February 15, 2010 | Photography | No comments
My uncle pointed out a hummingbird nest out front today and in typical obsessive fashion I just had to get a decent shot of the little gal. Little being the operative word here. I don’t think she was more than 6″ in length. Shooting through the window produced less than desirable results so I headed outside to get a closer look.
She saw me coming and bolted. So, I took a chance and got myself in to the best position I could and waited for her to return. I set up my GorillaPod to work help brace the camera on my arm and my chest since I knew that I’d be shooting slow because this was in the shade. She must have felt sorry for me ’cause she came back and actually tolerated my little moves to get different angles. She actually let me move in to about 1.5 meters (the only reason I know this is because its the minimum focus distance on my 70-200) which allowed me to use the house as a brace to augment the GorillaPod and get a nice stable look at her.
I had to push the ISO to 800 to get anywhere near a hand-holdable shot, but I have to say that I keep being amazed at how well this old 20D is holding up. The grain here is not bad and actually kind of reminds me of film. It gives the shot a nice feeling. Now, if only someone would release a nice film-grain plugin for Aperture I’d be tickled pink, but that’s another story.
Lesson of the day: be patient, don’t be afraid of using a high ISO, and use what ya got for stabilization.
February 3, 2010 | Computers | No comments
My MacBook Pro has been acting up again lately. Crashes, stalls, and overall wacky goodness. Yesterday I pulled it out of my bag after getting home and although I had put it to sleep, and confirmed that it was asleep before packing it away, it had crashed on the way home.
When I restarted it I was faced with a question mark flashing inside a folder icon. The computer couldn’t find a valid system to boot from.
(more…)
December 24, 2009 | Computers | 1 comment
Ever. Sheerly out of principle.
This is from a Macbook Pro “late 2008″ connected to a Samsung HDTV over VGA because all of my HDMI ports are taken.
December 21, 2009 | Plugins, Web Design & Development | No comments
I can actually say that I’m timely on this one! The WordPress TextMate Bundle and the WordPress Clippings for BBEdithave been updated for WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”.
There wasn’t a lot that changed as far as the bundle is concerned, most of it being about a shift in line numbers of where the functions are located in the core so that the Jump to Function action works properly. There’s also a built in About page now that provides documentation on the plugin as well as credits to the folks who have helped out.
The versions of the Bundle and Clippings that are compatible with WordPress 2.8 have been tagged at GitHub, so they’re still available through a direct download or git checkout.
On a side note, a less used (and maybe less practical resource), my WordPress Hooks Tag Cloud has been updated for the new 2.9 version (and, 2.8… whoopsie!). If you’re looking to see where a certain action or filter is used you can find that out there.
December 18, 2009 | Web Design & Development | No comments
Stupid Gippy Trick #2495: The title may sound funny, and the concept a bit weird, but when you’re working on many different client servers, development and production servers, with as many different configurations, keeping track of DB credentials can get a little tiresome and time consuming.
Here’s a command line one liner to print the database credentials so that they’re easily used to manually log in to MySQL or do a database dump:
Which prints out:
- define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
- define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
- define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
- define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
- define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
- define('DB_COLLATE', '');
Voila! No more switching back and forth from a credentials file or database or get the credentials, you simply use that’s already there.
Somebody more ambitious could probably make a little function that parses that output and creates a MySQL login command or mysqldump command, but right now that’s not me. 
