Drupal: Developer Unfriendly?
Douchebag of the week award goes to: VectorMagic
Note: VectorMagic is an awesome piece of software online service that will vectorize your images to SVG or EPS format. It does a much better job than adobe illustrator or other similar "tracing" software, however, the price that they have decided to charge ($2.50 per image) is not so awesome. Uploading photos to an online service for processing is an inconvenience compared to using desktop software, however, the superior quality provided by VectorMagic outweighs the slight inconvenience. When using a free service there isn't much concern about inconveniences, however, they are now charging a very premium price for the same service. Adobe or Google should buy this company and quickly. Their business model is flawed, I can't see them making it as a start-up.
Monkey: man did you see what became of our beloved vectormagic? ...boo I say!
Trench: nope, I haven't seen vector magic since the day I showed it off
Monkey: oh... well I used to use it all the time... now it's not free ;(
Scammers Hijack Sharaza's domain & trademark
After taking control of Shareaza.com, imposters trying to pass themselves off as an open-source dev team have stepped up their action to destroy the GNU GPL licensed project. In an audacious move, lawyers representing Discordia Ltd have filed to register the “Shareaza” trademark at the US Patent Office.The real site is at http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/, meanwhile the Shareaza.com site has been taken over by an impostor.
R.I.P. Allpeers!
Photography == Terrorism?
Update: my own public service announcement
Relevant information for photographers, at least in the U.S:
The right to take photographs in the United States is being challenged more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, buildings, trains, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.Be sure to know your rights: check out A Photographer's Right. More...
New Project: XULFolio
Overview
Currently supports Zenfolio's API. I may add Flickr and SmugMug support in the future, I am striving to keep the interfaces abstract so that it will be easy to plug in to other sites by writing a simple API Compatibility Layer.Update: SmugMug isn't allowing anyone to obtain an api key at this time. This puts them indefinitely out of consideration for this project. Also, Flickr could end up owned by Microsoft. I am strongly apposed to this acquisition and I do not intend to develop anything for a Microsoft-owned site. As long as this is a possibility, I won't be working on Flickr support.
Interesting Developments
- I developed a simple JSON-RPC library in javascript which uses Mozilla's new native JSON support.
- ZenFolio uses SHA-256 hashes for their challenge-response authentication scheme. This took quite a while to work out but once I figured out how to use nsICryptoHash then it all went pretty smoothly.
- I created a CRYPTO.jsm module to wrap up the hash generation functionality. In the process I got to play with the awesome new JavaScript code modules feature in XULRunner. This is similar to creating an XPCOM singleton component, however, it's much easier to implement.
Troubleshooting XPCOM Component Registration
Today I tried my luck compiling a custom XPCOM Component for XULRunner. The component wouldn't load, simply leaving an error in the console "Failed to load XPCOM component: ...."
I was having a terrible time debugging the problem and I couldn't seem to find the relevant documentation. Finally I asked for help on the #mozpad irc chat room. Plasticmillion pointed me to the correct document that I couldn't seem to find on google for whatever reason.
More...Firefox, Linux and Flash Transparency
A new year, a new mozpad
Certificate Change Notifier
I'm working on a simple extension for Firefox that would notify the user when an SSL/TLS site's certificate changes. This way an informed user could decide if the certificate change was valid / expected and opt out of an ssl session in questionable circumstances. Is there any interest in such an extension? My friend ask me whether there was a way to do it so I'm working on proof of concept code, I will release it as open source if anyone cares.