NSLog();

I despise - absolutely despise - feeds advertised as "RSS" which are actually Atom feeds. Oftentimes, FeedBurner factors into the equation.

If you're going to list a few varieties of feeds, ostensibly letting people choose which format they'd like, I say you provide that freakin' format. Don't switch it on the back end.

Why? Because some home-grown apps might only be designed to play well with a certain feed format, and some full-grown apps might not work, either. For example, PulpFiction doesn't work with Atom 1.0 feeds because we stopped developing the app prior to 1.0's design and approval, and the new owner hasn't done jack shit with the app.

Saying "RSS feed here!" and then switching to Atom is like a customer ordering a "Coke" and being given a Pepsi. A lot of people might not care, but some people care very much whether they get Coke or Pepsi.

In the news this week: Millcreek Golf and Learning Center is going to be closed soon due to airport runway expansion. The course has earned a tidy profit for Millcreek since opening a few years ago. In related news, the city of Erie continues to try to pawn off Erie Golf Club.

I'm not in favor of any purchase of Erie Golf Club and think Erie could probably recover the $1.8M in debt by just selling the place to real estate developers. The course is horrible - in bad shape and with bad routing. Though I'm sure it was a fine course in Tillinghast's day, it's definitely not right now, and given the dramatic nature of the land, I'm not sure it could become one unless converted to nine holes and dramatically re-routed. For obvious reasons, that's not an option. In short, it's a horrible golf course undeserving of protection.

I live a mile from the course and won't ever play it. It's not even valuable as a practice ground for the times I can't make the drive to Lake View. The lack of a driving range and the 14 square foot practice green don't help its cause any.

I still have my Final Cut Pro keyboard, but now a company has come out with an Aperture shortcut keyboard. I'd be tempted to buy it, but $59 for a set of keys alone? $99 for a $29 keyboard (with standard keys, of course). Forget it. I'll make due with the Aperture shortcuts PDF. But my birthday's coming up, and I don't look gift horses in the mouth… 🙂

P.S. Note to wife: this is in no way a hint. Do not spend our money on this. 😉

I'm suddenly in the mood for some Chicken and Waffles. Too bad I'm, what, three full time zones away?

My only experience with a Chicken and Waffles was in 2000 (I believe) when I was Editor of SegaWeb and I attended an E3 at the Staples Center in L.A. I had a full chicken and two waffles the second day of the trip, if I remember correctly, and was just about full the remaining three days.

Mmmm mmm mmmmmmmmmm.

One of the habits I got into was writing something every day on my blog, and usually not just some "I posted" type of post, but something with at least a little meat or which is a little interesting.

Today I wrote something, but will not be publishing it for some time. The executive summary: some people are morons.

A MacHeist member strikes again: Adam Betts has accused me of "revenge" and "threatening a lawsuit" for rejecting an icon. The full tale, as you might suspect, is a bit different.

To be clear, yes, Cyndicate is an RSS aggregator coming from Cynical Peak Software, a software company run by former FSSer Brad Miller. Cyndicate been referred to on this blog as "Iris," and it's about two months from shipping.

Brad and I had used Adam Betts before and been quite pleased with his work and rates. We tried to use him on subsequent FSS icons, but were unable to do so. Having sold FSS well over a year prior, I contacted Adam while MacHeist was finishing up and he agreed to do a full suite of icons for Cyndicate - app icon, document icons, toolbar and preference bar icons, small list-view icons - the works.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1286); »

I tried to name all 50 states in five minutes today. I got 12 in the first minute, 22 by the second, 30 by the third, 34 by the fourth, and 40 at five minutes.

Go ahead and try the exercise yourself. Write them down in a text editor and put an extra carriage return when you hit a minute. When five minutes are up, go back and recalculate to remove duplicates.

Post your results in the comments… (and don't read below before you do so). How many states can you name in five minutes?

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 155); »

My first smoke shots were only "okay," so today I set out to improve upon them.

First, I stopped down to f/16, giving me about five or six inches depth of field rather than the two inches I had before. I also backed the shutter speed off to 1/125 (from 1/250), though given the actual speed of the flash, all that managed to do was let in more ambient light off the background. Additionally, I shot these mid-day: I should have waited until night time. The basement window let in just enough light that the camera caught some detail in the black cloth background, resulting in a loss of smoke detail in levels adjustments.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 466); »

There have been a few posts about vacuuming your Mail and Aperture databases to speed up operations. Great. Yay for vacuum.

PulpFiction throws up a dialog at quit which tells the user that it's "optimizing" the database. What's it do, exactly? Vacuum.

I've received a few comments on my random header images script. One person wrote today asking me to share my "howto," as his method doesn't work with WP-Cache. This should be fairly easy, so, here goes.

The trick to getting random content in WP-Cache is simple: the use of an "mclude" comment. Since my sites are always fairly modular, I employ PHP's include() function frequently, and so it should come as no surprise that my header rotator is included in the page. This makes marking some random content in a cached file rather easy. In my "header.php" file, I have:

<!--mclude /path/to/my/theme/header_rotator.inc-->
<? include('header_rotator.inc'); ?>
<!--/mclude-->

By the way, please note that while I use <?, some PHP purists prefer <?php as the former requires "short opening tags" to be enabled.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1122); »

Thanks to the folks who responded to my previous question about incense I was able to make some interesting photographs tonight. Unfortunately, at f/5.6, my depth of field was only about 0.18 feet, or just over two inches. So, many of my photographs are a bit… out of focus. I set my shutter speed to 1/250 to try to stop motion (plus, that's as fast as my strobes will sync), and did a reasonable job at that.

All told, it was a good learning experience. Of course, I must still thank this article for providing the clues.

Next time, I'll have to try f/11 or f/16. That's two or three stops less light, but rather than putting the honeycomb grids (10° and 20°) on, I'll rig up an aluminum foil snoot and/or just put up a gobo. The grids probably take up about three stops of light.

Pictures come after the jump. Move your mouse over the image for the inverse image.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 347); »

Real businesspeople do not use @aol.com email addresses. I'm sorry, they just don't.

You can read more on bone age at Wikipedia, of course.

Currently, with four browser windows open (with 1 tab, 1 tab, 2 tabs, and 12 tabs in each), Safari is taking up 727 MB REAL, 1.23 GB VIRTUAL. Earlier today, I shit you not, with about 50% more windows/tabs (a total of about 24 total pages loaded), Safari was at 2.77 GB VIRTUAL and over 1.6 GB REAL. Yeah. Ouch.

Here's to hoping Safari's performance (both CPU and RAM usage) improves dramatically in Leopard, but despite blogging on performance issues, the WebKit team hasn't posted much on improvements in memory usage.

Update: As a quick read of the comments shows, many improvements have been made to Safari's memory usage. Good.

Lightroom is receiving a comment whoopin' at O'ReillyNet. The commenters dislike Lightroom's modules, praising Aperture for its "uni-module" design which naturally leads to a more cohesive user interface.

Aperture, for me - despite having a dual 3 GHz Mac Pro with 5 GB RAM and 200+ GB free space on the boot drive - is a dog unless I quit most of my other apps. Yesterday, simply selecting a picture to edit took a full minute. The hard disk thrashed away the entire time. Aperture loves its RAM, and when it can't get it, the page-in/page-out cycle grates on my nerves about as much as it grates on my hard disk.

That's a long way of saying what I've said a few times already: Lightroom's greatest feature is its speed. Its second greatest feature is the "target" thing that can adjust colors (hue, luminance, saturation, etc.) just by clicking and dragging. Outside of that, Aperture holds most of the cards.

BTW, if you're interested in learning how to use Aperture, I recommend Aperture Exposed.