Photography Blog

I used to have a separate photography blog on Blogger, but it didn't work well for me because it had no real integration with my main photography site. Different look and feel, hard to link together and required double of the work to maintain.

I ended up using Flickr as a way to publish and describe images as a surrogate for a blogging service in an environment conductive to photographers. That also took a lot of effort because - again - there was little connection between the main photography site and Flickr.

However, last week Zenfolio released a blog service to their line-up. Zenfolio is the company I use to host my photography, and I have been very happy with them. With his new offering I was able to integrate my photography site and my photography blog into one place.

The blogging feature integrates into the site, and is very simple but very effective. It has just the right features for what I need to do, and it comes to not extra cost for the Zenfolio customer. I've been using them for 3 years now, and they keep exceeding my expectations over and over again. A great company, and a great service.

DryCoder is born

This blog got a bit technical lately. Sorry about that.

To not alienate my non-technical readers (the majority) I decided to split anything about coding in a separate blog called "DryCoder" at a very easy to remember address: http://www.drycoder.com

Dry, in case you are wondering, stands for "Don't Repeat Yourself", and it is - in a nutshell - a programming philosophy that focuses on avoiding code repetition. It is also descriptive of my focus when I write code: efficient and targeted to ship a real product on schedule.

So, from now on this blog will contain non-technical stuff such as posts about woodworking, art, sculpture, philosophy, geeky stuff, rants and all the random stuff that I come across and interest me.

DryCoder is where you'll find coding and super-technical articles. It has an RSS feed of its own and it will be quite active given that coding is my profession, and I like a place to collect lessons I learn and tips and tricks of the trade.

See you there, if you are a coder of course.

Installing rvm on Lion OSX

Moved here

Ruby's ||= operator dangers

Moved here

Adding to methods of existing classes in Ruby 1.8.x

Moved here

Synchronizing Your Computers Painlessly

I have been a long time user of Dropbox, and I am very fond of it. If you are not familiar with it, Dropbox is a FREE service that allows you to share a directory on multiple computers and it also functions as a cloud backup service for that directory and as a revision control system for it too.

You signup for DropBox and install their client on your computers and mobile devices. Then you choose a directory to share and voila', from that moment on any file that you copy to that directory will be synchronized across all your computers and devices completely transparently and without using much resources on your machines at all. DropBox will keep a copy in the cloud, and will also keep many revisions so you can always go back to something that you deleted or changed by mistake.

I use it all the time for my photography when I am on the go for multiple days. I bring a few memory cards just enough for a day of shooting. At the end of the day I drop the photos into my Dropbox directory on my laptop and I clean my memory cards and keep on shooting. When I get home after several days the photos are not only on my laptop, but also on all the other computers I have, and a copy is safe on the DropBox servers too.

I also use DropBox for sharing configurations across my machines and keep them all in sync.


I use mostly Mac OS these days; at work I have MacBook Pro, and at home an iMac. I work in terminal all the time, and quite often I make adjustments to my ~/.profile to add paths, change my prompt, set configurations, etc. I also have a set of scripts that I wrote that I use all the time.

I like consistency, and I hate making the same changes on many machines to keep the same configuration between work and home.

To solve this problem, I added this line on my .profile file on all my Macs:

source ~/Dropbox/lorenzo/shell_settings

Then I put all the settings that I like to share in the ~/Dropbox/lorenzo/shell_settings file, which for me looks something like this:

alias dir="ls -l"
PS1="[\u@\h:\w]\$ "
export PATH=$PATH:~/Dropbox/bin/tools

And voila', on all my machines I now have "dir" do what I expect, my prompt look pretty and a handy shared directory where I keep my scripts across my machines. The scripts are on Dropbox too, and in this case I not only get the benefits of having the same version everywhere, but it also functions as source control for any modification I make over time.

Dropbox is available on Windows, Mac, Unix and mobile devices and.... it is FREE for 2Gb. I pay for 50Gb which is only a well worth $99/year. You have got to try it, it will change the way you deal with multiple computers and it will make thumb drives feel like prehistoric technology.

Google Calculator

Google is not only a search engine.

Did you know that you can use Google as a unit/currency converter and multi-unit/currency calculator?

Examples:

Forgot how many cups in a teaspoon? Try typing "1 cup in tsp" as a Google search to get an answer.
Do you want to know how many seconds in a year? Try to search for "year in seconds".
Do you want to know the area in square feet of 3 meters * 1 cm ? Try "(3 m * 1 cm) in feet^2"
Do you want to know how much is a British pounds in dollars? Try "1 British Pounds in USD"
Do you want to know how much is a dollar in whatever currency they have in China? Try "1 USD in Chinese money"

Splitting of the Red Sea

My latest sculpture. I found this piece of wood in the woods. It had been there probably 5 years or so. Then I dried it for 3 years in my workshop, and finally cleaned it, sculpted it and made it into this piece.

DreamBox Learning Shipped Today!

Today we officially launched DreamBox Learning K-2 Math, a Math Learning Game that is now available to help kids learn, enjoy, and excel at math!

Every day we receive fan mail from parents and teachers who tell us heart-warming success stories of kids playing DreamBox, from struggling learners to advanced achievers. The combination of our individual adaptations, in-depth math curriculum, and game-like adventures is working! We are actually “doing good” for the world! And of course I’ve seen how much my own children like it and learn.

Here is a product tour video! Check it out!



Here are a few ways to help us build the buzz:

• If you have kids in the right age group, please do try DreamBox
• Recommend it to your friends (and earn free months in our invite-a-friend program!)
• Write about it to your local Mom’s group or PTSA group
• Give it as a gift
• Blog about it
• Forward this information to anyone

Starbucks Speaks Italian, or not...

It seems like writing Italian phrases and words is now considered somehow a "touch of class" in many coffee stores, restaurants and other commercial establishments. I find it flattering and I have no problems with it. I share this love for the Italian language.
On the other hand, I find it embarrassing for the people or corporations that spend time and money to write enormous phrases in Italian on their precious wall space when the phrase itself contains elementary school level spelling mistakes. Ouch!
Now, I do not claim that my English is perfect; far from it as you can see. However, rest assured that if I had to write a huge four words phrase in any language in my hypothetical coffee shop, I would make pretty darn sure I got the spelling correct! Especially if I use such word to try elevating the elegancy of the place!
Now check out this "thing" that I saw, and took a picture of, in a Starbucks near where I live:





This phrase is about 6-7 feet long on a wall, and it takes very little to find out that the spelling is WRONG. I could understand the mistake if it was hard to verify... however, it takes only 30 seconds to find out that there is a problem. The easiest way is to search for this exact phrase in Google. At the time I wrote this post there were only 8 results for this, all from pages with spelling mistakes, and Google even offers a different spelling. Note how it says: Did you mean: "La macchina del caffe". Well, click on that link and now you get 4,000 matches. Not bad. A quick look at the italian dictionary will confirm that "Macchina" is the correct spelling! Not the huge wall-inscribed "machina", which is an embarassment for Starbucks. YUK!

The children know

A quote that inspired me.

"The children know. They have always known. But we choose to think otherwise; it hurts to know the children know. The children see. Thus we conspire to keep them from knowing and seeing. And if we insist, then the children, to please us, will make believe they do not know, they do not see. Children make that sacrifice for our sake - to keep us pacified. They are remarkably patient, loving and all-forgiving. It is a sad comedy: the children knowing and pretending they don't know to protect us from knowing they know."

( Maurice Sendak )