Mostly about my amusement
Not my usual type of model.
This is the work in progress picture for the 1/1 scale Hoi Hoi-san model. It’s for my 6 year old girl. To make sure that it all works out, I’m gluing the pieces together when appropriate. The head will have interchangeable faces so I need to remember to NOT glue those parts together.
Well, it’s free for a while. If you’ve never played, get it NOW. Especially if you own a Mac.
Very cool and when Portal 2 comes out, I’ll get it.
After I read this article on Gizmodo (helpfully called “How To: Jailbreak Any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad”) I figured what the heck and did the deed.
The Spirit Jailbreak Tool is as fire and forget as it gets. I backed up my iPhone, made sure I could restore it to its pristine Apple condition and pushed the button. It was so easy that I wonder what the catch is. A few minutes later and GV Mobile was installed on my phone.
I can see why Apple and/or AT&T blocked this app in the iTunes store. The integration is so flawless that I’m not sure why I would go back and use the Apple dialer. It’s like the Apple phone app but integrated with Google Voice. I get my downloaded voicemail as well as the transcribed email.
It’s a shame that Apple does not let Google get this onto the app store, it’s a good quality program.
I like playing with technology and I received an invite to Google Voice. I use an iPhone 3G so the integration is limited to a HTML5 web page running in Safari. The integration is not bad at all and the web page on my iPhone is very functional.
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I’ve been playing with my new 50mm. If you liked the f/1.8D version, then you’ll have no complaints with this f/1.4.G new model.
It’s a fun lens and as long as you can move around, you’ll get good shots. Here’s some samples I took today.
We ate at the Jade Asian Restaurant. There are probably some people who could get away with taking photos of strangers in a restaurant, but I’m not one of them. I took shots of my family and the dim sum carts.
I process most of my photos with DxO Optics Pro 6. Anyone who wants to do as little work doing color correction, noise, and distortion adjustments should order this software. With DxO I converted these from Nikon .NEF into Adobe .DNG format, but only because I like to play with the color temperature and blacks. Some quick cropping in PSE and I’m usually fine after that.
I’m a fan of DxO and eventually I’ll just go from RAW to straight JPEG. The software is very fire-and-forget.
It reads a little like a rant, but you really can’t blame him.
I’m not even going to link any of the articles because they have so many inaccuracies you become stupider by reading them.
If you’re a web host and you turn a bad file permissions story into a WordPress story, you’re doing something wrong.
It’s not rocket science and the real problem is explained in detail elsewhere but can be summarized as “It’s the hosting company, Stupid!”
Which leads me to a posting on another blog. Partial blame is leveled “At WordPress for requiring that the database credentials be stored in clear-text. At WordPress again for not installing itself securely by default.”
The ignorance continues with “I also have to agree with Network Solutions that this problem can happen at any shared host site. Not only for WordPress, but for any CMS out there that store the passwords in clear-text.”
That’s just a stupid thing to say. If you are going to make a statement like that, then you need to back it up with “WordPress should have followed example X for how to store that data securely”. It sure is good to call out from the cheap seats and that’s all that blogger is doing.
The impacted users are on a shared server that’s not setup properly. Users get a pass because, well, they’re users. It’s not really the users responsibility to understand how their self hosted blog works and prevent these compromises from making the neighborhood look bad.
Network Solutions loses any credibility because instead of just saying “Yeah, we screwed up and we’re fixing it” they played the ignorant blame-the-software approach. Network Solutions is not a flash in the pan company and should hire someone who can help them overcome Web Hosting 101 issues.
Wow. With some work the iPad did get into the blender.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko
You knew this was going to happen to an iPad.
As I usually do, I switched this blog from WordPress 2.9.2 to the current 3.0 beta. I always run the beta versions and I have not yet gotten myself into a hole. It also helps that I have very good backups for the last 30 days.
I re-ran my overnight backup job one more time to make sure I’m up to date and used SVN to perform the switch.
$ cd /my/wordpress/web/directory $ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
When I went to the login page I had to upgrade my database. And that’s all there was to it. I’ll do a regular “svn up” and keep my install current with the beta.
I have been kicking around the idea of taking the sites I manage and making them one multi-site WordPress 3.0 install but that will be down the road for a while. For now I’ll continue to maintain them separately with the released version (2.9.2 as of right now).
As for the beta, there are not many visual differences (the color scheme is lighter and less “harsh”) and each of my plugins check out. I am hoping that when 3.0 is released, the usual forum drama will not happen. But I also know somewhere someone will upgrade without doing the work of a full backup.
I’ve re-acquainted myself with StumbleUpon and finding out it’s a much better time waster than Reddit. It’s like Reddit without the witty comments. I pressed the Stumble! button and went to the Stellarium web site.
Stellarium was a fantastic find. I installed it and was explaining to my kids that this is how the start are laid out in the sky right now. I had no idea this was freely available and here’s the best part: this is GPL’ed software too.
When you visit a website you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Or you can ignore it. Mostly I press the Stumble! button and get sent to web sites that are in my chose categories. With your account you get to select those subjects that interest you, and can add or subtract later on.
It’s very addictive. I have narrowed down to astronomy and photography (not at the same time) and I get some really good websites. StumbleUpon has been around for many years and I’m glad that I’m using it now.
Just for giggles I tried to go to the GOP web page to see what kind of response the opposition has to the health care reform.To be honest I was hoping for some rational arguments about why this health care reform is bad. I wasn’t counting on much, but I hoped it would be something profound.
Two things happened. First I was redirected to a Fire Nancy Pelosi web page.
Nice graphic. The second thing was that the rest of the GOP website was FUBAR. There is a link at the bottom of the page that is supposed to lead to the real website and it just does not work.
Putting aside any politics for a moment (I’m for reform myself), their lack of technical expertise is appalling. This is the GOP website for crying out loud. It’s just not that hard to get it right.
What these folks need to do is speak with (read as “HIRE”) some of the talent that hosts conservative websites. While the styling and graphics are important, just being able to serve HTML pages without a redirection loop might help them get their message out.
