Sunset over Kinsale.
Kinsale Sunset
Author Archives: Donncha
Processing a Digital Photo
Here’s the digital workflow of one photographer. The steps he describes can be followed in the GIMP too.
Despite earlier reservations, I’m still shooting in RAW format and it’s been useful on occasion. I find it useful to slide the shadows and gamma settings around and then hitting “auto-adjust”.
I always have to use the Auto-Levels tool afterwards to fix the colours but the RAW converter does give me some extra control.
I can see I’ll need to make backups a lot more regularly however. DVD is way too small.
Security Checking PHP Templates
WordPress uses PHP as it’s templating language. It’s well established and as I’ve said before, there’s an abundance of free themes out there for it.
Unfortunately in a multi-user environment, allowing untrusted users to edit PHP code on your server is a huge security risk. There has to be some way to limit the commands a user can use, and there is!
PHP already parses html pages, so why not take advantage of that engine? The PHP Tokenizer lets you do just that!
Feed your template through token_get_all() and it’ll spit out an array containing HTML, PHP, and other elements from your file.
Here’s an if statement that should be familiar:
T_OPEN_TAG: '<?php '
T_IF: 'if'
T_WHITESPACE: ' '
(
T_STRING: 'have_posts'
(
)
)
We then need to compile a list of allowed functions, which can be got from wp-includes/* and we’re well on the way to a safe environment for WP bloggers. Any more ideas?
Installing a new habit and breaking an old one
Installing a new habit and breaking an old one – good, and has pretty pictures for those who want to skim!
Heavenly Sword: Diary of a Game
This diary is a good read. The best one ever was the Zzap64! diary of Creatures by the Rowland’s Brothers.
Via /. a few days ago.
Starting a Business in Ireland
Starting a Business in Ireland.com looks like a promo site but has a couple of good links.
Of immediate interest will be Revenue.ie, Oasis has a page on starting a bussiness, and here’s a another page without specifics, but then you should pay them for advice, right? 😉
Planarity
Techniques To Manage Procrastination
Nice list of tips and suggestions.
This Is Home
This is where I call home! Googe Maps finally gets satellite data for The Cork region. (yes, they probably have had it for ages but I’m not obsessive)
You can see the bird sanctuary where I took a number of photos.
Here’s where I grew up.
IOL used to have a map server. I remember looking at that and marvelling that I could make out the front drive of my home! The Google maps don’t seem to have the same resolution yet.
Ah, now I don’t have to tell people how to get to my house, I’ll just point them at the URL above and they can follow the satellite maps!
Wasps In My Composter!
Ah no! There’s wasps in my composter! Over the last few days there’s been an onslaught of small flies and flying ants! The local bird sanctuary is positively teeming with the little things that bite and buzz around your head! argh! “Kill Them All!”
Yesterday morning I noticed an unusual number of small insects around the garden composter, but didn’t pay it much heed as I was still recovering from the late night in Waterford on Friday.
This morning I got the zoom lens out to see exactly what they were and I wasn’t pleased.
According to this page it is possible to get rid of them: dose the heap in water until they leave. I think I’ll postpone doing that until the temperature drops. It’s expected to reach 26 degrees today and those wasps will be at their most active!
Later… it gets worse! *gulp* It’s scary having that many stinging insects in one’s garden!
Much later… after much discussion on #linux, those insects are probably bees and not wasps. I still don’t want to get close to them, but they haven’t made an appearance yet today so maybe they’ve moved on.
Luckily, there are plenty of predators feeding on the insects ..