I’ve held off asking this here because there’s tons of generic lens advice on the internet and it’s too hard to describe what I’m looking for to get specific advice (because frankly I don’t really know). Anyway, I currently have two lenses – one a Canon EF 18-55mm IS 3.5-5.6 lens, it’s what I use almost exclusively. The other is a Tamron 55-200 f4-5.6 which I use when I need the extra zoom but largely ignore because it takes noticeably inferior shots. I also find that 55mm is just a bit too much zoom for a lot of the holiday shots I want to fire off quickly so I miss a lot if I have the bigger zoom lens on my camera.

The development I seem to do these days tends to run at the extremes of reliability – either it has to be fully tested, nice, clean, production ready code, or it’s complete throw away code where development time is the only consideration.

The advantage of doing this rapid fire development is that you wind up with proof of concept code for most situations you’re every likely to run into. The disadvantage is that the code is rubbish and probably no use to you at all. That bit me once again today. I wanted to quickly whip up a plugin that makes pasting plain text into EditLive! work the way I want it to. I have a plugin that filters pasted content to wrap it in a blockquote for my blog so clearly I could just reuse that as a starting point. Sadly, I cheated:

Deployment ruins everything. So many cool technologies that let you develop more rapidly and do awesomely cool stuff fall down at the last hurdle of deployment. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t thought it through properly so it’s just plain too hard, but often it’s just that it’s too hard to convince people that it won’t be another headache for them.

The latest in my deployment-caused frustrations is CouchDB. I have a few use cases that I think CouchDB would be perfect for and it would save me heaps of development effort and headaches. The trouble is, while CouchDB may be of the web, it really isn’t of the enterprise IT architecture.

Or as Reuters put it:

One in 7 who leave Guantanamo involved in terrorism Lies, damned lies and statistics.

I’ve come to the conclusion that PHP libraries are simply designed to eat up RAM and do their very best to never spit it back out. There seems to be an assumption that everything will be done in RAM and then at the last possible moment dump everything out to the browser.

Sadly, this doesn’t work if what you’re building in RAM happens to be a zip file containing a whole heap of images. There are a few zip libraries around for PHP but none of them can directly stream the created zip file back out to the browser. Most of them create the entire zip file in RAM and then tell you to just ‘echo zip->file();’ which is just plain crazy. Others can “stream” but only to disk where they have random access.

Apparently my bashrc is append-only:

export gucis=z1419539@gucis.cit.gu.edu.au:

For those who didn’t study IT at Griffith Uni, gucis is the student UNIX server. This particular shortcut was so that I could scp files over there more easily. Actually, given that gucis had open access to the Internet and my dorm room didn’t1{#footlink1:1243014118649.footnote}, it was far more often transferring files from gucis back to my local machine. I finally removed those shortcuts today.

The otherwise mostly link bait suggestion from Matt Asay that Apple and Google should drop their browsers in favour of FireFox triggered an interesting reaction for me. The argument goes along the lines that IE is dominating the browser landscape and FireFox is clearly the second place runner, so everyone who wants to bring down IE should just pool resources behind FireFox. My immediate reaction was to wonder why people saw FireFox as the best horse to back.

Since my last question was so quickly solved thanks to Kaushal Sinha, I thought I’d try a simpler one. I need to set up a page in WebSphere Portal that doesn’t appear in any of the navigation structure but it does need a known URL. It’s used only as a landing point in the portal, has a portlet that asks a couple of questions and then sends the user on to the right place. It just doesn’t make any sense to navigate to that portal via the links at the top of the standard portal theme, but I can’t just remove permissions from the page because it needs to be available when they come in via external links (where it does make sense).

I’m stumped so I’m throwing this one out there in the hope that someone might know the answer. I have a JSP component that builds a URL to create a new content item, in a specific site area with a specific authoring template. It works great on Portal 6.0.1.3 and Portal 6.1.0.0 but breaks on 6.1.0.1 and 6.1.0.2. When you go to the URL, it correctly starts creating content but instead of skipping the stage where it asks for an authoring template it just gives a blank list to choose from. If you omit the authoring template from the URL it will correctly list all templates and go on to create the content.

Note to self:

That magical file that controls just about everything you ever want to control about IBM LWCM (at least so far as things that are controlled from the file system rather than the web interface) is under the profile directory at /wcm/shared/app/config/wcmservices/WCMConfigService.properties

This includes:

• configuring backwards compatibility for WCM 6.0 -> 6.1 migrations. Primarily the don’t expire content immediately when no expire date is set.
• setting up the SMTP server properties so you can get e-mail notifications in workflow
  • Side note: These get annoying really quickly if you’re not careful.
• A bunch of stuff on caching that looks cool. I wonder what the changes I just made will do…

Also, why did it take me this long to add fancy list bullet styles to my blog stylesheet? Mixing the blue and green is probably a bit much – I should create a blue tick or green arrow, but oh well, I’m drunk with power.

Rob wanted to know where I’ve been getting the clip art images on my recent posts. They’re from the seriously cool, but overly hard to use, Open Clip Art Library. They have a ton of SVG images so when combined with Inkscape can be converted to PNG images at any size. I wound up downloading an old archive release of the library which includes PNG versions of all the images and now use OS X to browse and search.

The conversation that has sprung up around how the use of distributed version control, Github in particular, affects community is a refreshing change in the blogosphere1. It’s people collectively thinking things through rather than just reacting in uproar or following the latest meme.

The latest installment is from Ben Hyde, git: Balene for Knowledge2. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but let me pull out a couple of key points: