Stuff I should know

I went on a morning run for the first time in months. I ended up running to the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which turned out ironically to be about “How McDonald’s Works”. Audio file:
[audio:http://podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2010-04-01-sysk-mcdonalds.mp3]

You see, along with the running kick, I decided just this week to stop eating at McDonald’s for a while. I was in danger of taking back my FourSquare mayorships of all the fast food places in SoMa—and my stomach was starting to revolt.

(I finally lost my FourSquare mayorship of those and the Fisherman’s Wharf Burger King. Burger King! I thought I’d have that one forever. Who eats at the Fisherman’s Wharf Burger King more than once?!)

Though I knew most of the stuff in it, I found the podcast interesting because I had forgotten about the McLibel case and its impact on fast food.

Now the podcast is old so all the corrections have probably been aired a hundred times, but I thought I’d mention the ones I noticed on during my run.

The reason for the real-estate deal was because Kroc felt that the franchising fees to the McDonalds’ brothers were too onerous. By sub-leasing the real-estate, they could pocket most of those fees. (This is explained in the book Fast Food Nation.)
I think the character’s name they couldn’t remember was Officer Big Mac
I think the damages that Crofft/H.R. Pufnstuf got were, in the end, much larger than the amount they mentioned on the program ($50,000).
The McDonald’s coffee lawsuit was eventually settled for a much lower amount on appeal than the amount originally awarded.
Speaking about the book, Fast Food Nation, it was that book that accidentally revealed the “natural beef flavoring in the french fries” fact that touched off the lawsuit. The order presented in the program had that backwards.
Finally, there is no way selling 5 million double cheeseburgers would compensate for the $10 million in damages from that lawsuit.

Any regular at McD’s knows the double cheeseburger is on the Dollar Menu ($1) most everywhere except in places like San Francisco, where I happen to live. There, it has been replaced with the “McDouble.” What’s the difference, you say? One slice of cheese. Even here, the double cheeseburger isn’t more than about $1.29. (Yes, that’s 30 cents for a slice of cheese. Believe me, I’ve been dreaming up some serious McDonald’s arbitrages over the last few years.)

Oh yes, I go to McDonald’s way too much. Three months ago, I was disappointed to find out that they built my sausage mcmuffin with egg backwards. Last week, they made my double quarter pounder wrong.

(FYI, I was able to avoid my fast food craving by stopping by the Prather Ranch Grill stand in the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market on the way back. So much better, and with drink, only $2 more than McDonald’s here.)

Posted on May 18, 2010 by tychay 4

First, take away their citizenship

Joe Lieberman has a solution to rights for suspected terrorists who are U.S. citizens: take away their citizenship.

Joe Lieberman is Jewish. Hmm, I wonder how that idea worked for the Nazis?

(I love it when I can Godwin an argument before a discussion even starts.)

Posted on May 4, 2010 by tychay 3

Thoughts on “Thoughts”

Now that this site has been down for a month (Thank you, SARSxSW), I tried to see restart this blog with a deep thought.

I couldn’t come up with anything.

So instead, I’ll talk about the tech news. Recently a lot has been going on about Steve Jobs latest missive: “Thoughts on Flash” to which, Adobe’s CEO quickly responded to in the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of rushing to Apple’s defense here, I thought I’d provide some thoughts on these “thoughts.”

Continue reading about three thoughts after the jump.

Posted on May 4, 2010 by tychay 5

Black Sun

“Supposedly, this guy is the Korean Usher.”:

Me: “Maybe Usher is the Black Sol?”

…

I’m just saying, don’t mess with Taeyang or he’ll cut you

…with his hair!

…

When I was in the third grade, my house got a sample bottle of Prell. I did the same thing as Taeyang to my hair—I’d put it in and not wash it out. Who knew I was ahead of my time?

…

My Prell mohawk lasted only a day: 1) I ran out of Prell; 2) the thing flopped over by the time I got to school and made me look like a really greasy Adolf Hitler. (Yes, I spent recess with my best friends saluting me with a “seig heil!”)

Posted on March 29, 2010 by tychay 0

Confoo: PHP without PHP

If you are attending confoo this year, I’ll be giving a talk at the beginning of the conference. Even if you aren’t a PHP developer, I think you’ll find the talk useful—as there is no language religion in it. I’ll be pleased if you attend.

It’s going to be a little different from my recent talks (less cussing). Believe it or not, there was a time I used to be a speaker who didn’t resort to scatalogy to get my point across. 🙂 In fact, George once told me that his favorite talk of mine was the first one I gave—nary a cuss word to be found because I was so nervous! This talk is an attempt to return to the more-focused application of philosophy that I had done starting out.

Since my session is in the beginning of the conference, and I’ll be there until I have to leave for SXSW, I’d appreciate it if you still came up to me and talked to me about anything on your mind. Don’t worry, like a terrier (terryer?), I’m all bark and no bite.

I’m trying to reset the way I approach web development and so this may very well be the only conference I’ll be speaking at this year. I’m sure any discussion you have will be worthwhile—even if it isn’t about my talk or web development. Confoo this year is going to be about so much more than PHP, and I’m very interested in new developments on the web, even if it is happening in the Rails community. ;-). Besides, PHP gets nowhere without stealing from our betters. 🙂

See you there!
Continue reading about the post presentation stuff after the jump

Posted on March 9, 2010 by tychay 0

MacJournal meets my Kindle

While going through the MacHeist nanoBundle 2 purchase, that one of the items was MacJournal. I already own it, so I gifted it. But it caused me to take a peek again at the application—the last time I used it was back when it was freeware and had a taco.

…it still does.

It occurs to me that it might make a useful reading notebook to complement my Kindle (and my iPad next month). I haven’t been keeping track of the copious clippings and notes I take with it. Here is my first attempt:

Here is the process I am trying to use:

Create a journal in MacJournal called “Reading Notebook.”
Import all the Kindle Clippings I’ve not clipped up as entries
Create an entry for a book I am reading, tag it with some search terms in the inspector.
Search and cut the related Kindle Clippings out of the various notes, and paste it to the bottom of the book entry.
organize, summarize, and delete as I go.
Import kindle clippings often and delete often.

We’ll see how it goes. I made out some stubs for other ideas for journals.

Organizing Journal – keep a record of my failed attempts at self-help.
The Woodwork – I’ve stored unfinished drafts for blog posts in a myriad of places: Things, folders with the title, TextEdit RTF documents, and drafts on the blog. I plan to consolidate them here. Note that MacJournal has a “publish to WordPress” feature, but I don’t think it’s robust enough for me. I’ll continue to use the website, and maybe ecto, if I have the wherewithal.
Things to Buy – Things is getting too cluttered with a lot of stuff that I don’t plan on buying for years. Delicious is in the same state. (I’ll still use TaskPaper for last-minute organizing before a major purchase and other maintenance purchases.)

For most notetaking, I’m still happy with opening an RTF, dropping it into a folder, and using Spotlight (via Leap) to find things. This just formalizes a fraction of it.

Purchase MacJournal with 6 other applications on MacHeist (2 days left!).

Posted on March 8, 2010 by tychay 1

OpenSearch on WordPress.com

A couple months ago, I did something so small it doesn’t really deserve mention. Nial and I got OpenSearch working on WordPress.com for individual blogs:

Search of the entire domain has always been working, but this allows you to add a special search for one blog. To activate this, open Firefox (or Internet Explorer), and click on the search dropdown and you’ll see a new entry to “Add your blog name.” Select that.

Maybe I’ll add a plugin to WordPress with this code. I’m not too sure there’s a need though since there are already a couple OpenSearch plugins and this one only works in WPMU and PHP 5. There’s also a couple of WordPress.com-specific features like tags, privacy flags, and blavatar support in this one.

Posted on March 7, 2010 by tychay 1

Geolocation sharing in Aperture 3

A lot of people are complaining that the flickr sharing feature in Aperture 3 is missing geolocation data (Places).

This is not true, all you have to do is go to Aperture > Preferences… > Web and check the box to “Include location information for published photos.”

Then click on the “radar” buttons to the right of the Flickr sets in Aperture to force a resync. Your image geocodes will be re-uploaded (I noticed in my case, it re-uploaded the images instead of just resyncing the metadata, but that bug may have been fixed in Aperture 3.0.1).

Here is a photo I uploaded via Aperture 3’s flickr sharing:

The Concourse Level
Westfield San Francisco Centre, Market Street, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/30sec @ ƒ2.4, ISO160, 4mm (24mm)

I was so tired after the run, I could shop no longer…or rather, watch my friends shop. I decided to hang outside and take photos of the curvy escalators in Westfield San Francisco. And I actually needed to buy a suitcase from the Tumi store, too.

You can see it has been placed on the map automatically.

Sync, not Upload

One thing a lot of people don’t realize is the flickr sharing is a synchronization, not an upload. This means that edits you make on flickr appear as metadata modifications in the original file. (I think it does not sync down changes to the image, but new images in a set do get brought down.) It also means you can’t do an upload without creating a set. It also means you are limited in the tags by what tags you explicity upload (instead of tag hierarchy). It also means you are limited to the amount of resizing you can do on export. It also means you can’t do things like add a watermark on your export. It also means you can’t batch add to a group, or another set, or anything without using flickr’s online organizr.

If you don’t like that, then that’s why Frasier Spears is still selling FlickrExport and has recently updated it for 64-bit. I own it, and use it.

Fraser, Bernie, Greg, and Amy
Buzz Andersen’s 5th Annual WWDC Party
111 Minna, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, 24-70mm f/2.8G, SB-800
1/30 sec @ ƒ/2.8, iso 1000, 24 mm

Fraser Speirs with some of my friends. I got really shit-faced that night (it was my birthday so I was making everyone buy me drinks).

I believe I uploaded this image with his software. 🙂

Oh yeah, the “check mark” you see next to the image in Aperture’s Flickr albums is the image actually uploaded/synced with flickr. I have no idea how to change it other than deleting it and dragging a new one. This is a major bummer for me.

Faces sync in Facebook

Faces are synced back in Aperture. You can tell because Facebook added faces are now searchable. Right now, getting the Facebook Faces back into your Aperture faces is a little buggy. The only way to do that is to go to the set, click the “Name” icon, and manually go through each image confirming the facebook entries by clicking the “f” icons and hitting return. Still it does guess faces well.

Photo from this article was synced to Facebook and Flickr.

Basically click on the “f” and then hit return and those names will be synced back. Notice that even though Alicia Kenworthy has only been tagged in a different Facebook photo, it guessed the face here.

I hope they fix that.

Posted on March 6, 2010 by tychay 7

Camera manuals to go

Buried in a previous article, instead of carrying the paper manuals around, I mentioned that you should download your manufacturer’s camera manuals onto the iPhone for reference. But I didn’t explain how this could be done or why it is useful.

Here are three applications I’ve used that render PDFs:

Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader

I’ll be talking about Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader. If you want to know the solution I use for camera manuals, skip to the section on GoodReader.

Continue reading about reading PDF manuals in Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader after the jump

Posted on March 5, 2010 by tychay 2

Camera testing bias

Ken Rockwell goes on a tear with his new camera, a medium format digital.

As his habit, Ken Rockwell exhibits a bad case of selection bias. For example, let’s take this quote from the first article:

All the 35mm rangefinders and DSLRs look pretty much the same, and the point-and-shoot is the worst.

I’ve also shown the fallacy of falling for claims of 12-bit, 16-bit or 24-bit image processing in-camera.

As those of us who have done this for a living since the 1980s know, the noise level of any of these sensors is much larger than even 12-bit processing. Throwing more real bits at the ADC only serves to quantize the noise more accurately; there isn’t any meaningful image data needing that precision.

Well anyone can see from his sample the 35mm cameras are not the same: the Nikon D3 exhibits tonality better than the Canon 5D Mk II and the Leica M9, as it should. And those aren’t even the right 35mm cameras to be testing against—I will bet you’ll get nearly the same result as the Mamiya DM33 in the Nikon D3X (with a Zeiss ZF optic on it). He does similar manipulations of outcome bias in order to get the result he is wants to get before hand in his high ISO test.

Continue reading about Ken Rockwell after the jump

Posted on March 4, 2010 by tychay 6

You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodwork

Sync, not Upload

Faces sync in Facebook