Admissions

Faking Lomo I was browsing around yesterday for good photoblogs when I came across Tracey's photoblog, Shutterbug. I think a good chunk of her images are amazing.

I noticed she took her earlier pictures with the same camera that I use, the Sony DSC-F505V. She has a really cool effect on some of her images that resembles pictures taken with a Lomo. Tracey was kind enough to point me to the following tutorial for producing the effect.

I took some ordinary photos that I had laying around and applied the effect. I'm pretty happy with the results.

XIFF 2.0 Public Beta Out Sean Voisen has just released the latest version of the XIFF components. For those of you unfamiliar with XIFF,

XIFF (XMPP Implementation For Flash) allows Flash developers to rapidly build applications that leverage the power of XMPP, the world’s most prominent real-time XML messaging protocol. XMPP is the same protocol used by the Jabber™ instant messaging system.

XIFF 2.0 is now wrriten in Actionsript2, makes it easy to implement protocol extensions, and comes with a number of new features including IM (w/ XHTML support), MUC, and service browsing. Congrats to Sean, looks like things are starting to come together.

What are you looking at? The kitty cat joined me on our sunny porch this afternoon while I was fiddling around with the camera. I've always interested in knowing what the kitty is staring at so intensely. Then there's me, bored with all the subject matter within 10 feet of my house.

CSS: Defeat the focus rect in Mozilla Normally in Mozilla, when you click on a link, you get that nasty focus rectangle around it (see image).
Well thankfully there is easy fix. Just wrap everything inside the link in an empty tag and you're all done. The only downside is that you introduce non-semantic markup, but it's there if you need it. The technique also works in Safari.

Update: The original post was incorrect stating that the link needed to be wrapped by a span tag. This will not work, the link must wrap the span tag. How about an example to clarify:

  Going Nowhere

Posted by Wes at 07:17 PM

Daily Reconnaissance

General Interest:

Coolest Small Company
A good article about Ann Arbor entrepreneurs. They demonstrate that there's away to grow a business without turning into some kind degenerating franchise.

Fahrenheit 9/11 will be distributed via BitTorrent
This would be great, but I'm not holding my breath.

Announcing and explaining our new 2.0 licenses
Creative Commons releases new licenses along with a fancy new blog badge.

Trust us -- we know best:

Clear Channel Playing Dirty with Bands selling Music
Helping the musicians and music listeners one scam at a time.

Clear Channel Sucks
What else is new?

RIAA Bags 493 More Swappers

The RIAA does not yet know the identities of those it targeted in its latest round of lawsuits but plans to discover them through court-issued subpoenas. RIAA sues but doesn't know who they're suing just yet.

I wonder how many people under the age of 10 and over the age of 60 they're going to sue this time.

Cramping Japan's Digital TV style
Some tips for the FCC.

DVRs 'Recapture' 96% of TV Ad Zapping
My knee-jerk reaction is to disagree because I love TiVo and I hate commercials. Unfortunately, they're right. I actually know all the commercials and recognize them as I'm fast forwarding through all their crap. This is pretty analogous to people pirating MP3s and actually buying the CDs as well. Let me put it this way, I love music and since I don't download any illegally MP3s anymore, I rarely find new bands that I like.

Leave Linus alone so he can code:

Linux report falls flat
Imagine that, Linux was actually written by Linus Torvalds.

R.I.P.: The Counterculture Aura of Linux
Linus adds requirement for patch in order to trace code origin and the NYTimes
attaches the outlandish title "R.I.P: The counterculture aura of Linux" to the article that doesn't go into any detail about this supposedly dead counterculture. Looks like
NYTimes is turning into a blog.

Bookmark This:

How Linux Saved My Files and My Job
Linux saving Windows' ass once again.

Company looks to capitalize on free XML tool
Authentic 2004 is free. It's from the makers of XMLSpy and a chunk of other XML related tools.

You're dying, but here's some drugs:

Aspirin May Lower Risk of Breast Cancer, Report Shows

But the scientists said it was too soon to recommend aspirin just to prevent breast cancer in women who are not already taking the drug for some other reason.

Time to add another pill to the daily regiment.

All stressed out and Everywhere to Go
Flying a lot will make you crazy. Well, duh.

Did they read it Slashdot has a post about a new email service called DidTheyReadIt.com which allows you to send an email, and then be able to track when, where, and for how long their recipient read the email.

DidTheyReadIt.com linked to a USA Today article as part of the favorable press coverage section. The article had the following to say:

Rampell Software CEO Alex Rampell says he's braced for controversy. "It can be used inappropriately, but our intentions are good," he says.

The tracking service could be used by job hunters who want to see if their résumés were read, or by salespeople wanting to track pitches. Today's spam filters can sometimes block e-mail sent with attachments, leaving the sender thinking an e-mail got through when it didn't. This is a way to check. "It can be useful peace of mind to know people got your e-mail," Rampell says.

Ironically, all the of supposedly good purposes for using DidTheyReadIt still sound pretty slimy. How can you with a straight face tell me that this software will benefit me, salespeople, and headhunters all in the same breath?

The claim that you can verify that the email wasn't chewed up my some span filter is probably the most plausible excuse for this software. However, I'm sure these guys, if they have half a brain, have already figured what I just realized now: What if the spammers started using this software to track and profile who received their spam? Big bucks for them, and more spam for me.

Outlook and other mail clients have had different forms of this feature for a long time now. People at the company that I used to work for used this fairly frequently. I setup a special folder for emails with tracking just so that I can purposely delay responding to those emails.

The same kind of people who would use this feature are those who currently send an email and then immediately call to make sure you've received and read the email. Except with this service, they'll be able to be a little more covert with their harassment.

An author's dream come true Actionscript.com is now opening it's doors to contributors, and the best part is, you can earn some extra cash. They are using Google's Adsense, which can now track individual pages. So the more popular or more often you write, the more you can earn. Details here if you're interested.

Standards Roadmap Mezzoblue has a great article on how to teach yourself to be standards compliant. Full of great advice on design strategies, plenty of books and sites to get you started, and already a slurry of comment additions. This blog has some ways to go before it's compliant. I better get started.

Kyoto Andy's 1362 pictures during his two week vacation fell just slightly short of his original goal of 2000 pictures. However, the results speak for themselves. See the full Kyoto in Springtime gallery.


Previously from Andy:
Where would you rather be?
Night Scenes

Flash: TextFormat to HTML Have you ever wanted to see the HTML representation of a TextFormat object without having to go and create a textfield, set the format, and then get the htmlText?

Well the code below creates a single hidden textfield and then calling fmtToHtml takes care of all the details:

//create a default textformat
var $DefaultFmt = new TextFormat("Times New Roman",12,0x000000,false,
                                 false,false,"","","left",0,0,0,0);

//create the hidden textfield
_root.createTextField("$ConvTxt",-10,0,0,0,0);

//initialize it
var $ConvTxt = _root.$ConvTxt;
$ConvTxt.visible = false;
$ConvTxt.html = true;

//takes an input string and format and converts it to html
_global.fmtToHtml = function(txt:String,fmt:TextFormat):String {
  //asign text
  $ConvTxt.text = txt;
  //reset all formating
  $ConvTxt.setTextFormat($DefaultFmt);
  //apply new format
  $ConvTxt.setTextFormat(fmt);
        
  return $ConvTxt.htmlText;
}

You'll notice that before applying the TextFormat, it's first reset with a default format. This is necessary because when apply a new TextFormat, it is merged with the existing format. For example if the currently applied format had the bold property set to true, and you applied a new format without explicitly setting bold to false, the resulting format would still be bold.

Panorama Stitching Acts of Volition doesn't just have a cool radio broadcast, they have some wonderful panoramic shots as well, and a link to the software they used, Panorama Factory. I decided to give it a try instead of trying to stitch some shots we took earlier myself. And here is the result: The software is amazing! I just had to specify which images to stitch, my camera type, and some correction settings, and 10 seconds later, a seamless panorama. The results would have been better if I wasn't so haphazard when taking the individual shots, but still quite impressive and well worth the $60.

Update: This should give you a better idea of how well this software works. The samples below are my attempt at a stitch of 2entwine headquarters in Photoshop vs Panorama Factory.

Where would you rather be? Tokyo or Providence? While I'm hunting for nice photos in Providence and New York, Andy seems unable to miss wherever he goes. Andy's ducks at the Korakuen Garden look a lot happier than my ducks in NYC. Go figure.