Mike Cohen

Google App Engine

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I signed up for Google’s new App Engine beta and I’ve already started looking at the APIs. It looks very clean and well-designed. I’m not too familiar with Python, but it looks like it’s fairly simple to pick up. The language itself is easy and has some nice Lisp-like features that I really like. The hard part is getting familiar with the huge library of extension modules.

I’m thinking of possibly rewriting my2unz.com with App Engine, since Drupal can be really ugly when trying to integrate several third party modules with my own code.

Photos of the day

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Everything is blooming in my garden, so I have 3 great pictures for today. I find that I prefer using Aperture Priority mode rather than program automatic, especially when I’m photographing flowers. It isn’t any more difficult than automatic and gives me more control while still giving the correct exposure. I like to use a large aperture to get a narrow DOF, which I think looks better for these shots. I’ve been shooting raw almost all the time now, since I can still get over 600 shots on my 8GB SD card and it lets me do more adjustments.

Orchid

Red bromeliad

Yellow Flower

Security Scan Plugin

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I tried the WP Security Scan plugin, which checks the blog for common security problems, such as incorrect file permissions, but unfortunately it causes posting via XMLRPC to fail, so I had to deactivate it. I also tried out some other themes but didn’t really like them, so I went back to the old one.

Net4Mac

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I joined net4mac a few days ago, but so far I don’t see much point to it. This is a new “social network for Mac users”, but it’s severely limited by requiring their proprietary software. You can view public pages from a web browser, but to write anything or contact anyone, you need to use their software. This means you can’t access it from an iPhone (unless they release iPhone software).

If anyone’s interested, here’s my member profile.

Photo of the day

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I noticed this beautiful rose and had to take a picture of it. I used my Nikkor 50mm/f1.8 lens with the maximum aperture of f1.8 in Aperture Priority mode, which gives a very sharp image with a narrow DOF.

Red Rose