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Bitterness never tasted so sweet

With the holidays just around the bend (ack! HOW does that keep happening every year?), your non-geeky friends, relatives, significant others and other loved ones are going to end up in the frustrating position of trying to decide what to give you for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus. You are a geek, they are not. This causes them much anxiety, and too often leaves you with crappy presents. So do yourself - and them - a favor - and point them over to this post on TehAwesome.Net, which contains a fantastic list of excellent gift ideas for the geeks in their life (namely, you.)

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Facebook and MySpace Users, Beware!November 7

I have received two virus emails from two unrelated friends, indicating their accounts have been compromised. The messages are being sent through Facebook and both have had a spammy sounding subject line and a link to a geocities website. This was suspicious enough, but the fact that one message came from a friend I haven’t spoken to much in a year made it even more so.

The first virus email subject was “RE: You were caught on our secret camera!” and the second was “RE: You have a great hair cut in this movie” . The geocities addresses they pointed to were for user’s reedgates21 and richiemack11. I’ve googled both addresses and gotten no results, so my guess is that they are randomly generating geocities accounts and generating these emails. A co-worker just one too - variation on a theme. Subject is “Don’t cry! Your mom will never see this movie”, also pointing to geocities, user name rkssbcyzk.

The links in the Facebook messages point to websites that contain viruses. Do NOT click on them.

Below are some examples of what they look like. (These are just images, so you can click on them for larger versions to see how the messages come into your inbox.)

Screenshot 1

Photo Retouching - How to Salvage a Dark Digital PhotoNovember 6

I prefer not to shoot with flash when I can help it - I don’t like the way it washes colors out. Unfortunately, sometimes if you don’t leave the exposure open long enough, or don’t have time to adjust your exposure in the first place (candid shots are my favorite but can be a bitch if you only have a second to capture the moment), you end up with under-exposed photos that may be too dark to use. Dark photos are particularly challenging to retouch, because as you make the image lighter, it can end up looking very grainy. This tutorial will show you a few ways to salvage a dark photo and minimize some of the graininess.

Retouching dark photos is possible because the camera captures more information than your eyes can see, so even if something looks very dark, there is more information contained there that can be brought out using a series of filters and adjustments. Bear in mind that the end result will be much nicer if the photo can be resized to a smaller version. The tricks we’ll use here can get rid of some of the graininess, but it does so by reducing noise and effectively blurring the image slightly, so if your end result image is smaller than the original, you’ll end up with a nicer finished product. Depending on how dark the image is that you’re starting with, the end result may not be perfect, but it may work for your needs.

For this tutorial, we’ll use a photo taken at a recent concert.

Is IMAP/POP3 Gmail or Gtalk periodically rejecting your password?October 6

I have run into this many times: my Gtalk password is stored in my email program (Thunderbird as an IMAP account) and my Gtalk password is stored in Adium, and every now and then, when I start my computer, Google tells me my password is wrong.

I can’t login to Gtalk, I can’t check my email. Accessing Gmail via the web interface works fine, so I know Google isn’t down, but every time I check mail in Thunderbird, I get a password error. I faithfully retype my password, only to have it reject it anyway.

Using Adium, I can logon to AIM, Yahoo, even LJ Chat (tho I don’t know why I ever would), but every moment or two, I get a password prompt. If I pull up the Accounts screen and try to manually connect, it gets to “Authenticating: 75%” and then hits me with another password box.

While I have no idea why this works, it does:

Quit/close your email client (Thunderbird, in my case)
Quit/close your chat program (Adium in my case)
Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha
Complete the captcha prompt there and submit the form
Restart your email and chat clients - all should be well.

It would seem some of sort of authentication bug with Google. The captcha gets all of the services back on the same page.

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Planning Your Facebook ApplicationSeptember 27

This is part one of a series - the technical how-to of creating the application will be discussed in a separate article. This article is intended to help you plan out your application to best prepare for coding and best leverage the new aspects of Facebook for exposure and social interaction.

Having created several Facebook applications, I had this article in the back of my head for quite some time now.

The code and Facebook functionality mentioned in this series is current as of September 26, 2008, and deals primarily with the “new” Facebook. I will try to keep it updated in the future as they continue to change things.

The planning phase is absolutely critical and directly relates to the success of your application. This is especially important in Facebook applications, since good planning can literally make or break the popularity of your application. If you overlook one of the profile boxes, or fail to implement social actions such as inviting friends or posting actions to the user’s newsfeed, you’re going to lose out on some of the key viral aspects that make Facebook applications become popular in the first place.

Application Canvas Page

The application canvas page is the standalone page that your application lives on. It has the widest available page real estate, since the application doesn’t have to share the page with anything else, other than a narrow column of ads on the right-hand side (not sho