Live preview

There was an interesting question of the D200 user group:

I know its just been 2 days since I bought my D200 but am I missing something or is there no way to shoot while screen is on?

I dont want to look in the viewfinder in every picture I take, there must be a way that I couldnt see in the users manual… 🙁

Okay, I can see all you SLR users there smirking. The person just bought a $1400 camera and doesn’t know that SLRs don’t do that sort of thing because the reflex mirror (the R in SLR). But things have changed a lot. Are we sure we’re not being snobs for smirking?

Golden flight

Golden flight
San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
1/90sec @ f/22, iso 125, 18mm (27mm)

Maybe if I had live preview on a swivel mount, I could have gotten the horizon right?

I know of at least three ways newer SLR cameras get around this problem:

[Understanding live preview after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 2

EVE online

Since I was working on a web-tool to detect and clean HTML embed codes, Firefox was experiencing some intermittent crashing. Today I loaded up my page in Safari, seeing the site for the first time in weeks without my banner ad blocker:

Eve Online, Afro Samurai and other Tagged madness

The banner ad is for Eve Online which is a MMORPG imported from Korea. Someone I know just accepted a job for a similar company so this is a big shout-out to you (you know who you are).

BTW, Afro Samurai did a takeover a couple weeks ago. I decided to change my tagged profile theme to the promo. It’s a pity that I don’t get cable and this isn’t on iTunes, because it looks like an interesting show.

(I had cable until yesterday, but didn’t know it since I never connected it. I found out today when they left a note on my door saying they cut it.)
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 1

Plaxo is evil. Plaxo is spam.

Disclaimer: I worked as an engineer at Plaxo a long time ago (in internet years… in human years it was five months ago).

In October of last year, an engineering colleague asked me about this whole “Plaxo is evil. Plaxo is spam” thing. At the time I went in to a long boring lecture about Plaxo and privacy/security. (I don’t need to go into it here, you can read this to get a taste.)

After sitting through it, he asked me this simple question: “If you didn’t work for Plaxo, would you use it?”

I answered, “I’ll do you one better. I’m not going to be working for Plaxo much longer, and I’ll continue to use it after I leave.”

“Good enough for me.”

[The power of connections. The power of search. After the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 11

The key to beauty

According to Popular Photography’s blog, apparently the key to feminine beauty is either Photoshop or over-exposure mixed with either high key or low key lighting.

I’m kidding, but it’s a nice tip. I have to remember to try “dialing to 11” my meter next time just to see what comes out. Before this, I was depending on happy accidents:

unknown tree flower

unknown tree flower
Mountain View, California

Nikon D70, Lensbaby 2.0, Tokina .45 macro
f/2 at 1/2500 second, iso 200, 50mm (75mm)

(Yes, I know the photo isn’t of a woman. I’ll have to work on that.)

Posted on by tychay 0

Javascript framework pile on

Dr Dobbs has a review of Javascript frameworks, which they call “AJAX frameworks”, that’s an interesting read in my opinion.

I’m not going to write about Javascript frameworks in this article (one huge article a week is draining enough and writing and responding to the fallout would take forever to write). Instead I’m going to single out Alex’s complaint: the article used an ancient version of Dojo Toolkit.

[The validity of complaints after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3

Tagged is hiring (Senior Software Developer)

(I’m sure there are other positions we need to fill, but this one I have the full description for and would make my life so much better…)

The position is a Senior Software Developer at Tagged in San Francisco. It is a profitable pre-IPO social networking service ranked in the top 100 website. We develop in PHP and Java if that’s important.

The best thing about this position is you don’t work under me. 🙂

[Full blown job description after the jump.]
Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 0