Creative abuse of the OSCON submission system

OSCON proposals are due in 20 minutes. I submitted something just now. That’s like 10 minutes sooner than last time. I am improving. 🙂

The last talk new talk I gave was at OSCON so I had to come up with something new. Since I just changed jobs and actually spent the afternoon B.S.ing one of Dave’s submissions (in exchange, he was the one who reminded me (multiple times) that proposals are due), I had to keep things sort of vague but possibly interesting at the same time.

That was a challenge.

[My proposal after the jump.]Continue reading

The origin on PHP trading cards

“…and Terry started taking pictures as Terry does with everything.”
—Cal Evans, Editor of Zend Dev Zone, in a Pro::PHP Webcast

Look on my cards, ye Mighty, and despair.

Look on my cards, ye Mighty, and despair
Open Source Conference 2006, Portland, Oregon

Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
DxO (exp, blur, distorion, ca, vignette. noise, lighting)
1/15sec @ f/4, iso 250, 26mm (39mm)

BTW, Marcus Whitney is in the final deck which debuted at ZendCon and my guess is that the template from HP was probably inspired by Apple’s strange attempt.

[the origin after the jump.]Continue reading

Ringr

Ringo started out as Monster’s attempt at making a social network. This makes a lot of sense: like mashups, social networking can be seen as a possible disruptive technology threat to Monster’s core business: job search (a form of vertical search).

I’ve already mentioned job mashups in the past, but last year’s breakout success of LinkedIn shows that you can build a sustainable business model around job-related social networking.

In light of this I was shocked to notice the new homepage of Ringo:

Ringo homepage

Look familiar?

Flickr homepage

Anecdotally, this makes sense because the only person I know on Ringo uses it to share photos with me. From that and their clever spam of me—in a holiday promotional e-mail they mapped my friend’s photo onto an image in order to sell me a custom calendar—I would guess that photos form the majority of Ringo’s income.

But Flickr already rules this niche which is one among potentially many in photography: for a dump of your cameraphone photos there is photobucket; for professionals there is smugmug. This is not counting the fact that social networking sites like Facebook already have passable photo sharing built in and sites with interesting ideas like riya have abandoned photosharing for vertical search. Why make another Flickr?

But more importantly, Monster is a job site. Shouldn’t they be dealing with LinkedIn? Talk about losing your focus!

Leica and Aperture. Don’t you think it’s about time?

Some of you remember my my strange hack for getting the LX1 working in Aperture.

A year later, and I still have to do that. This model has since been replaced with the Panasonic DMC-LX2 (a.k.a. Leica D-LUX 3) which on paper sounds like this same trick should work for the RAW files. I don’t know, so I haven’t tried but this Flickr thread made me think.

This is total B.S. Why do I have to resort to using an Adobe product to get this to work at all?

[Why Apple should support this after the jump]

Continue reading

Photoshop CS3 Beta

Sent this to some of my friends two weeks ago…

I don’t know if I remembered to mention this but Adobe CS3 is in public beta. It requires your Adobe CS2 authentication to use past two days.

One big thing is that this version is native on Intel Macintoshes. According to the latest benchmarks it now runs slightly faster in the Mac OS X operating system than on Windows (same hardware).

Here is an article on some of the new features. One big one for us photographers is the new way of doing black and whites.
Continue reading

Hoya-Pentax

Catching up on some of my RSS newsfeed, I see that Hoya will buy out Pentax to create Hoya Pentax HD Corporation.

I think this makes a lot of sense, Tokina (a Hoya trademark) already markets Pentax-designed lenses for the Nikon F-mount and Canon EOS-mount. My next lens purchase is going to be a Pentax-designed Tokina.

Most of us think of Hoya as a company that makes really nice filters at a reasonable price. But they also are the Hoya, Kenko, Voigtlander and Slik brand names. If my eyeglasses lenses are any indicator, Hoya is a huge optics company.

With the backing of this giant and the introduction of the K-100D and K-10D, who else thinks Pentax will soon claim the #3 camera spot from Olympus?