Month / September 2008

by Aaron

DIPP – Digital Image Protection Paranoia?

I enjoy Moose Peterson’s photography and blog. He’s a great photographer and an interesting writer. However, he recently changed the way he embeds photos to “better protect them”.  Instead of a simple image embed, he’s now using Flash.

We’ve made some changes here on the blog that you might not have noticed. The images are now being posted as Flash. This is curtosey of my bud Roger,RC (of Layers fame who also created the Moose Gallery) and of course my longtime webmistress Jan. We’ve gone to this because it offers the greatest amount of protection for the images in a web environment. (Oh yeah, forgot to mention, might mess up RSS feeds too.)

I’m not sure what he’s protecting exactly by using Flash for a tiny 350 pixel wide image?

I totally respect his rights as a photographer — that he owns the pictures he’s taken and he doesn’t want others to use them. But, hiding them in Flash just makes the honest people more honest … if you want to steal the tiny image, it’s still REAALY easy to do.

I’ve intentionally distorted the section of the blog containing the image and rotated it to show it’s so easy to do (I used SnagIt 9). It took me a total of 10 seconds to do the fancy work. It would have taken less if I just wanted to grab the bear.

image

(image and content owned by Moose — clipped here for editorial demonstration and distorted as an example)

What impact does this have on me? Well, as suggested in the quote above, the new technique is causing my RSS Reader of choice (Google Reader) to not show any of his beautiful images. And that’s a big loss!

I’d still recommend his web site and content nonetheless … but here’s to hoping he can find a better way to “protect” his images while retaining the ability for RSS readers to show the photography.

by Aaron

Google Chrome ….

Google’s running their own ads? :)  (An Ad from Google that appeared on my web site in the past few days).

image

Also, if you’d like to read the whole Google Chrome comic, it’s available from Google here. There are some PDFs as well floating around, but they’re not higher quality (in terms of resolution).

by Aaron

C# Extension methods and strings …

Thomas posted an interesting experiment regarding the use of extension methods on strings. He noticed that it’s possible to add an extension method to a string, and that it’s still called even when the string object is null. Given that it’s just syntactic sugar, it makes perfect sense, but it’s so odd to see code like this:

image

I wouldn’t use this as it just feels wrong to call a method on an object that is null. But, it’s a nifty trick (and something you should watch out for in your extension methods!).

by Aaron

Coding Challenge #21

Coding Challenge Series / Technical Interview Series

Create a function which copies byte data from a source location to a destination location (you might use pointers or an array depending on the programming language). The function must copy using this pattern: 8 bytes, skip 8 bytes, 4 bytes, skip 8 bytes, 8 bytes, … repeat (+8,-8,+4,-8….).

Bonus points for really nailing the performance of this one.

 

(Are you enjoying this series? I’d appreciate a comment if you’d like me to continue the series. It takes more time than I’d like to admit to create and post these entries every week.)

by Aaron

Moral Challenge #1

OK, this won’t be a series, but I asked my wife the following question on the way home from work tonight … I’m curious to see what your response is to the same question:

If next week, you could receive a check in the amount of 10 times your annual salary, with only a single condition, would you? The only condition: three of your coworkers, who you are good friends with, will loose their jobs within 2 weeks if you accept the money offer (and they will know you took the money).

Do you accept the money? (If you try to be sneaky with my wording, don’t bother. That takes the punch out of the moral dilemma.)

(And if you were thinking about giving some of the money to your coworkers — many countries have established laws about the amount of money you can give to another person without serious tax complications — for the purposes of this challenge, assume you can’t give them any of this money).