Mark asked me to pick him up from the Airport today. I thought it would be a nice opportunity to test out the Flight Tracking widget in Dashboard. (click to play)
In Memoriam…
Mark Shields honors this day, eloquently.
PTMac
I stitched my first panoramic shot in 1994. I had just gotten an IS-10 and went to the top of the Duquesne incline plane and took a picture of Pittsburgh. I then digitized the photos with a scanner and stitched it together using my limited Photoshop skills. (360 degree panoramas aren’t the only use, there are some amazing wide aspect ratio shots that are impossible to get otherwise.)
Now things have improved greatly for me. I own a a real camera and a auto-leveling tripod with a panoramic head. So it is time to do some panoramic photography again.
When I first started digital photography, the software to use for stitching panoramas is the Apple Quicktime VR Authoring Studio ($400) which is still sold by Apple even though the web page for it has disappeared from Apple’s website and hasn’t been changed in 5_ years. Unfortunately, it stitched and blended really well, many commercial programs today can’t compare to it.
Well the lack of Mac OS X support is a deal killer (along with its exorbitant price). Time to look for another solution.
I decided to try PTMac.
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What camera should I buy?
Since I take a lot of photographs with a dSLR, I’m often asked by others for advice on camera purchases.
I think if they saw my photo album, they’d not be asking such questions. In fact, a digital SLR photographer is the last person you should be asking for advice as their needs are different from yours.
But since it was my brother’s wedding and the cell phone just wasn’t cutting it for snapshots, I was enlisted again to advise on a digital camera for the wedding registry.
OSCON 2k5: PHP talks announced.
Chris Shiflett has a nice overview of the “talks that made the cut” for OSCON 2k5 (complete list) and I’m happy that I made the list (and thankfully they’ve only taken one of my talks).
Now if I follow my previous modus operandi, I can expect to finish the talk about 5 minutes before I have to give it.1 But it’ll be good so you better come see it!
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The Koran and Flag Burning
The news have been covering the fallout of a Newsweek article about the descration of copies of the Koran. Today over lunch, I was involved in an argument about this, and have decided to separate out what I know from what I can infer.
Reloading Dashboard Widgets
One of the new features of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) is Dashboard. Instead of talking about what Dashboard is, I want to show you a poorly documented feature (and nice eye-candy) that Apple placed in the Dashboard.
While I’m told to think of them as desk accessories/Konfabulator for Mac OS X, I prefer to think of them as Sherlock 2/Watson done right. That is because Dashboard widgets are basically HTML web pages + Javascript + optional Cocoa binding. As such, most dashboard widgets are simply web views. This means that sometimes your dashboard widget may be displaying something that needs updating from the web and it isn’t. Instead of complaining to that the widget developer was too moronic to include a control for widget reloading, you can reload your widget manually by hitting Apple-R.
When you do so you’ll be given a nice little Core Video eye-candy (click the picture below to “get” it).
“Spiritual Correctness”
The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family’s bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can’t even sing.
—Frank Rich, The New York Times
That’s the first time I’ve heard the word “spiritual correctness” and I was shocked at the force of the term. Could liberals have gotten their act together and finally adopted Lakoff’s theory of framing the debate?
But a simple network search shows that the term is most used during the heyday of political correctness as either applying political correct terminology to spiritual issues (such as saying, “the reason I’m dieting is for health reasons, not to look better” or implying that all spirituality is equal.
And yet, “spiritual correctness” defines exactly how I feel right now about the right-wing frames: “culture of life,” “fiscally liberal, socially conservative,” “family values,” and “partial-birth abortions.”
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Being Steve Jobs…
One thing I’ll never understand is why people follow what Steve Jobs does so closely. Are these the same people that have a secret stash of People magazine?
They’re in good company though. My co-worker (an ex-HP employee) once said that Carly Fiorina has a bad case of Steve Jobs-envy which pretty much hits the nail on the head. Too bad whenever I see a picture of Carly with rock stars, actors, or entertainment executives, I keep hearing the Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the other… One of these things doesn’t belong…”
Now Gawker has a contest guessing the expletives uttered by Jobs as if it is impossible to utter an 8 letter cuss word.
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Does the Pokémon effect apply to Tiger developers?
In his quid pro quo effort to convert me to the Dark side of the Force, Mark sent me this reference to a Gizmodo article.
Go to the site, and read some. The special powers are a nice touch. I wonder which cards are rare? I want the Jobs and Avi Tevanian card. Do you think the Phil Shiller card has an animated GIF of his hands gesticulating while he talks about how “cool” Tiger is? Where is the video of Jonathan Ives talking about the design of these cards?