Symphonious

Most people have probably already worked this out but if you're new to rails or new to rails login components, you probably want to use Login Generator and avoid Salted Login Generator like the plague.

Login Generator is extremely quick and easy to get up and running with, is made up of a small amount of clean code, has no dependencies and works with Ruby on Rails 0.13.

Salted Login Generator on the other hand is crap.  Sorry to the author of Salted Login Generator for putting it so harshly but it really is a mess and has caused me a huge number of headaches.  The feature creep seems to be what killed it - the localization is particularly problematic and makes all the code horrendously messy but depending on a firstname and lastname field in the database is bad too (should have just had login and let each application decide how and if to store the user's real name).  If it were trimmed back so it just focussed on handling authentication it would probably be a lot better for it.

So Sam Ruby is pandering for links in a vain effort to tell Apple that iTunes's RSS support is horribly non-standards compliant.  Of course this effort will fail horrible because Apple doesn't do anything unless there's a Radar issue created and Radar issues created by internal staff carry far less weight and get far less priority than Radar issues created by external parties.

That's right, you can create Radar issues yourself.  Apple has a bug reporter which is the official and the only official way to tell Apple anything.  Don't like the fact that Apple only acts on things that have a Radar issue?  Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don't like the bug reporter? Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don't like the way iTunes works with RSS?  Log a radar issue telling them so!

Now here's the kicker, Apple uses duplicates as a measure of priority.  So instead of pandering for links, log a Radar issue, then post the contents of it to your blog and add a note to the top that references the Radar issue you've already created.  Finally, get as many people as you can to log a Radar issue with Apple using your template.

Besides, it's just common decency to report bugs directly to the application vendor instead of or as well as making a big scene in public.

UPDATE: Added link, sorry I intended to do that originally but forgot.

Compatibility Matters

Funny, funny, funny.

Feedster seem to have improved their indexing times recently - they now find every new entry on this blog immediately when I publish it - the Feedster item (for my vanity search on "Adrian Sutton") actually appears before the actual entry for this blog (I subscribe to my own feed to make sure it's working correctly).  Good stuff.  I've probably managed to set up WordPress to ping something whenever I post (I seem to recall seeing something in that box) and Feedster has linked into that somehow (that or I'm pinging Feedster directly but I don't think so).

Sadly, Feedster is indexing the whole page instead of just the content of the (full text) RSS feed so it screws up and matches every new post to this blog with my "Adrian Sutton" search just because my name is on the sidebar.  We really need an RSS extension that marks an RSS item as full text so that these stupid search engines don't have to try and guess what the content is based on what's on the full page - they always seem to get it wrong and it makes them a big waste of time.

Course, it wouldn't be a probably if everyone just provided full text RSS feeds…

As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present - it's only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera.  It's a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).  Having that much zoom is much, much more useful than I had thought it would be.  Instead of importing my photos from the camera and spending hours cropping each photo to get rid of useless stuff around the edges, most of my photos are framed exactly how I want them and I leave them as is.  The down side is that I'm still learning how to hold the camera still enough when zoomed in and have quite a few fuzzy photos because the camera shook.

It has full manual override as well which has already proven useful.  Taking photos of the kids playing is rather difficult when the camera decides to use a slow shutter speed to deal with the lowish light conditions (I didn't let it use the flash as it gets annoying when someone is constantly taking flash photography and I didn't want to distract people from acting normally).  Flicking it into shutter speed priority mode let it pick the optimal aperture and avoids blurring when the target is moving.  Many of those photos I ignored the cameras warning that it couldn't set an aperture to match my desired shutter speed and the photos came out a little dark but that was quickly rectified in iPhoto.

The OptioMX also has a video mode which is quite usable.  It only does 640×480 but does a full 30fps and records pretty good audio with it.  The results appear a little small on a computer screen but would need to be shrunken further for e-mailing or web deployment and is the same quality as NTSC and PAL so displaying it on a TV screen looks as good as your camera work and lighting allows (ie: pretty bad in most cases but it's not the camera's fault).  While you wouldn't buy the camera as a video camera, it was really nice to be able to very quickly shoot some video for action shots like the kids riding their bikes or playing soccer.  I mean quick too - no changing modes or fiddling with settings, just press the start recording button instead of the take photo button and you're filming.  Both are just as easy to access with your thumb without moving your hand.

The flash pops up when you want it so you can easily control whether the flash is used or not by just not popping it up.  It also means that there is very little red eye effect because the flash is further away from the camera lens - I only found one person who came up with red eyes and she has the biggest pupils I've ever seen so it would have been hard to avoid.

Overall I'm very happy with it.  Now I just have to decide what the best way to publish my photos is…