Mike Cohen

Drupal Disappointment

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I’m becoming very disappointed with Drupal, due to version 6’s lack of backward compatibility. A lot of very basic modules still haven’t been upgraded to work with Drupal 6, yet they’re already working on Drupal 7. I still haven’t upgraded any of my sites to Drupal 6 and I probably won’t upgrade them. I doubt if I’ll be able to upgrade to version 7 either, without first upgrading to 6.

Corey Smith wrote about moving from WordPress to Drupal, but I’m thinking of going the opposite way. Daniel first brought up the idea of moving MacMegasite to WordPress, which I discounted at first because it would lose a lot of functionality.

I would be losing the forums, buddy lists, the point system, and some of the less-used features like feed aggregators & user blogs. Some of these features could be implemented with WordPress plugins and a separate forum system. The most critical feature is the ability to have multiple authors, which WordPress supports.

On the plus side, WordPress is a lot more attractive, with more professional looking themes, and a much nicer content entry screen. I’m concerned that WordPress seems to use more GPU according to MediaTemple’s GPU usage report. My Drupal sites use anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.0014 GPUs per hit, while this site uses 0.0017 or more GPUs per hit. It may be a due to the plugin configuration.

I’ve seen a few articles about moving from Drupal to WordPress, so I know it’s been done. It would be a big project, so I probably won’t do it until after I finish my current projects and release the iPhone apps I’m working on.

The D90 is selling fast

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I like to check Flickr’s camera finder page every few days to see how popular the D90 is. As I write this, the D90 is ranked 15 of 102 Nikon models. Less than a week ago, it wasn’t even listed. Yesterday it was #19, a jump of 4 places in one day.

Here’s a shot I took today with my 50mm lens at f1.8. I love being able to use auto focus with that lens.

New Orchid

HDR Comparison: Hydra vs. Photomatix

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I took a few shots of tonight’s very spectacular sunset using the D90’s exposure bracketing and created an HDR image from them. I tried both the Hydra plugin for Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop with the Photomatix tone mapping plugin. I found that Photomatix produces a much more vivid image with more detail.

DSC_0791_HDR
Hydra Plugin		 Sunset HDR 09-26-2008
Photoshop + Photomatix Plugin

Using a WebKit view for help

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Since the F**KING NDA makes it difficult to find iPhone programming tips & sample code, I thought I’d share this little tidbit.

Sometimes the easiest way to display a help or information screen is a UIWebView. It’s very easy to display the contents of an HTML file stored in the application’s resource bundle.

    NSData *info = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile: [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"info" ofType:@"html"]];
    [webView loadData:info MIMEType:@"text/html" textEncodingName:@"utf8" baseURL:nil];

However, if you have any external links, they will open in the same web view, which you probably don’t want. I found a very nice work-around to have any clicked URLs open in Safari. You’ll need to specify a delegate for your web view that implements the webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType method. The code is very simple.

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType
{
    if (navigationType == UIWebViewNavigationTypeLinkClicked) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: [request URL]];
        return NO;
    }
    return YES;
}

Upload to multiple sites at the same time

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Pixelpipe is a new service that lets you upload your photos & videos to multiple services at the same time. You set up all of your photo & video sharing sites with Pixelpipe. You can then either email a photo or video to a personal address at Pixelpipe or use their free software to upload it. The photo or video will then be sent to all of your chosen sites.

Pixelpipe has an iPhone app, a Mac uploader app (based on Flickr Uploadr), a Firefox 3 extension, and an iPhoto export plugin. Unfortunately the Eye-Fi card doesn’t currently support it.

The D90's Eye-Fi Surprise

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I haven’t been using my Eye-Fi card because I prefer using a higher capacity 8G card with the D40x & D90’s large file sizes. I also prefer to choose which pictures to upload and do any necessary touchups rather than just upload everything immediately.

When I heard about the D90’s Eye-Fi support I decided to give it a try. The D90 recognizes an Eye-Fi card and adds a new item to the setup menu which lets you choose whether you want it to upload automatically. The D90 also adjusts its power settings to avoid shutting off while pictures are uploading.

When I do upload from the Eye-Fi card, rather than uploading to Flickr, where I prefer to be a bit more selective, I always used Picassa as sort of a dumping ground. I also have it upload to a folder on my MacBook Pro, where I can import it into Aperture, do any necessary touchup, and upload the best to Flickr.

D90 Eye-Fi Upload