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I do like to write something every day. I think it's a good habit to get into. Poof!

Saying "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally": dumb.

Daring hackers to attempt to do bad things to your OS: even dumber.

What, I've linked to the same small page? Yeah - because Gates said and did these things back to back, right after being dimwitted enough to mention Jim Allchin's name. You know, the guy who's been made famous for his "I'd buy a Mac" and "iLife kicks butt" emails from within Microsoft.

Despite the harsh lighting conditions (at times), I'm relatively pleased with how some of the shots I took turned out. Ben and Brandon were reasonable subjects, though it's obvious Ben is much more still (a good quality in playing pool) than Brandon, who had a lot more blur to most of his images.

Compositionally, I'm sure none of these are great, but they're not complete duds either. All were shot at f/1.8 (which I'm beginning to think is a bit soft - to be expected on a $70 lens) at ISO 800 or ISO 400.

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As I wrote yesterday, WordPress 2.1 severely breaks image uploading in several ways:

1. It automatically creates thumbnails I don't want (or need).
2. It ignores path components and instead appends the path to the filename.
3. It creates unnecessary (or unwanted) data in the wp_postmeta table.
4. It creates unnecessary (or unwanted) data in the wp_posts table.

I can deal with the last two via a cron job that removes these items from the databases. They're more headache than actual "broken-ness."

Today I discovered yet another way in which image uploading in WordPress 2.1 is broken: it renames my images! In the XML below, you'll see I've attempted to upload "test_image.png" to "sw/". WordPress instead creates a file called "swtest-image.png" (along with a thumbnail).

I ran this query in ecto, but I also did similar tests in MarsEdit. WordPress behaves the same in both cases.

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We're paying for the fact that most of December was about 50°, I think. This isn't a promising looking weather chart, and I can't say I'm particularly happy to see all that Apple-designed snow flitting about in my Dashboard. It may be well-designed snow, good-looking snow, but it's still a lot of freakin' snow.

I'm still enjoying the kick I get out of using the snowblower, at least. I watched the guy across the street spend 15 minutes just blowing out the snow in front of his mailbox (and into the street, no less). His snowblower stalled out no less than six times. Ouch.

No, I don't blog about cats, but I guess this is just as bad.

P.S. Transparent PNG screenshot with a CSS background color captured with a standard shift-cmd-4, space bar combo. I really wish the "escape" key would work when you've entered screenshot mode. Instead I find myself holding ctrl down to put the image on the clipboard, then re-issuing the keyboard commands to effectively "escape" (when I meant to hit shift-cmd-3 instead of -4, for example). Seems TypeIt4Me may be at fault there.

WordPress 2.1 has "broken" something I've come to rely on in ecto: the ability to easily upload images. Two problems exist:

1. Thumbnails are automatically created (I don't want them to be)
2. The "/" in the path I specify is ignored.

In the case of the second, if I specify photos/ and attempt to upload picture.jpg to my imgs folder (specified as the uploads directory in WordPress's settings), I instead get a file named photospicture.jpg (along with the unwanted photospicture.thumbnail.jpg) in my imgs directory.

As if that weren't bad enough, WordPress 2.1 tracks these image uploads in the wp_postmeta table and adds new rows to wp_posts with the type specified as "attachment." WTF is up with that?

This makes me want to stop using WordPress to handle my image uploads altogether. The image management features WordPress offers are weak or non-existent, and now I come to find that it clutters my database to boot? No thanks.

Adobe's $199 introductory pricing ($99 for students - I'll have to see if my teacher wife qualifies!) is almost low enough to tempt me into buying it. Even if I only use it occasionally, $199 (or $99) ain't bad.

The problem is that much of Lightroom's functionality can be found elsewhere: Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw are all part of Photoshop, and I've had Photoshop since version 5.0, right on through to CS2. A CS3 upgrade, naturally, is also due to hit shelves this summer.

Yet there will - I've heard - be no Photoshop CS3 upgrade that includes Lightroom. This would be the ideal package for me, yet I'm faced instead with paying $299 for Photoshop and $199 for Lightroom.

What's up with that?

I ventured to the Winter Snowfest at Frontier Park today. What a great place to sled! All we had growing up was the relatively puny hill at Gravel Pit in North East!

By far, the most interesting thing happened as I was leaving. A conversion van was driving along the road and sideswiped a parked van. The entire front bumper fell off. The owner was standing nearby, and clearly saw me with a camera, but the perpetrator (a.k.a. crazy driver) returned and admitted fault, and the two started hashing out the details. Had he asked for a photo, I'd have taken one.

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I believe that writing daily is a good habit to get into. Today, though, not so much to say except "poof!"

I must admit: I feel a bit like Tim Allen. Perhaps 10.5 horsepower is overkill for a guy with a short driveway (but a lot of sidewalk), but is there really such a thing as "too much" when it comes to powering through two to three feet of wet snow without breaking a sweat? I cleared my driveway and sidewalks in the time it took a neighbor to do less than half of his. None of this "take it slowly" stuff.

20% off at Lowe's, for the few of you who read this and live in Erie (or somewhere else with snow). Carey and I would have gotten one last year, but I was happy to save the money back then and instead kill my back. No such trouble this year. 🙂

Turns out +1 to +1 1/3 is a good exposure for snow at 4:00pm on an overcast Erie January day. We're getting dumped on now fairly hard, but all the snow we've gotten has given me an excuse to both try the new snowblower (a Husqvarna 10.5 HP) and take some pictures.

The snowblower will take some getting used to (it's almost too powerful), but man am I able to clean up quickly. I plowed 4x as much sidewalk in half the time as my neighbor across the street.

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You know what I'd like? AirTunes on my hip. I want a little player - iPod shuffle-sized ((The old "pack of gum" size, not the new tiny size.)) if possible, but capable of showing up in iTunes as a destination to which music can be streamed. I'd pay a little bit extra to be able to control more than the volume on such a device as well.

There are a lot of times in the day when I'm listening to a podcast and doing work, yet want to take a break from work, walk down the hall, and shoot some pool balls for a few minutes. Or go downstairs to get some food. Without interrupting the podcast.

And no, Bluetooth on an iPod is not the answer. My whole house is blanketed in wireless. I'd like to be able to use it for more than just getting online from my basement, kitchen, and bathroom. 😛

Today I ventured into Cleveland to have a look at a Canon 5D at Dodd Camera. I wanted to get a sense for the size of the thing, and Erie's camera stores don't carry much more than $300 P&S cameras. The 5D feels great in my hands, and the viewfinder is incredible.

Canon is offering a $600 (doubled up) rebate through February 19, and the PMA show takes place from March 8-10. I may buy a 5D at the last possible moment and return it if a successor is announced. I'd put the odds of a 5D replacement coming out before the PMA show at about… 50/50 if I'm optimistic, 70/30 if I'm not.

In the evening, I took a few pictures of some Beanie Babies in the basement. I'm trying to determine whether the XTi has an issue focusing (or whether I do). I tried both AF and MF, but didn't get any conclusive results. I'll have to try the ruler trick or something.

P.S. Yes, it's all related.

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As I said in an earlier post, WordPress 2.1 breaks ecto, a blog publishing app I and thousands of others use. I wrote to the developer Adriaan, and he's informed me that the fault lies with WordPress 2.1. Here's how.

When requesting new information in ecto (via "Refresh"), ecto attempts to retrieve the last 15-20 or so entries, their categories, their dates, etc. WordPress 2.1 sends this:

<member><name>categoryId</name><value><int>7</int></value></member>

It should send this:

<member><name>categoryId</name><value><string>7</string></value></member>

This was correct in previous versions, and according to Adriaan, the specs clearly indicate that categoryId is a string, not an int. A quick Google search quickly returns this page, which is over one month old.

I'll mention this on the IRC channel.

I've updated my two WordPress plugins to support WordPress 2.1. In fairly limited testing (i.e. here on my blog) they seem to work okay. So… grab them from the plugins page.

From an end user perspective (i.e. as a blog admin, not a reader), WordPress 2.1 is incredibly underwhelming. It forces an en-masse "check" of all plugins with little added features. The one new feature - to Akismet - doesn't even work properly. I've gotten a few emails asking me to moderate spamments posted on entries older than 30 days, and have not been notified of other valid comments. I've not done enough testing to really nail this one down, though.

It occurs to me that perhaps - since WordPress relies so heavily on plugins - that a centralized "version" server should have probably been created by now. That way your WordPress installation could check once per day to see if new versions of your plugin were available. Instead, you're left visiting individual author blogs, and that often means trying to figure out if the permalink for version 0.9.1 will always be current, or if version 0.9.2 exists elsewhere on their site.

Update: WordPress 2.1 breaks ecto with a bad categoryId type.