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In Windows Vista x64, drivers are required to be signed by someone holding a VeriSign code certificate or they won’t load. Microsoft’s claimed reason for this is that it prevents Trojans from installing kernel-mode rootkits. The real reason? DRM.
Mike Cohen
Plugin Progress
I had a chance to do a lot more work on my watermark plugin this weekend and I made lots of progress. Most functions work, but I still need a few days of QA & testing before I can release it.
Black Star Rising tells why you should add your name and copyright notice when posting a photo, which is the reason I wrote this. I noticed that almost all of the pictures by the professionals from last week’s photowalk have a copyright notice, so I wanted to make it easier to do with Aperture.
links for 2008-06-27
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The Last.fm API allows anyone to build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether they’re on the web, the desktop or mobile devices.
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The new API introduces a user authentication protocol which for the first time allows applications to create user sessions, bringing both read and write services to web apps, desktop apps and mobile devices.
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here are the five regular expressions that are the most useful for day-to-day web programming tasks.
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This tutorial will go beyond the basics of regular expressions.
Protecting your photos
After seeing how my blog posts have been republished without my permission, I realize that the same thing is likely to happen with my photos (and most likely already has happened). Most photographers add a visible watermark or copyright notice to identify their photos. Although Aperture can embed a copyright notice and author info in the EXIF data, it doesn’t have a way to add a visible identification.
One way to do it is to edit in Photoshop and add a text layer. As an alternative, I started to write an Aperture editing plugin that can add text to a photo. I hope to have it ready for public release next week.
links for 2008-06-26
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WTF? “So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”
links for 2008-06-25
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Manual focusing puts the control completely in your hands and will get your images with the right parts in focus.
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A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. Starring Apache, Windows XP, Linux and Halo (among many others)
Cameras as Weapons
Via Imaging Insider: B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, gives video cameras to Palestinians to document the attacks and abuses they suffer.
WordPress 2.6 to disable client access by default
Daniel Jaikut reports that WordPress 2.6 will disable the Atom & XMLRPC protocols by default. These APIs are used by applications such as MarsEdit to let you post from your desktop. If you want to use a desktop blogging app, you need to go into the settings and explicitly enable remote posting. Hopefully, upgrading an old WordPress site will keep it enabled.
The developers feel that those APIs “expose a potential to be a security risk“. As far as I know, none of the recent WordPress attacks have involved XMLRPC.
I almost never make a blog post through the web interface; I do all of my blogging with MarsEdit (which I’m now using to write this post). I’m sure the majority of serious bloggers use a desktop client such as MarsEdit or Ecto rather than the web interface, so this will be an inconvenience for all but the most casual users. Since many people will re-enable XMLRPC, any security improvement will be negated.
A better solution would be to require a client key, as Flickr does, which you need to explicitly allow before that client can post to your blog.
FriendFeed Comments
I’ve added the FriendFeed Comments plugin, which shows activity on FriendFeed related to each post.