Archive for

August, 2008

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How to link your blog to Facebook and get thrown out

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The new facebook GUI has a feature where you can link the RSS feed of your blog to your profile. If you do that, every time you post a new entry in your blog, it gets added as a note.

Of course, they allow only one blog RSS. In the simplest case, I have 3 RSS feeds, one for my photo blog and two for this blog [entries and comments]. I added my photo blog first – then changed my mind and added my text blog next. I wasn’t sure which of the two blogs I want to link to my account.

I wasn’t satisfied with this setup, so I wrote a Yahoo Pipe to link these 3 RSS feeds into one and used the RSS feed of the Pipe in my facebook profile.

Now, I didn’t realize two things.

a) Facebook’s RSS aggregation is stupid. Instead of fetching the last 20 [or 10] results alone, it fetches all the entries from your blogs the minute you add them.

b) They don’t really think that anyone would have more than one blog and if they did, they would have to experiment till they get it right.

So I got a warning message in facebook saying that my actions were in ‘violation’ of facebook’s terms of use and my account might be disabled.

Of course, I was curious enough to find out what the heck I did wrong, so I hit the ‘Notes’ page in my facebook profile.

Now I get a nice popup which says my Notes is blocked and the block will be removed whenever they deem fit. That dialog had a link to go back to the home page and a ‘Close’ button.

Of course, I hit the ‘Close’ button and I saw that my notes page was intact.

I should have probably left it there so that only my notes page was blocked but my profile wasn’t.

Of course I didn’t.

I tried to delete a note. I wanted to see if there is a way to delete all my notes and unblock my note page :) .

That caused facebook to log me out and disable my account.

So much for that new feature.

If anyone knows how to get back into facebook, let me know :)

Adobe LR 2.0 profiles compared to Capture NX profiles, landscapes

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As explained in http://blog.anands.net/2008/08/07/camera-profiles-beta-in-lightroom-20/, I started to compare camera profiles for Nikon D300 in LR 2.0 and NX.

Here is a comparison for a landscape image, shot earlier in 2008 in Yosemite National Park.

NX camera standard

NX camera standard

LR Camera Standard

LR Camera Standard

NX Neutral

NX Neutral

LR Neutral

LR Neutral

NX Vivid

NX Vivid

LR Vivid

LR Vivid

NX D2X Mode1

NX D2X Mode1

LR D2x Mode 1

LR D2x Mode 1

NX D2X Mode 2

NX D2X Mode 2

LR D2x Mode 2

LR D2x Mode 2

NX D2x Mode 3

NX D2x Mode 3

LR D2x Mode 3

LR D2x Mode 3

LR Landscape

LR Landscape

My verdict. It is very close again. I really do not see much difference in using either LR and NX now.

If you are unable to login to your mac.com address in iChat

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Around the time Apple announced me.com, I have been unable to login to iChat using my mac.com username and password. iChat would throw me out with an ‘invalid password’ error.

I tried resetting the password. It did not work.

I tried to delete the ichat plist files. It did not work.

I then created a new user in my mac and tried to login. It did not work.

I then tried from 3 different macs. It did not work.

I then tried from a mac where I know other usernames works. My username did not work.

The same username and password worked from Adium, which confirmed that it was definitely not my password which was the problem.

After lots of trial and error, I figured out how to get it to work.

In the iChat window, choose me.com as the ‘provider’. So if your mac.com address is foo@mac.com, try to login as foo@me.com and use your password. It goes past the ‘invalid password’ stage.

Next, it will present you with an AIM login window with foo@aol.com email address. Change that email address to foo@mac.com and enter your password again.

If you do both these hacks, your old mac.com username and password works again. Looks like Apple did screw up my account when they did the me.com thingie.

This cost me a bunch of time. I hope it saved a few minutes of yours!