This jar of cashews actually has a warning label that says it contains cashews. I’d be concerned if it didn’t contain cashews.

When I attempt to take a photo of the moon, it usually comes out as a featureless white blob, due to being overexposed. Thanks to a tip on Flickr, I discovered that the secret to taking a photo of the moon that doesn’t suck is to use spot metering rather than matrix.

With matrix metering, the camera will use both the dark sky and the bright moon to determine the exposure, which usually ends up overexposing the moon to avoid underexposing everything else. Spot metering lets you use only the moon to determine the exposure, which avoids the usual blown out appearance.

For this shot, I used my Sigma 70-300mm lens with shutter priority. Since I wasn’t using a tripod and this lens doesn’t have VR, I used a shutter speed of 1/250 with ISO 3200.

• openAL sound on the iPhone at benbritten.com
  Tutorial & sample code for using OpenAL on the iPhone
  (tags: programming howto iphone audio)
• furbo.org · Sharing iPhone projects
  How to set the code signing identity in an XCode project so it can be shared between multiple developers without each having to change the signing identity every time they check it out.
  (tags: iphone development xcode)

I have been working on a major update to iDjembe for several weeks. The major new feature is Virtual Drum Circle, which lets you broadcast to other players on the local network using Bonjour.

I’ve also drastically improved the responsiveness, and in the process learned a lot about iPhone audio. The current version uses the simple Audio Services to play the sounds, which has some major limitations such as being able to play only one sound at a time. Since the samples have a long trailing end as they fade to complete silence, during that time it isn’t possible for any other sounds to play, which makes it unresponsive.

I did a lot of experimentation with different sound APIs and I’ve settled on using OpenAL which seems to give the best performance and is the least ugly.

In the current version, I handle taps in a single view, where I do my own hit testing to determine the location to decide which sound to play. I’ve changed it to use custom buttons, which performs just as well and gives a nice highlight effect for the tapped area.

I hope to have this update out in 2 weeks or less.

• Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. An initial list of data sets is already available, and more will be added soon.
  (tags: web reference free ec2 aws datasets research)

After trying Safari 4 on another machine yesterday, I got brave enough to install it on my main system today. I still don’t care for the tab bar at the top of the window, so I used these patches to restore the old style tab bar and the blue progress bar.

I find that Safari 4 is a lot faster than either Safari 3.x or Firefox 3. It also uses a lot less CPU than any of the other browsers. So far I haven’t seen any crashes or incompatibilities. New versions of SAFT and 1Password were released today, so I have all of the functionality I’m accustomed to.

• Safari 4 Hidden Settings
  Hidden preferences for Safari 4 to make it work more like Safari 3, including moving the tab bar back where it beloings.
  (tags: safari safari4 hidden preferences)

When Safari 4 was released today, a lot of people reported that 1Passsword won’t work with it. Since I rely on 1Password, I was very reluctant to upgrade. The developers of 1Password came up with an easy work around, which must be re-applied with every 1Password update until they officially support Safari 4. I came up with a simple automatic patcher, which you can download here, including full source code.

• iPhone: Using Pre-processor Directives for Device Testing
  How to identify whether code is being compiled for the simulator or an actual device, to handle things that don't work in the simulator.
  (tags: iphone programming tips)

• How to Thwart iPhone IPA Crackers: Detection
  (tags: iphone development iphonesdk security)

If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw about 32 tweets spew from my blog, thanks to WP-O-Matic blowing chunks all over my blog, which Twitter Tools dutifully reported as new posts.

I’m attempting to set up automatic photo blogging from my Flickr photo stream. Flickr produces RSS feeds for each tag, so I’m using the tag photoblog to have those images posted here automatically by subscribing to the resulting feed. Unfortunately, Flickr’s tag feed URL has several characters such as ‘?’ or ‘&’ that WP-O-Matic choke on. As a result, instead of seeing my tag feed, WP-O-Matic saw my entire photo stream. Furthermore, although I limited it to post only 5 items, it decided to post each item multiple times.

A work-around for the URL problem is to use a URL shortener such as tinyurl to generate a clean URL for WP-O-Matic. I’ve made it create new items as drafts instead of publishing immediately, so it shouldn’t happen again.

• A Simple Way To Play MP3 Audio Files | iPhone Development Blog
  The iPhone media player is very easy to use, but it only works in landscape mode and it seems designed more for video than audio. If you wish to play an onboard MP3 or an MP3 file as it’s downloading (not really streaming, but progressive download) you have another option! Use the audio player embedded with Safari running in a UIWebView.
  (tags: iphone cocoa programming tips)

I have been working on implementing the new Cheezburger API in the ICHC app, but I’m starting to become unhappy with the user interface. In particular, the bottom toolbar is too cluttered and I don’t really like the action sheet I use for creating LOLs.

I’ve started redesigning it to use a navigation based user interface, where the top level lists the sites, and each site opens a view similar to the current app. Like the current version, you’ll be able to swipe back & forth or use arrow buttons to switch images and tap to toggle the toolbars on or off. When the application starts up, it will go directly to the last site viewed rather than the top level. Unlike the current version, it will save the last image viewed for each site.

Before I commit to this, I’d like some feedback.

This is the top level view, where you choose the site:

This is the image view (still not complete):

free polls at easy-poll

	Which user interface do you prefer?
	Current – 1 screen & Action sheets
	Navigation Controller

Aaron Swartz notes that the stimulus bill requires that each government agency report the money they give out with Atom or RSS.

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

Furthermore, the recovery.gov website is based on Drupal.

• Multi-user blogging: Wordpress vs Drupal
  Comparison of WPMU & Drupal for multi-user blogging.
  (tags: wordpress blogging drupal software)

• Your Digital Camera and the Law – PC World
  There's a lot of confusion about what's legal to photograph and where it's okay to use a camera. This article attempts to clarify some of the issues.
  (tags: photography)

When i guess i’m floating compared Fanfario to Arcade Fire, it caught my attention. I really like the two samples from their upcoming debut album, Reservoir, which still isn’t listed in iTunes or eMusic. I did find a few EPs and collections with their songs on eMusic, though. I’m definitely going to buy their album as soon as it’s released.

Last week I added Google Friend Connect to MacMegasite, with a member widget in the sidebar and rating/comment widgets for each article. Today I added Friend Connect to WorldBeatPlanet with a social bar at the top of the page.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Unlike the sidebar widgets, the social bar won’t work when placed in a block. I had to paste the code into the page template.

I’ve swapped the 4GB of RAM and 320G 7200 RPM drive from my MacBook into the new MacBook Pro. It feels a bit faster than the MacBook, even when using the GeForce 9400M video. I haven’t tried switching to the 9600M GT yet. The display is really gorgeous – much brighter and better contrast than the MacBook. On the other hand, the new MacBook Pro does feel very big & bulky.

After swapping the hard drive, you would expect all of the software to still work. However, Adobe Photoshop CS4 and a few other applications including Fluid Mask 3 seem to be tied to either the machine serial number or MAC address, so they were no longer activated when I tried running them on the new MacBook Pro. Furthermore, Photoshop told me that I had too many activations and refused to let me activate it.

I figured out how to regain one activation from my old MacBook Pro, which I never deactivated and is going to a new owner tomorrow. I was able to boot from a backup drive on that machine, and Photoshop then let me deactivate it.

I’m still waiting for a response from Virtus about Fluid Mask 3.

A few nights ago I got a call telling me that I won a MacBook from Drive Savers at Macworld Expo. At first I thought it was a scam, but it was real.

Late this afternoon, FedEx delivered a large box, containing a brand new Apple computer box along with this letter.

However, it wasn’t a MacBook – it turned out to be a new 15″ MacBook Pro! I was expecting a low end model, or even an older one.

The screen is gorgeous, but it’s a lot heavier than my current MacBook. I’ll probably keep this one as my desktop system and use the MacBook for travel, since it’s easier to carry around. This weekend I’ll swap the 320G hard drive & 4GB RAM from my MacBook into the MacBook Pro.

This leaves my old MacBook Pro that I was using for software testing & debugging, which I’ll sell now.