onfocus

I heard through the Portland Bloggers grapevine that Linus Torvalds is moving to Portland in a couple weeks. He said, "The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available) by moving during the summer." Given enough webbed feet, all puddles are shallow. More on Linus Torvalds.

This weekend I made some changes to my photolog. On the backend there's now a database keeping some meta-info about each picture. (Previously, it was using the filesystem only.) On the frontend, some of the photos now have a [details] link after the title that leads to a page with the meta info for that particular photo. For example:

• Today's Photo
• Details of Today's Photo

I'm adding some of the metadata like title and keywords by hand. But some of it is automatically included by parsing the exif data embedded within the image. Exif data includes technical details about the shot: exposure time, focal length, aperture setting, etc. To get the exif info I'm using a program called exiftags. (jhead is another good exif data extractor that I found while putting this together.) I'm hoping that having this technical data about the shot a click away from each photo will help me remember what works and what doesn't.

101 Ways to Improve Your News Site. This is full of great ideas.

Get Anil an iPod: Nigritude Ultramarine. He'd link to your crazy Google contest.

According to John Udell, ISBNs are changing from 10 to 13 characters in 2005. (I have a bunch of code based on 10-character ISBNs that I'll need to update.) More info.

Matt posted a couple pictures of Luna: one at rest, one at full speed. When she gets excited she runs in big loops around the yard at top speed. She really needs animals to herd, but she'll have to get by with frisbees.

I took some photos of the moon tonight:



I had help with the exposure settings from Hack #96: Shoot The Moon in Digital Photography Hacks. I know I'm biased because I put together a book in the Hacks series, but I really found this book entertaining and useful (read most of it tonight). Unlike most Hacks books it has full color, glossy pages and is filled with illustrations. I don't know if it's because I'm used to the Hacks format—or because I'm the target market—but I feel like I got more practical advice from this photography book than any other I own. I wish there would have been more web/photography stuff (EXIF parsing, programatic resizing, etc.) but I realize this is a book for photographers, not coders.

I'm not happy with this level of detail in the photo, and I'd like to get an adapter so I can hook my camera to my telescope. I want to see craters in my moon photos. (Here's a picture of the moon I took in 2002 by holding my camera up to the telescope eyepiece. The adapter should work better.)

A local Corvallis company Bigha (makers of high quality recumbent bikes) just started a weblog: The Bigha Blog. Every business should do this. Ernest put the weblog together, and he posted about a hike at Silver Falls we went on a week ago. You may remember him from this photo where he's probably not thinking about bikes and weblogs.

And at The Bigha Blog I found a link to a satisfied customer talking about his experience with the company on his weblog. It pays to be nice to weblog authors—they post the good and the bad for the world to read.

I'm not sure why I feel the need to pass this on, but Extreme Ironing. [via WordSpy]

Corvallis is in the news right now because a woman was abducted sometime Monday—just across from the OSU campus. Her name is Brook Wilberger. If you're in the area, please take a look at her picture--it can't hurt having everyone keeping an eye out for her. Here's the most recent story in the paper: The search intensifies. There are signs with her picture up all over town, and remote news trucks at Reser Stadium. This is the first violent crime to happen since I've lived here.

I went for a hike with some friends along the "Trail of Ten Falls" at Silver Falls State Park on Saturday. The best part was being able to hike behind some of the falls. Here are a bunch of photos:


more >>

Matt got a great, misty running-water effect in this photo of South Falls on his site. I was pushing my camera's exposure time in manual mode, but I still didn't get as nice an effect as that. I think a neutral density filter may help.

Amazon has a new feature updated their feature called Early Adopter Products. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but the site says they're "analyzing purchase patterns" and I think they're trying to see what's bubbling up to the top before it's on the top sales lists. It seems like this could only work if you analyzed the buying patterns of certain people who were flagged as early adopters. How do you know when something is being purchased by trend-setters rather than just having an initial burst of sales after being released? (For example, several books in the Early Adopter Computer Books list don't strike me as books that are being purchased by what I consider early adopters.) I'll be disappointed if it turns out to be just another way to highlight new products. In any case, it's a cool concept and I'll be keeping on eye on it to see if it's useful.