iLounge has a great overview of their site’s resources.
Their Free iPod Book and Buyer’s Guide are my favorite because they’re drool-ready and a free download. Remember when this stuff was published in book (and later magazine) and you had to pay for it?
I’ve been using them since I got my first iPod in 2001—they were iPod Lounge before Apple laid down the law(yers)—and they’ve gotten better and better. My only complaint is that I wish their RSS feed had images.
The origins of this rant begin with a question about Canon’s camera roadmap that occurred during a Christmas party. It built up steam when reading Ryan’s excellent series on camera purchasing and overtopped my levies of tolerance when I was reading this thread on Flickr.
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
I’m tired about hearing about how Nikon is going to go “full frame” or about how Canon is going to crush Nikon with a cheap full frame camera.
This is magical thinking on behalf of Nikon or Canon owners. That or Chicken Little thinking if the order is reversed.
[The economics of “full-frame” after the jump]Continue reading
With Christmas here, Ryan has been writing a series on purchasing a digital camera. I thought I’d link them for a number of you who have expressed interest:
Here is my “series”:
You can see my guide is haphazard and a bit elitist. It’s also really dated—though I’m proud of how much of it has stood the test of time.
Still, it might be fun to compare and contrast our approaches/philosophies.
Chris pointed me to a new Ajax security hack.
The way it works is by loading a window.onerror handler and then loading a remote site as a <script> tag that will generate a slightly different error when logged in vs. not logged in. That’s pretty clever.
The reason Chris probably chose to add Amazon to this is is because Amazon has a CSRF that will allow you to add any book to the Buy It Now!. Coupled with this script, you can only do it when the attack will actually succeed. Nice.
Hmm, I better check my Amazon account to see if I’ve “accidentally” bought another copy of Chris’s book. 😀
I got an e-mail today in which someone asked to use a photo of mine for a Christmas prayer.
This use is well within my creative commons license, but it’s always a nice touch when I’m shown how my photos are used. Besides, I always had a soft spot for Episcopalians. 🙂
I noticed they’re using Joomla as their CMS. That’s interesting. Their template seems to be missing deep links, though.
[More of photo usage after the jump]
Continue reading
Someone’s blasting Christian Pop in the small apartment complex I’m living in.
Somewhat bothersome.
At least it wasn’t anyone who has complained to me about noise.
I mentioned this in my Ajax and eCards talk, but if you’ve ever had to encode querystring of anything that isn’t ascii, you’ve run into troubles with encode(). The solution is to use encodeURIComponent().
Here is an article that outlines the difference between the three escaping functions.
The quick summary is, don’t use escape() use encodeURI() to encode URLs or encodeURIComponent() when encoding string parts that form a query string. In Ajax, always use the latter and form the string yourself.
Congratulations to Andrei and the PHP team for passing the halfway mark at adding ICU/Unicode support to PHP 6.
I can’t wait.
Bill sent me this video about talking smack in first person shooters.
[Spoilers after the jump]Continue reading
A very interesting question popped up on Flickr: Is there any technical advantage of specifying AdobeRGB or sRGB in a Camera RAW file?
Almost all digital cameras obtains color by placing a color filter in front of identically constructed photodiodes. The RAW file just stores digitization of those monochromatic values. Color profile information on a RAW file is stored in the metadata, not applied to the file itself. So there is no technical difference between the two profiles besides hinting to your image processing applications your preferred color space.
There is a slight theoretical exception here: the RAW format isn’t a standard so there is no reason why a camera manufacturer couldn’t record different raw data based on the intended color space. This might be advantageous in a camera like the Nikon D200, which does color processing in analog space before digitization. The intended color space could theoretically provide hints to the camera so as to minimize interpolation to the resulting color space.
Of course, this doesn’t happen. If Nikon did such a thing, Adobe would probably have a conniption and call it “encryption.” Sometimes I wonder if Nikon’s White Balance code page in the D200 was intended to give Nikon engineers the flexibility to take advantage of this camera trait—I know of no other camera that uses white balance information to modify digitization—in a future firmware release…and corresponding Capture NX update.
Now we’ll never know.
[Adobe Camera RAW and color profiling after the jump]Continue reading