iOS and Mac developer
Mike Cohen Sarah Palin? I’m sure McCain could have found a more experienced woman like Elizabeth Dole.
McCain’s choice is such obvious pandering to the 20 or so disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters who haven’t come to their senses. He found someone already tainted with scandal and with less experienced than Obama. As a creationist and anti-choice candidate, she’s also aimed at the theocratic base that wasn’t comfortable with McCain.
McCain and the Republicans like to emphasize Obama’s lack of experience, but they don’t mention that George W. Bush had even less experience when he was elected. Jimmy Carter also had very little experience when he was elected. You could even say George Washington had no government experience before he became president.
Being able to inspire & motivate people is a huge advantage. The fact that Obama is well liked overseas will be a huge boost to our international relations.
We need to repair our reputation in the world, which Bush damaged so badly. We can’t stand alone; we need the rest of the world’s cooperation. A president who will bully & threaten other world leaders and lose his temper will make the rest of the world less willing to cooperate with us. A likable & charismatic leader with good negotiating skills will raise the world’s opinion of us and strengthen our alliances.
Links for 2008-08-27 through 2008-08-28:
Posted by Postilicious
Nikon officially released D90 today and it’s everything we expected. One lucky photographer, who usually uses a D3, got an opportunity to use a few D90s for more than a week and he’s very pleased with it.
The D90 includes all of the D80’s features plus a higher 12.3 megapixel resolution using the D300’s CMOS sensor, a live view, movie recording, and several new auto focus modes. It also comes with a new 18-105mm VR lens, which is a nice step up from the 18-55mm kit lens that ships with most current models.
I’m definitely getting one. It’s exactly the step up from the D40x I was hoping for.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a server administration application (I can’t go into specifics). It was ported Windows code that included some MFC emulation using old-fashioned Mac APIs such as WaitNextEvent. As expected, it never worked reliably and I was starting to feel defeated by it.
I figured out that the actual server code consisted of self-contained C++ objects that had very little to do with the application code. I ended up throwing away most of the old application code and grafting the server code into a modern Cocoa application using some ObjectiveC++ bridge classes. Once I got it to build, it took less than a day to get it working, and in the process fixed lots of long-standing bugs.
Links for 2008-08-25:
Posted by Postilicious
Nikon Rumors has posed a few pictures & official specs for Nikon’s soon-to-be-released D90 camera. It was accidentally leaked at target.com and taken down quickly.
The highlights include video recording, 12.3 MP resolution, a 3″ LCD with live view, and face detection. That’s a very interesting combination of features more commonly found on point-and-shoot cameras with professional DSLR features. The included 18-105mm lens also looks very interesting.
The major reason I want to upgrade is for internal auto focus, since none of Nikon’s prime lenses have a built-in AF motor. The leaked specs don’t mention built-in AF, but the D80, which it is replacing has an AF motor. I’d be surprised if they left off one of the D80’s features. On the other hand, the new lens is AF-S, which wouldn’t be necessary if the camera has an AF motor.
Tropical Storm Gustav is aiming in our direction. It’s already a strong tropical storm with 60 MPH winds.
I don’t know if this is documented anywhere, but I found that it’s possible to create a smart album to track photos that have been uploaded to Flickr using the FlickrExport plugin.
FlickrExport adds a metadata tag with the Flickr URL when it uploads a photo. When you create a smart album, one criteria you can use is ‘other metadata’, which you can select from the ‘+’ popup in the top right of the window. One of the metadata options will be ‘Flickr URL’. Choosing Flickr URL is not empty will select all photos which have been uploaded to Flickr. Alternately, ‘is empty’ will select photos which haven’t been uploaded. Combining these options with star ratings make it easy to choose photos to upload when you have a lot of them.
Using that trick I managed to finish going through the rest of my photowalk photos and uploaded many more today.
