Here’s yet another excellent essay by Michael Reichmann. He was allowed into the Chittagong Ship-Breaking Yards in Bangladesh, a visit routinely denied to other photographers and he captured some moving and powerful photos. Go look, and read his essay on the journey.
Monthly Archives: January 2005
css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design?
Beauty? Ugh!
Stephanie – Save your old jeans
This girl, Stephanie, really needs new jeans!
Wouldn’t it give you a great feeling to know that somewhere you have helped to put clothes on the back of a young person?
(Slightly NSFW! Thanks Donal for sending that email on!)
Doogle – The Feckin' Search Engine of Ireland
Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, you’ll have to visit Doogle now won’t you?
Google "nofollow"
Well, Google’s nofollow attribute is one way of putting off comment-spammers but it won’t stop them. They’ll continue to spam in case they come across a site that doesn’t support the new attribute.
I may look at adding rel=”nofollow” to links here, but it’d be handy to have a list of “safe” URLs that are safe to link to. Perhaps a WP plugin, backend interface and db table?
In other news, the number of spams getting through to the moderation queue has dwindled down to zero (besides the edgesaver one of course!) so it’s not a problem here right now.
Gimp, Wine and Photoshop Plugins
I’ve known for a while that it’s possible to run FFI Photoshop plugins but there are problems getting 8bf plugins working. pspi.exe can be used to run them if you’re running Windows GIMP but not in Linux unfortunately. This discussion on the Wine list suggests that a mini-wine loader such as is used by Mplayer might go some way to achieving this goal but such a loader doesn’t exist yet.
That’s a pity as this virtual photographer plugin looks nice. All the effects can be done manually in the GIMP too but why not take a shortcut if it’s there?
A Bill Gates On Every Desk
Hehe. Missed these photos a few days ago but they’re a scary look at the past!
EdgeSaver – Longer Lasting Razor Blades
Someone left a comment here asking if I’d used EdgeSaver and if it worked. I don’t know, but Google does and review after review after review have been positive so I guess there’s something to this product. ‘Course, it could well have been a comment spam but this actually looks useful if it works. Does it?
Update… I asked a chemist friend and his opinion is, “don’t waste your money” as it’s just, “a fancy WD40 – an oil that expels water and essentially air contact (necessary for corrosion of metal) from the surface of the metal so that it cannot corrode through oxidative chemical reaction.”
Any sort of oil-based lubricant can be used but of course it has to be safe, don’t go spreading 3-in-1 or WD40 on your face! It’ll seriously hurt you!
A “food grade oil” is ok, and the ones that immediately spring to mind is sunflower or olive oil. Still not quite comfortable with those either. They’re fine in the frying pan, but in the bathroom?
I must look into essential oils, why not use lavender, rose, or another fragrant oil instead? Lavender oil will relax you too!
Thanks Justin for the above!
Later still… Someone left a comment on the previously commented post saying they, “have been using edgesaver for about a year now and have no regrets of the purchase.” Unfortunately it comes from a very similar IP and the same ISP as the comment that sparked all this off so it’s likely to be a spam attempt. Stick with the olive oil folks!
Ah ha! I’ve confirmed in my own head that this is comment spam, although clever and manual – Follow the links from this search to find the same comments on this post and here too.
Still an interesting idea that the lifetime of blades can be extended by immersing them in oil.
Much later.. Edge Saver have rebranded as RazorMax. I only mention this in case someone doesn’t find this blog entry when they look for the new name!
PEAR Output Cache and WPMU
One of those things PHP doesn’t do well is load large libraries of scripts into memory and parse them quickly. WordPress and Smarty fall firmly into this category and the caching I’ve done so far has only addressed half of this problem: cached pages don’t load any WordPress code, but the heavy Smarty library was still loaded.
I’ve now modified my code to use the PEAR Output Cache and that avoids loading the Smarty templating system. On a heavily loaded server this should make quite a difference to visitors. Things still need tweaking, I may need to introduce a “time” aspect to the cache key as pages could be cached indefinitely but for now it seems to be working really well!
Note to self, please remember that gzip compression upsets PHP’s output buffer. Note to everyone else, don’t set “gzip compression” in the backend or your blog will be foobarred! (Thanks Mel for testing his blog and reporting problems with it!)
Digital Darkroom Forum – Imaging Techniques>Emulating (B&W, IR, filters, etc.) threads
Here’s a forum on photo.net I’m going to keep an eye on. Looks like it’s updated and posted to on a regular basis so hopefully there’ll be a few nice nuggets of info there!
Canon have a great site dedicated to the “The Art of Photography”. It has general photography information beyond Canon blurb so I’ll be reading it!