Slippery spam · Feb 25, 11:12 am by Michael Dales
This came through my door the other day. Looks like a handwritten note from a friend, but on closer inspection it’s spam, disguised to look personal:
It’s quite bad really – it’s an attempt to trick me into reading by a product by pretending to come from someone I know – I assume statistics show that most people know someone who’s name starts with a J. The font they used to print it was quite good too – it was only on close inspection that it was clear it was printed rather than handwritten. It’s bad enough to get spam, but it’s slightly creepy when it starts to pretend it came from someone you know in order to fool you into reading it.
Either that, or I need new friends ;)
EmberExporter · Feb 25, 08:22 am by Michael Dales
I’ve been a big fan Realmac Software’s Ember for a while – it’s a great scrapbook for random screen shots and pictures that don’t fit with my arty pictures on Flickr, and don’t belong in my albums on SmugMug.
Whilst I use LittleSnapper for managing screenshots and uploading them to Ember, there was no easy way to get my photos from Aperture onto Ember, so when I bumped into the Realmac guys at NSConference earlier this month, I decided to fix that state of affairs :)
Thus I’ve just put out EmberExporter for Aperture, a simple little plugin that lets you export your photos straight to Ember:
It’s a simple plugin, which just lets you select a bunch of images, set things like the titles and tags, and put them straight into Ember. Originally this was written just for me, but I got such a positive reaction from people, including the very nice people at Realmac, so I’ve decided to put it out for all.
The only niggle at the moment is that whilst it works with Aperture 3, it only does so in 32 bit mode. I need to wait until Aperture 3 arrives for my immanent birthday so I can work on 64 bit support :)
Cup cakes · Feb 21, 09:35 pm by Michael Dales
Cup cakes at the very nice The Walk Cafe in Nottingham. They have excellent teas and cake, but are quite hidden away. But well worth seeking out.
Savoury sweets · Feb 12, 11:50 pm by Michael Dales
On exhibition from Saturday at IVC · Feb 9, 08:26 am by Michael Dales
February 13th till the 17th sees the 2010 Art Exhibition at Impington Village College, and nestled amongst the usual array of paintings will be some of my photography! Laura and I have been along in previous years to have a look at the local art output, and there’s usually something for most tastes, and we’ve even bought a nice abstract oil painting the last time we went.
This year I decided it’d be fun to submit a few pictures of my own. They’ll probably stand out slightly, as almost all the other work last time we went was painted rather than printed, but it’s fun to mix things up a little. All art work is for sale, so if you ever fancied owning a nicely framed Michael original, now’s your chance :)
The exhibition starts on Saturday evening at 7pm with a special event (£3 on the door) with wine and nibbles and a chance to meet the artists. :)
Why do you do this every single day? · Feb 6, 10:30 pm by Michael Dales
Spotted on a block of offices in Norwich. I wonder what their staff retention levels are like…
Scotty · Feb 6, 10:28 pm by Michael Dales
Scotty, who organised the excellent NSConference 2010 which I went to last week. There’s lots more pics I took over here.
python-cmemcache considered harmful, sometimes · Feb 5, 12:28 pm by Michael Dales
Just thought I should put this on the Internet somewhere: if you’re using python-cmemcache, then you might want to move to python-memcached (or other alternative) if you plan on moving from just one memcached server to multiple ones.
We had an issue last week at Camvine when we moved from running our main django app on one server to multiple servers. We use memcached not just for caching, but also for storing transient state that we don’t mind if it’s lost occasionally. To access memcached from django we’d been using python-cmemcache, as it’s a bit faster than the pure python python-memcached.
When we moved to a pool of servers we did the standard thing of sharing the memcached across all machines as one large memcache. This is fine, except we found that randomly we’d find inconsistent state between the machines. It turns out, after 24 hours of chasing, that python-cmemcache was occasionally losing responses from remote memcached instances. Looking at the logs on the memcached instance you could see it replying when asked, but from the apache logs on the machine asking, you could see the reply from cmemcached was “no data”. Switching python-cmemcache for python-memcached cleared the issue up immediately.
We’ve ran python-cmemcache for ages, without issue. It was only as we moved to more servers we hit this issue. It seems to be something specific to it running in apache, as I couldn’t recreate it from the command line. The python-cmemcache page itself says it’s time to move on to other libraries, as it’s no longer supported, but I imagine there are many out there who have been using it for ages and haven’t thought to look. Hopefully this post can save someone a day of their life :)
The lego people get Apple fever · Jan 30, 07:06 pm by Michael Dales
Preparing for NSConference :)
I tend not to do much composition work with photography, but I’ve been following I Drink Lead Paint/Mr Flibble on Flickr, and he does some amazing composition work, which has inspired me to start giving it a try.
Local photography · Jan 30, 04:18 pm by Michael Dales
My Snow Angel picture got picked up by our village newspaper!
They also carried a little piece about the Flickr group I created for Histon & Impington – many thanks to the Histon & Impington Courier for promoting it.
We’ve had some great pictures of the villages submitted – I’m particularly taken by the ones submitted by Bongo 61005 of when the A14 was being constructed. If you don’t live here, the A14 is interesting as the old road connecting Cambridge to our villages is still there, only blocked by a mound of soil upon which sits the dual carriageway! It’s a hint that things changed, so it’s nice to see what it was like before the A14 cut through the area.