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I've looked in a few stores (including Wal-Mart). I'd like to buy some incense sticks (for this), but I'm not sure where to find them in Erie. I could probably find some at Spencer's or a head shop, but I'd prefer to avoid those places. I just want to take pictures of smoke, not mask the scent of dubious activities.

Something I have to look into sooner or later: the order in which Subscribe to Comments and Live Comment Preview output their data/controls is bad. StC puts its "subscribe" checkbox after LCP's preview text. Thus, the longer someone's comment is (and the more likely they want to subscribe to see if anyone's followed up), the more likely it is that they'll miss the "subscribe" checkbox.

Since I'm using the default "hooks" for each of the plugins (i.e. I don't manually insert either plugins' data or controls), I have little control over the order. But, I'm sure there's a way. In a perfect world, the "subscribe" button would appear before the submit button.

Update (literally one minute later): Duh. I guess I chose "sooner" over "later." <? show_subscription_checkbox(); ?> can manually control the location of StC's checkbox. 😳

And more importantly, what does our choice say about us? 🙂

Mine's currently set to purple, though in the past few months I've been changing it regularly. Blue or yellow are likely my all-time favorites.

I read on one of the many photography forums out there that someone right-clicked on an image and saw the EXIF data. On the Mac, the only two lightweight applications (1 and 2) are written for Intel Macs, and PhotoToolCM hasn't been updated since about the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple ((I'm exaggerating, yes.)). Several other apps (EXIFutils, EXIFplot, EXIF-O-Matic) are also PPC only.

It appears that someone could wrap the exiftags source into a contextual menu item for PPC/Intel Macs. So, will someone? I'd do it if it weren't so… Carbon? COM?

I'm absolutely livid with MediaTemple currently. LIVID. For the past two weeks, my server - which hosts a vBulletin forum, two popular blogs (with caching enabled), and a few other little piddly sites that are lucky to get 1000 hits per day.

I'm hosting with the $50 (dv)Base plan, and despite a month and a half of fairly adequate performance, in the past two weeks I find that I'm constantly running out of memory. MySQL throws up errors. Apache drops connections. Even FTP uploads don't go through. I'm seeing server loads of 12 despite the fact that the server hung out in the 0.3 to 0.8 range for most of January and February.

Despite promises of a MediaTemple user forum - promises that led me to take down a site I'd started building for that very purpose - from executives within MediaTemple, nothing has come to fruition yet. The company seems to have a problem with promises, in fact. The (dv) 3.0 plan was promised in October but wasn't available until early January, and only then if users signed up new accounts or chose to spend hours migrating their own sites.

I'm very, very quickly becoming displeased with MediaTemple. Their support has been responsive, but the fact that I've needed so much support just to run a few sites of late does not reflect well on them.

I've recommended MediaTemple in the past, but as of now, that will no longer be the case, as I am once again back to paying far too much for far too little.

I'm all for the $1 coins. But shouldn't we eliminate the penny first? The penny, last I heard, costs more to make than it's worth. I can just hear our President saying "Sure, that's true, but we'll make it up in volume!"

Ditch the penny. Keep the $1 coin. It'll make people who use vending machines very happy eventually. Canada has been happy with the Loonie ever since it was forced upon them.

A few minutes ago, I received an email from "Dave S" of "ReputationDefender, Inc." In short, the email requested that I remove a comment by Julian on a very old entry. I was asked to make this change because "he considers his comments to be outdated" and that complying would "go a long way to help make the Internet a more civil place."

As someone who wishes he could "undo" a few of the things he's done publicly, I wish that fixing one's reputation was as simple as asking nicely in the name of civility. It just doesn't work that way, folks.

What's funny is that this isn't even a case of a damaged reputation: the comment is nearly three years old. Clearly people researching Julian will see that his comment is "outdated." I responded by saying:

No thanks. He said it, the comment and post are dated, and it will stand. I think "honesty" is more valuable than whatever gains may be made - or presumed to be made - to make the Internet "more civil."

I may change my mind - and I may certainly feel differently if the person had actually said something that made them look bad - but for now, I'm standing on principle.

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I posted briefly about this "thing" yesterday, but today I'm officially announcing that I'm looking for an entrepreneurial web developer/designer. If you're skilled - and I don't care whether it's in PHP or Ruby or whatever - get in touch with me.

I will not discuss details of the project for at least a week or so. I'm in ongoing talks with two individuals that I trust can do the job, and if one of them wants the spot, it is his. I'm posting this simply so that I can transition smoothly into talks with another group of developers should the need arise.

I can say that the developer chosen will be made a part of a new company as a partial owner. The developer - like the other two partners - will invest some sweat equity (no cash) in order to start the business and produce the "product." The sweat equity will require nowhere near full-time work. Initially, the business itself will require only "free-time work" as well, but could grow quickly to becoming a full-time job (with the income to match, of course).

P.S. AIM remains the best way to get in touch with me, email second, and posting a comment here a distant third.

With the recent news that MarsEdit has been acquired by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater, now is definitely the time for ecto to step up to the plate and begin to deliver solid updates (progressing into the beta) of version 3.0.

I've used ecto for a long, long time. I like the way it works. But other editors are passing it by. Once I switch to another editor that offers one or two features I really like, I'm likely to stay switched for quite some time. I imagine it'll be the same for others.

I realize, too, that Ecto developer Adriaan has a full-time job and is not afforded much time to work on ecto. Perhaps he, too, should consider selling it to someone who would take care of it if he can't spare the time to work on it.

From the WhiBal guy, Michael Tapes, come about two hours of Lightroom tutorial videos. Though he's on a PC, adjusting the keyboard shortcuts he mentions is relatively painless as most shortcuts are done without the use of the ctrl key on Windows.

I'm considering picking up a WhiBal, but I'll wait to see if I can't get it for a bit less eventually. I've never seen one in person, either. It seems to beat using an ExpoDisc.

In WordPress 2.1, I encountered a few problems uploading images. One of the problems was solved with a plugin that disables the creation of a thumbnail. Two others are solved with a nightly cron job. The last problem - renaming of images and ignoring of specified paths - was solved by commenting out $name = sanitize_file_name( $data['name'] ); in xmlrpc.php.

This fix no longer works in WordPress 2.1.1. In fact, commenting out this line of code throws an error at you: could not write file.

Thus, WordPress 2.1.1 again breaks image uploading via XML-RPC (I use ecto). Un-commenting the line allows images to upload, yet again in the wrong folder and with - replacing _.

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Just wanted to get this up. I de-saturated the image because it's mostly a black-and-white image anyway. Just the red rings and the green table tennis top add some color.

This is a bit of a LazyWeb request here, or rather an "I'm busy doing other things and don't yet have the two hours necessary to find the answers, but maybe someone knows offhand" type of post.

Anyway, the question is this: are there any forum packages that "expose" their member list for extensibility and use outside of the forum software?

In other words, I'll soon be working with a members-based site. A forum is one of the components, and we'd like to use the forum member logins across every section of the site - from the forum itself to the more specific members-only areas. Or perhaps the question is backwards - perhaps there's forum software that can use a members list supplied externally.

I think something like vBulletin or Invision can do this, but I'm not certain. Please, no recommendations for bbPress - it's just too simple at this point.

Think Secret seems to believe that both Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Mac OS X 10.5 will ship in March. Me, I'm not so sure, and I think a lot of people will be incredibly disappointed if Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't have some massive UI overhaul. A March release would be a first, after all - we've not really been treated to much of a tour of the OS by Steve Jobs as we usually are.

Ars Technica reviews Lightroom and compares it with Aperture. Though I tend to prefer Apple applications, I'm familiar with Photoshop and Lightroom appears to have made incredible strides since the last beta. I wonder if Aperture 2.0 is around the corner and if many of the features found in Lightroom will make their way into Aperture.

I can pick up Lightroom for about $100 via the education discount, so I may just do that for experimentation. I just saved $100 putting up my own garage door opener, after all! I do still wish Adobe had an option to bundle Photoshop CS3 (upgrade) with Lightroom. 😛

Personally, I like a lot of the picture editing features offered by Lightroom. It also feels much faster - Aperture all but demands I quit most other apps or the VM thrashes my disk like crazy (on a 3 GHz quad Mac Pro with 5 GB of RAM and an ATI X1900 card!). But I much prefer Aperture's concept of a centralized library and very slightly prefer its user interface. What are your thoughts?