Too cold for me, but not for some.
Winter Surfing
Monthly Archives: January 2005
The BitTorrent Effect
Here’s a great interview with the author of BitTorrent. I’ve only read the first bit but I’ll be picking it up later at home.
istock and shutterstock vs "pro stock" sites
This thread on dpchallenge says that, “istock / shutterstock are ruining the industry”.
SharQ recommends Alamy, Corbis and other sites that sell photos on a royalty basis. istock/shutterstock sell royalty free photos so photographers could be “underselling” their photos. It’s an interesting thread and worth a read.
According to their FAQ, Alamy require 48MB tiffs (24MB for “reportage material”) which my camera might have a little trouble creating. By upscaling a 2048×1920 photo to 3584×2688 the resulting uncompressed tiff file is 28MB. *ouch* It might be a while before I submit stuff to them!
Meanwhile, in the world of the amateur photographer I’ll continue to use the “royalty free” sites such as istockphoto and shutterstock.
Here’s a thread about how well some users of those sites are getting on. Note to self, upload more photos!
The Dundalk Blog
DERMOT AHERN DUNDALK IRELAND – Not much on there now but apparently this blog “named and shamed” drug dealers and criminals in Dundalk and surrounding areas.
They’ve taken down all the interesting slanderous bits, but it was fairly irresponsible to put it online in the first place anyway!
You might be able to find some of the content on the Irish Republican News forum.
Sky charges for repairs to non-faulty digiboxes
There I was going to subscribe to Sky+ and this story comes along. Does this bug still exist? Is it on new boxes?
British Sky Broadcasting has denied accusations that the company tried to profit from a known software fault in its digital video recorders, after customers were charged £65 for engineers to visit their homes.
Thanks Pron for the link.
WPMU Update – mod_rewrite fix for digits in URLs
Here’s a small fix to fix a big mod_rewrite rules bug. URLs like this, http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/2005/01/06/2004-indian-ocean-earthquake-wikipedia/, won’t load properly as mod_rewrite gets confused between the date of the post and the year in the title. Here’s a quick fix:
Open the .htaccess file in your root directory and replace each occurance of ^(.*)
with ^([_0-9a-z-]+)
Thanks to Kae and Darragh for spotting that.
The latest CVS update broke post editing a bit, an extra field was added. Here’s how to update your blog if you’re using it:
cd wp-inst/wp-content/blogs; for i in *; do echo "ALTER TABLE wp_"$i"_posts ADD menu_order INT( 11 ) DEFAULT '0' NOT NULL" | mysql wpdb ;done
gometric.ie :: Countdown to Metric speed limits
gometric.ie is the Irish Government’s site to inform the public that speed signs will be going metric on January 20th! It’s accompanied by a mailing campaign and advertising on radio and television so hopefully the message will get through to everyone!
“Ugh! Yeah officer, I saw the sign. It says 50mph in this area.”
From 20th January it’s kilometres for speed as well as distance.
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami- Wikipedia
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake including links to blogs and sites with footage and first person commentary. I just watched a video of the wave hitting in Patong Beach and it’s scary – the water just kept on coming and coming until cars floated down the street…
Search Switzerland!
20D in the dark
Garret took a photo in near dark at ISO 1600 using his Canon 20D and didn’t see any banding and very little noise. Picture came out great! Me wants, me wants, me wants!