Aw crap, first MD5, now we can’t hash anything using SHA-1. All it takes is what, 2^69 operations to find a collision? I’m kinda glad I don’t understand cryptography.

Via ongoing, a delicious rant about the concept of “Groupware” and why it always, always sucks. Nay, why it must suck. “Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from ‘unchecked' to ‘checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review.

Tattoo We I forgot to post shots of the tattoos. Here they are.

Peek Originally uploaded by Jack Baty. One more of my favorite subject.

I met up with my very old, very good friend Wayne tonight, whom I haven’t seen in almost 3 years. He knows I’m a scotch lover and every year would buy me a good bottle on or near my birthday. He made up for missing a year or two tonight and bought me not one, but two glasses of Macallan 30-year-old. Oh dear lord, I’ve been spoiled! I might be able to afford one glass a month, but now I’ve got something to save my pennies for.

Another Luminous Landscape article, this time extolling the virtues of always using RAW format when shooting digital. I don’t have the talent or card space for it, but I shoot RAW anyway. I like having the unprocessed “negative” to fall back on—just in case I should accidently capture something great, but botch the camera settings. “The JPEG shooter and the RAW shooter both capture RAW data. The JPEG shooter uses the camera as their RAW converter (developer) and is willing to give up the potential to do a better development in the future.

We all know and love the Apache web server, but if you’re like me you never even consider alternatives because there’s really nothing else out there, right? (IIS is not considered an alternative, BTW.) There’s been some noise recently about lighttpd. Reading through the documentation has peaked my interest. FastCGI built-in (which wasn’t even a consideration until this whole Ruby on Rails thing cropped up), simple virtual hosting, and easy to grok URL rewriting engine, plus the other usual suspects.

I’ve had opportunity recently to help spec and design a rather complex web service API. The choices are usually SOAP, XML-RPC or REST. REST has always been my favorite. Why? It’s just so damn simple to write apps against it. When I’ve got to create a web service client it’s always disappointing to find that the only interface is SOAP. While SOAP has a few advantages, they seem academic and mostly unnecessary for my purposes, so I politely nod and keep on walkin'.

I never use a UV filter on any lens, even the absurdly expensive ones. Especially on the absurdly expensive ones. With so much attention paid to the fine art of lens design and construction, it just can’t be a good thing to toss some cheapo filter in front of it. This Luminous Landscape article agrees, and goes into more detail – with examples.

Open and honest communication is always a good idea. When it comes to software development, Jason says… And then there are the cases when people want software to step in with a solution instead of just politely explaining the situation to their clients. They want new features, modified features, obscure feature exceptions when all that is required is a simple conversation with their client to explain the way something works.

This shopping cart implementation from Panic is interesting. Drag and drop stuff in and out. Nothing fancy. Standard stuff (html/javascript) only. Neat.

Oh boy. If I even mention a new development platform around the office, people start to break out in hives. Let’s just say the phrase “Now what?!” has been bandied about on more than one occasion. But this time it’s different… honest! If ever a bandwagon felt like a good one to jump on, Ruby on Rails is it. This looks to be, based on a weekend or so of fiddling, a fantastic framework.