NSLog();

If you're a Mac user and you've got a PS3, and you'd like to beta test some software that helps tie the two together, please leave a comment with your preferred email address ((Which is not available to spammers, just me.)) below.

And yes, if you'd like to put 2 and 2 together, be my guest.

P.S. No time frame on this. Could be Monday, could be a week or two. Depends on a few things.

P.P.S. I'll probably cap this it at 20 people. Feel free to post beyond 20 comments, but please be aware that the odds that you'll be included are significantly slimmer.

What's the best forum solution written in Ruby on Rails?

The best blog solution?

By "best" I mean a good combination of "fully featured," "robuts/stable," and "extensible/modifiable."

Today, after wasting a little time thinking that my Safari installation had gone awry, I tracked down a bug with CoolIris 1.9.0.16396 and Safari 3.2.1 regarding the latter's phishing/malware protection.

The bug manifests itself in a bit of an odd way:

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 377); »

You read the title correctly. Now, if you have half an hour, read the rest.

That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

I remember seeing the website for Ben Stein's eXpelled a few months ago and being shocked at how poorly put together it was. I completely lost all respect for Ben Stein at that time, and it doesn't appear as though he'll be getting it back any time.

P.S. And on a side note, I despise the decline of the "documentary." There's no way in hell Michael Moore movies should win awards for "documentary" films. They - and eXepelled - are not documentaries. They're op/ed pieces.

Are all credit card transactions through all processors handled roughly like this: $0.30 + 0.022x. In other words, does every processing gateway charge a small fee (the 30 cents) and then a percentage of the overall transaction?

Or are there gateways/processing agents/whatever-they're-called that just charge a flat percentage, like 5% ((Or even, I suppose, a varying percentage, so long as it didn't get too high.))

I ask because I'm interested in micropayments from about a dollar and up, and this is likely a problem I'll have to solve sooner or later.

Given this problem and the many others I've had with my Drobo ((This includes its complete and utter failure to work as a Time Machine backup - I think my attempts to resize the sparsebundle resulted in failure. I could mount the disk, browse the files, and copy any I wanted to, but Time Machine showed no backups at all.)), about a week ago I shuffled things around in order to better accommodate the functionality of the Drobo and my system needs.

So currently, my drive situation looks like this:

• 1 TB Internal Drive "Peter" - main boot volume, Mac OS X 10.5.5, etc. [275 GB]
• 1 TB Internal Drive "Roger" - psync nightly cloned version of Peter, bootable. [275 GB (duh)]
• 1 TB Internal Drive "Harvey" contains only three things: Aperture Library, iPhoto Library, Windows XP.pvm file for Parallels. [160 GB]
• 1 TB Internal Drive "Mimzy" - new Time Machine drive. Currently 457 GB used with 450 GB or so free.
• Drobo with four 500 GB drives (1.3 TB actual space) "Thumper" - partitioned to 16 TB for future-proofing. Contains "Videos" folder (home movies, TV series, DVD rips) and my Aperture Vault (backup).

For obvious reasons, "Roger" isn't copied to the Time Machine volume "Mimzy."

In the end, this arrangement both takes advantage of the Drobo while once again providing me with worry-free Time Machine backups. The only thing I'm not backing up is the 500 GB of data or so on the Drobo, and ideally that data should be pretty safe unless two drives fail at the same exact time or something.

Nik Software's Complete Collection, $599 normally, is now available for Aperture only for $299.95.

I've been interested in this software for awhile now, but I've yet to try it because I really try to avoid Aperture's handling of editing plugins. This dislike exists in tension with my dislike for Aperture's lack of masking. For example, tomorrow's image at my photoblog could have been done with Viveza in Aperture without the round trip to Photoshop.

If you've tried any of Nik's software, post in the comments and let me know what you thought.

P.S. There's no educational discount on this package, despite text on the right that may lead you to believe otherwise.

I spent some time today tweaking the photoblog. Chief among the changes was the inclusion of a new Ratings Page. This page (currently) lists the three highest and lowest rated images as well as the five most and least rated images.

If I could suggest one thing, it's that you visit the page and vote for some of the least rated images. These are the images with the lowest vote totals (not the lowest cumulative rating). At the moment, the most rated images are around 21 while the least is at three.

For now, you can spend a thousand bucks and get a 7-inch OLED digital photo frame from Kodak.

I think I first heard about OLED nearly five years ago. The promise was inexpensive "screens" that you could literally roll up. People were talking about rolling out screens for laptops, using large screens instead of projectors in conference rooms, and more.

I guess at $999 and seven inches, we're still a long ways from that.

What do I want? Not a computer display. I want an OLED up to 24 x 36 inches that includes a Wifi chip, 16 GB (or more) memory, and a rechargeable battery that lasts a year. I want to mount the screen inside a frame and hang the thing in my house so that I can display my photographs.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 228); »

A quick list of the things for which I'm thankful, in no particular order whatsoever and as they come to me.

• My family and their health and well-being.
• Apple's resurgence. I shudder to think of where we'd be had the "late-90s" trend not been reversed.
• Athletics/sports. Watching (Go Pens!) and playing.
• The United States of America. We do a lot of stupid shit, but we do a lot of good too, and I would not rather live anywhere else.
• Technology in general. More specifically, digital photography, the iPhone, my golf clubs, and, for my wife, her Cricut. 😛
• Friends. I kind of lump them into the first category, so I didn't list them sooner, but I suppose they deserve their own place.

No doubt there are others, but I've got to get going. Guests are arriving soon.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Due to a comment, I posted PPEndLoop to the Plugins page here at the site.

It's a PixelPost plugin - not a WordPress one - and I extended it to have full functionality ((I believe so, anyway - let me know if there's something missing.))

A long time ago I found Dropbox intriguing. Then I didn't think about it again.

Until I read Michael "Rands" Lopp's post on it, after which I signed up immediately.

I've already found two good uses for it:

1. I've put my Scorecard data files on it so that I can have up-to-date files on both computers. Previously I had them stored on my iDisk.
2. I created a folder for a project I'm working on with Josh (yeah) so that we could share documents that way rather than emailing them back and forth.

Only one question remains: why the frick couldn't the iDisk work like Dropbox?

Update: Good point by Michael Tsai regarding Dropbox's limitations.

Josh (a friend) and I are currently seeking a web developer (design skills are a plus) for a startup company with photography overtones and tremendous potential.

The position offers no pay, but does offer an ownership stake in the enterprise and fairly loose time requirements. Josh and I are looking at this as a "sweat equity" startup - a method that's worked well for me over the years with Freshly Squeezed Software, Cynical Peak, and other ventures.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 287); »

If someone is ever bored and adventurous enough to update the Quoter plugin for WordPress, I'd be very appreciative.

One of the biggest problems is that you cannot put <blockquote> tags inside your own comment or they're transformed into a sort of self-referencing quote.

I was going to suggest that "fixing" this with a slight CSS hack might be the easiest way, but after a little poking around I think fixing the actual plugin would be the better tactic.

Any takers bored enough to look into this? I'm personally not quite skilled enough at grep to solve it right away - I'd have to figure out what each of the PHP grep patterns were doing first, and I'm spending today working on an Aperture plugin.

My wife has a cell phone. A first-gen iPhone, in fact. She almost always has it with her, except when she's at home, and yet I can never seem to reach her. Optimistically, I'd say 33%. Sometimes it's because she's on another call (she doesn't like to use the hold button), but most often it's because she can't hear her phone ringing in her purse or because she's left it in another room of the house. She won't wear it on her hip, either.

In the interest of saving time by not having to listen to what seems like the inevitable "five rings before voicemail," (at least 67% of the time), perhaps I should start using SlyDial to call her. It calls directly into someone's voicemail. The joke is that now you can avoid any and all human interaction at all, but since most of the calls between us are one-way informational talks that last about thirty seconds (just a bit too big for a text message), SlyDial might work for that. With the iPhone's visual voicemail, she can see it's a message from me and play it when she's not in the middle of traffic or checking out at a store.