The Digital Journalist – July 2005

A bit late this month, but Dirck Halstead the July 2005 edition The Digital Journalist is out.
It has plenty to read, including a good article on the emergence of “citizen-journalists” armed with camera phones.

Photojournalism history was made last week. For the first time, both The New York Times and the Washington Post ran photos on their front pages made by citizen-journalists with camera phones.

As I was snapping the sunset in Kinsale last night with my cumbersome 20D, swapping lenses, and swearing when I realised I had left my second memory card at home, someone else got out of their car, hopped up on the ditch and pointed their phone to the west. Somehow I can’t imagine it matched my 300mm zoom, but the future is now!

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?

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!

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