Candles?
Yes, this photo is from the same set as the one posted here. Taken last Holy Week on Maundy Thursday, using my D60 and a Canon 50mm f/1.8 MkII, most likely at f/1.8 and ISO 400.
Just sharing a photo from my archives. 
- Going to Google
→
Doug Bowman is going to Google! We should see pleasing interfaces and eye candy across Google’s products and services with such a great talent leading the design team. Good times. #
- FontEditor BitfontMaker → Make your own bitmap font! Don’t forget to check BitFont Museum. #
- Oracle exec hits out at ‘patch’ mentality → “What if civil engineers built bridges the way developers write code?” #
- Password Hashing → Any aspiring web developer should read on the topic of storing paswords and securely protecting them. This is a must for those developing muti–user services and applications. #
- Canon to stop making single-lens camera → With the slow demise of film SLRs, will we finally see the death of mainstream film photography? #
- Sink or Swim → “Pisay graduates are accused of overconfidence and academic delinquency in college.” #
- 101 Fabulous Freebies → Some of the best things in life are free. #
- The firm that blew it all in two years → Burn 160 million pounds in less than two years: Gizmondo. #
Comments are back
Joachim emailed me that he couldn’t leave a comment on my site for some unexplained reason. Form submission ends with a white blank page. So I took a look at my comments template and there it was, a stupid coding oversight left when I upgraded my site and templates to WordPress 2. Comments should be back now.
The WP2 upgrade for all my blogs was one huge mistake. Just several days after upgrading, Dreamhost had to move me to an evaluation server because of extremely high CPU usage. Without WP-Cache, WordPress was taxing the servers redundantly that I was using more than ten times the resources allocated for my account.
I managed to revert my blogs to WP-1.5.2 using this life–saving downgrade script. As of writing, only this weblog remains on WP-2.0.2, and the others on the stable 1.5.2 release. Because of this, I plan to keep an internal WordPress version updated to contain relevant patches to make it work with WP2–specific themes and plugins. I hope WordPess’s next major release addresses important concerns from its long–time users.
New lens, new photos
A visit to Hidalgo Street in Quiapo can be a costly adventure. Yes, you got that right, but I wasn’t robbed. I just sort of spent way more than I should be spending on this photography hobby. 
Last week, my ‘el cheapo’ 1GB CF card decided to finally die after less than four months of not even frequent use. I was actually expecting it, with the very slow write and read times it has been giving me since the day I bought it. Unfortunately, it decided to say goodbye when it was keeping a very important chunk of data — the latest Pop Ratio sessions. They’d kill me if they’d find out, even if we weren’t playing our best. Even if it wasn’t even half our best. There’s one keeper I can remember, Jonas singing Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” which was his trademark song way back in high school. Hopefully by some voodoo magic the card’s data gets recovered by the binary witches.
Okay I’m no longer making sense so let’s get back to the story.
Anne was joking it wasn’t a good idea to be in Quiapo with some money in the ATM ready for withdrawal. I should’ve listened to her. While we were there, I realized it would take some time before my 1GB CF is fixed or replaced, so I might as well get a new one since I have a shoot at the beginning of June. Henry’s had the Ridata Pro2 1GB at 2200, surprisingly low! But thinking about their offer, I just couldn’t wait to get to my favorite shop Mayer’s and see if I could get it for even less.
But then it happened. Displayed on the shelf was the very last stock of the Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro, a new lens I’ve been eyeing since the day it was announced. Mounting it on my D60 and a few test clicks later, I found myself crossing the street to the BDO ATM. In no time I was considerably poorer with a happy smirk on my face.
I’ve been shooting with this lens for around a week now, and it is well worth the price. It is listed around 20k locally but you can get it a little cheaper if you know where to look. The focusing is much quieter compared to my Sigma 18-125, and most likely as fast and as quiet as the Sigma 24-70 f/2.8, though still not as good as Canon USM in both respects. Resolution and detail is very good, and focusing with the less than stellar D60 AF system has been predictable and spot–on. But this lens’s main strength is its macro shooting. You can get as close as an inch away from your subject and still get a focus lock, quickly! You have to be careful not to get too carried away shooting too close lest you want a broken filter or worse, a chipped front element.
I still have to take this lens to an actual shoot so I’m still waiting for Karl and Mimi to give me a call for another wedding gig. If it proves to be a keeper, and I think it will be, I might be selling the 18-125.
Hey wait, you’re wondering what this entry is really all about? I will be posting more samples soon.
- The Eternal Value of Privacy → What’s wrong with this statement: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” #
- MacBook: What you need to know → Thinking of getting a MacBook anytime soon? Here’s are some considerations you might need to address. #
- Introducing the all–new MacBook. → Yes, the iBook replacement is finally here! #
- Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it) → I think everyone is guilty of at least one item. #
- How The Da Vinci Code Doesn’t Work → A lot of people are questioning Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” for its reference to various truths and beliefs we’ve grown to accept, but here’s another way of showing how the book doesn’t work, in more practical terms. #
Read the right sources
The past few months, I slowly noticed that my feedreading list has grown to become one huge unmanageable mess. The rapid growth of weblogs has spawned sites providing similar information on the same topics. It is easily noticeable that my unread folder contains several items discussing the same news developments.
I used to subscribe to RSS feeds using Bloglines, but Rojo’s interface seems to make the task a lot easier. Tagging and other “web 2.0 style” enhancements makes it easier to use compared to Bloglines’s traditional layout.
But back to my feed subscriptions, reading close to 500 feeds almost everyday is a daunting task. I used to get to all of them every few days, but had to hit “mark all as read” sometimes. Eventually, I was marking everything as read more often than I would read them. I just have to do something about it.
Just this week, I decided I would be trimming down my RSS subscriptions. I will be keeping those for people I personally know and read. Most of them don’t write that much everyday, so keeping myself subscribed wouldn’t take much reading time. News sources on the other hand will be trimmed to a minimum, keeping only those that provide good coverage and analysis of the events they report on. Sites solely built to aggregate information on specific fields will be kept, but only the best of them, preferably a few per category.
The approach I outlined should work, but a possible problem would be personal sites that double as news aggregators, but fail to reach the quality of popular sites dealing with the same niche. It wouldn’t be right to unsubscribe, but duplicate coverage on the same information is a waste of time.
The next few weeks should reveal if my “read the right sources” approach works, and somehow affect the range of discussion and interests on this weblog. We will all see.
- How to Love a Framework You’ve Never Used → “The dynamic languages make programmers so much more productive that even conservative business types are forced to sit up and notice.” #
- Australia celebrates, and mourns, after mine rescue → The two Australian miners trapped for 14 days inside a caved–in mine is finally over, with the men rescued successfully by fellow miners from all over Australia. #
- Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming → Separate yourself from your code; ten things to live by towards separation of self (ego?) from code. #
- Strategic Commenting: No blog is an island → Solve the “no one visits / links to / comments on my blog!” problem. #
- getElementsBy*() function index → “This is a handy reference for all the various getElementsBy*() JavaScript functions that are out there.” Handy indeed. #
Sunday music
Jonas was here last night just hangin’ out, so we recorded a cover. This is Fra Lippo Lippi’s “Light And Shade,” obviously inspired by their recent promotional events for the Araneta concert on the 13th of this month. Hannu desperately wants to catch this, can anyone help us score tickets?
- Style-Force Semplice Pixelfonts → Yes, free bitmap fonts! #
- 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail → “Focus on social instead of personal” is first on the list, and probably most relevant. You can’t build an app that tries to solve the world’s problems without first attending to the personal needs of the user. #
Mini-Review: Mission Impossible 3
This is a film you cannot afford to miss. Despite the fact that Tom Cruise is getting older and his leading ladies get even younger, the Mission Impossible franchise manages to release another good one, and this installment does it without much promotional fanfare, at least compared to the previous two. Or maybe I just didn’t notice, but nonetheless MI3 possibly is the best action films I’ve seen this year, and likely better than any from last year.
Now that I sound like a promotional review, I’d still tell you to drag your ass to the movie house before someone spoils the story for you. Almost every action scene is a panic attack; it’ll leave you breathless. You will be doing that several times throughout the best Mission Impossible movie so far. A must see.
- The Five Most Common Lies in Business → “There are as many lies in business as there are people in business.” #
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn → Startup school once again as Paul Graham releases another essay on the subject. This time, he discusses the pattern of lessons learned from every startup, successful or otherwise. #
- Conventional RSS → A common approach to RSS from the WordPress and Textpattern folks. Hopefully, iPAP will take this path as well. #
- The myth of “keeping up” → Trying to do everything to “keep up” is a myth. You have to find your passion and the things that really matter. #
