I saw several twitter links come by today that seemed interesting, and thought I would link them up.
Packing Light – from Shutterbug
189 Business Ideas – from New Media Photographer
How to Add a Copyright Notice to Your Photos – from Black Star Rising
Sending Nice HTML Email with PHP – from CSS Tricks
5 Useful WordPress Functions You Didn’t Know Existed – Nathan Rice
Bootcamp II: Introduction– from Strobist
20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Devloper Easier – from net tuts+
The last pattern we looked at was the Adapter pattern. It was a good pattern to start with as it maps well to the physical world and is fairly simple. Now we will look at the Singleton pattern. In some respects it is the simplest of patterns, but there are some things to think about.
The idea behind the Singleton is to ensure that there can be only one (insert Highlander jokes here). If you had a factory that made widgets, you would want a widget to be created many many times. But there is only one factory. If you were modeling the US government, you would only want one president. Only one senate.
On the software side, the idea is the same. It is usually used when we only want one set of configuration variables, one controller, one data base connection pool, that kind of thing.
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“S” as in Super phone, or at least “S” as in speed. If you missed the WWDC live, you can check the recaps from the live feeds that Ars Technica and Engadget posted.
The highlights are the speed, and the new hardware bits. I don’t find my iPhone to be too slow; more network bound than anything, but I am sure for the folks playing games that the extra speed will be welcomed.
I think the compass sounds interresting, and the ability of the phone to allow accessories will allow TomTom (they demoed the app) to do turn by turn directions. The biggest hardware piece I think is the new camera. Not the most exciting, but now a 3MPix camera that can autofocus (currently fixed) and do macro, and video. Already I heard someone complaining about only 3MPix. COME ON PEOPLE! How big a sensor do you think is in this thing. More pixels than that just equals more noise!
Anyway, they are also talking longer battery life, all fitting into the same size hardware. The 3G version has dropped to $99, and the new 3GS will be available on June 19 (with the iPhone OS 3.0 available June 17). It will be $199 adn $299 for 16meg and 32 meg versions.
I am continually amazed at the applications that are created for a device such as this. I use apps on my phone (not even games) more than I use the phone capabilities. Build it, and they will come.
They also demoed voice control, but I wasn’t sure if that was a 3GS feature, or a OS 3.0 feature. Either way, voice control over not just dialing, but things like iTunes is pretty cool.
There were lots of cool OS 3.0 features demoed. The google maps service will be empedable into other apps with full pan and zoom, custom annotations, current location and geocoding. The ability for iPhones to talk to each other sounds really cool, but the push notifications are what looks to be a great feature. Not sure how it will effect battery life, but having notification from other apps would be great, although as I add more and more poeple to my twitter friends, I am not sure I want to be notified everytime someone tweets!
Find my phone appears to be only for Mobile Me users, but it allows you to locate a missing phone on a map. You can send it a code to have your phone (even if set to not ring) to make a noise. If you are convinced that your phone is gone, you can even send it a code that will wipe all your data.
I can’t believe it has taken so long to get MMS messages on the iPhone, but they will finally be here. Not on June 17 with the new OS, but sometime this summer when AT&T gets around to getting their support for it. Really? Yikes. I don’t suppose that this or AT&T blowing off tethering support all together is going to set that well in Jobs corner office. That’s right, AT&T has chosen to not implement tethering on it’s network. Shakes head. Sees new carrier in Apples future.
Well, looks like I will be doing a sync and update around June 17, but despite the new camera features, I won’t be in line on the 19th. I don’t want to be stuck in an AT&T contract and find out I can switch carriers 🙂
Update: Looks like Chase Jarvis is getting one for the camera features, but then again, he takes better pictures with his iPhone than I do with my camera… sigh…
Update: Apples guided tour via video: http://www.apple.com/iphone/guidedtour/
Well, I was quite surprised to see a box from Tamron when I got home yesterday. It was my 17-50 back from service. I was not expecting it so soon. I had recieved a letter from Tamron late last week saying that it would be another 2-3 weeks. That must have just been the standard boiler plate that goes out with every repair notice. It is a little annoying that they can’t look around the room and see how many lenses are in the queue waiting to go out and make a better estimate.
Notice I said I got a letter from Tamron. Yup. Paper. Not email, a paper letter. Weird. I don’t quite get what is going on there. They need a serious upgrade in the software side of the house at Tamron’s repair facility. They need to look at getting more automated communication with their customers.
I did get an email, from the post office for tracking the package. I found it in my junk mail. It must have only showed up a day or two ago, becuase I check it fairly frequently. Outside of my phoning awhile back, the only communication from Tamron was the letter from last week.
Ok, so was it fixed? It looks like it. I had several issues when I sent it in. The front ring where the lens hood attached was really loose when I sent it in. It is just like new now. The barrel, where you adjust the zoom appears to have been tightened as well. It is smooth, but tighter.
The biggest issue I was having was the focusing. It just didn’t seem to nail the focus properly. I wish I had thought to take this same picture before I sent it in to compare. But if you look at the picture of the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 above, you can see the the text in the middle is very sharp. This was in auto focus. It was not anywhere near this sharp before. I need to so some tests with flowers and people still, because that is what appeared to not hit the focus sweet spot before.
So I am giving Tamron service an A for the repair, but for the whole experience, a C. The lens did come back fairly timely (sent May 11, so not super speedy). I am OK with that, but the utter lack of communication is a problem. 
Note to Tamron: customers want to have confidence that thier investment is being looked after. Remember, if you have to send something back, you are starting off with the customer frustrated.
Update: I sent Tamron a letter suggesting they improve their ability to communicate with their customers via automated emails or better/more information online. I got back a reply:
“Thank you for your suggestions. We are actually in the middle of doing some updates to our repair process to make it more automated. This may take some time but we hope to have drastic improvements in the future.”
Nice to see them respond so quickly. Hopfully (for their sake) the improvement will be soon.
Ben and Alexa held an engagement party. They had a prom theme, hence the outfits. Since I had my camera loaded up from the wedding I was shooting earlier in the day, I decided to be the “party photographer”. There a bunch more of the pictures here.
Saturday was a blast. I shot a wedding out in St. Joseph near St. Cloud Minnesota. The couple getting married had gone to school at St. Johns/St. Benedict’s so it was a fitting place to have their wedding.
It was a great location, and I will have more pictures later once they are processed, but this is the church they were married in.
Annotations allow you to attach metadata to a field, class, or method. Metadata is data that describes something else. For example, metadata about a song in mp3 format could be the artists name or the bit rate it was encoded at. A jpeg image could have metadata that described the image height or the number of colors in the image.
@Override
public String getName() {
return "no name";
}
The word after the ‘@’ is the Annotation. It precedes a method or class name. The Override annotation is built into Java. It is used to indicate that a method overrides a parents method. These are used for compiler hinds, for documentation, and to apply meta data.
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This is part of our series on building a NAS. In this article we will get the box set up with a static IP address, and get your drives set up for RAID 1.
We are assuming that at this point you have Ubuntu installed. We are gong to install software raid in a moment. The first thing I want to do is make sure we have a static ip address. Usually Ubuntu will start up with a dynamic ip address. This can make it more difficult to transfer files to this box, so lets make it static.
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To me it seems a better word would be Specifics. The use of Generics is applying a specific type to a class that can be used in a generic way. One of the most common generic classes is List. A list allows you to put any type of Object in to it. In fact, you can put several different types of Objects into a List. But, there is a way to create a specific List type that can only take one type of Object.
Since we are talking about Lists, lets look at what a ArrayList would look like that could only take Strings.
List aList = new ArrayList();
What goes between the <> is the type that you want to specify for the List. You need to do it in the left side declaration, and on the right side where you are creating the Object.
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I am going to Seattle in few weeks, and I have been trying to figure out what to shoot while I am there. I wanted to go check out Pikes Place Market, but wasn’t sure what else to do. On that same site, I saw Snoqualmie Falls. Hard to know how much I want to rent a car. Could get expensive.
I found a couple of sites that could help in the research. The Photographers Guide to Seattleblog looks interresting.
There is a flickr map of Seattle to check out.
I also found this Google map of one guys Seattle photos. Some of these night shots would be really neat to take. Once again, not sure how easy to get to these by bus. A scooter maybe?