January 2008 Archives

Our latest object of techlust, the Sigma DP1 was reannounced at PMA 2008 (it was supposed to ship Spring 2007, now its Spring 2008). Please be real, and real good. Now it's a toss up, Canon G9 now or wait for the Sigma DP1...

"The DP1 has a sensor around the size of those found in most DLSRs - although it is greatly different in terms of design - and aims to offer equivalent image-quality and specification in a compact format. In common with Sigma's DSLR offerings it utilizes Foveon's direct-image-sensor technology which detects three colors at each of its 4.6 million pixels (collecting the same amount of color data as a conventional 14 megapixel sensor).". Via dpreview.

I was an early MT user back in the days (even did the first french translation - somewhere in 2002). It was the first Pro platform for blogs. But then, several factors got me to move to wordpress for a couple of years, most notably the open-sourceness of WP and the developer community. MT is now fully open-sourced and it is still used by a lot of the most read blogs around. So it was only natural that I would go back to it someday... it's... now.

So had PH (hey where is his blog?) load a fresh version of MTCS4 on a new Amazon instance (more on that in a later post) and started to get back in the MT groove. I must say they did a great job on the admin UI. Wow. But finding the xmlrpc endpoint for editing apps was a bit trickier. It was been moved to /cgi/mt-xmlrpc.cgi (by default) but the real tricky part it that you have to set a different password for accessing MT this way, they now call this the API password. So login thru the web with your user, click on your username and set your API password to a sensible (and memorable) value.

There's a good reason for this, security obviously, but then again, not obvious. But hey, if it works, this will be my first MT post from Ecto thru XMLRPC. It either works or this note will stay in my drafts list until I figure what doesn't work (this being posted on a friday night at 8pm from the office, initially, if the publish date ends up being on monday, blame it on some obscure urge related to malted barley).

Over and out, still have a few emails to answer before I call it a day.

We've heard there can be a lot of turnover in start-ups, but this... Turning the Place Over is an oscillating ovoid that is cut in the façade of a building and turns in 3 directions, triggered by light. The pivoting "window" turns the building inside out and is set on a giant rotator designed for industrial use. This piece, commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial, got underway almost a year ago and will run through the end of 2008. For once I don't want the window.

Except for one thing, noticed how it's... not green? Yeah, that's the sum total of effort we've applied to this.

Razed is the team blog at Praized. It is not our official blog.

You will not find interesting insight on the intersection of local search and social media here. You will not find Sebastien's now famous what it means analysis. Just stuff we are interested in, things we might as well bookmark on del.icio.us, upload to Flickr or just blab about on Twitter.

So what can you expect to find? Geek humour (we're an internet startup after all), shared obsession with gadgets and a few rants. Maybe even some raves about cool emerging standards.

Oh, glad you asked. What does RAZED mean? Well, it's the opposite of Praized, or as succinctly defined in by a invocation to the connected consciousness : demolished: torn down and broken up.

It seemed appropriate for us, because we make software that sucks ;-)