Sam’s random musings

Terminal town:

I shot the picture above at 10:31am this morning from my window seat on approach to Santa Barbara. The town is La Conchita, which reposes uneasily beneath soft dirt hills that have been slumping toward the Pacific with emphatic inevitability.

I wanted to take this picture to show the larger geological context, which I haven’t seen in most news photos of the site. Look closely and you’ll see the latest mudslide is just one a series of landslides amidst land so soft that it’s cut by gullies that have grown quickly to canyons.(One report said there have been 12 landslides since 1850.)

In this shot you can see how, at some point in the recent past, the entire hillside above the town slid down toward the town, exposing an escarpment at the top of the slope. Two brown exposed areas near the upper edge of the photo show other recent landslides.

I heard today that the town is being evacuated because the land above it is “unstable.” No kidding. There’s not much difference between living here, and living on the slope of an active volcano.

As I expected, the event was close to home in other ways. The friend who picked me up at the airport knows about half of those killed in the slide, plus the father who lost his wife and children.

(Via The Doc Searls Weblog.)

How to fix a bad cup of coffee.

1. take a sip
2. make a sour face
3. add a couple shakes of cocoa powder
4. add a small teaspoon of ground up candy cane left over from making cookies with daughters.
5. drink and smile

Color tools for the design impaired:

Color tools for the design impaired: Great set of color pickers for web designers! This is definitely a bookmark for the future.

This is a keeper

(Via Weblog Tools Collection.)

DevShed: Output Caching with PHP:

Whether you’re working with a larger site that you want to speed up dramatically, or you’re looking for a way to streamline your current, smaller site just that little bit extra, output caching might just be what you’re looking for - and DevShed has a good introduction posted today just for you.

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

Linux Journal::

For a Web site, several means of geotagging are available. My previous article explained how to embed the site’s geographic information in its DNS entry. Other options also allow this information to be placed within a site or each individual page. These are the older ICBM tags and the newer, more generic geo-structure tags.

Good summary of various means for geo-tagging web and feed type data

(Via Dangerousmeta.)

Well, this past weekend I did another half marathon, wish I had been able to do the Full Marathon but a back problem in December ruled that out. But it was a personal record time so that is good, and I am stiff which should make some people happy…

DevShed: Reconsidering PHP Variables:

PHP helps you to quickly build big applications and many times, its easy to neglect the security matter. Its easy to believe that security breaches could not happen to your software. But what if it does happen? For this reason, security in your applications should be kept in consideration from the beginning.

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

Image Panorama Plugin:

This is really cool. Taking the photographs and stitching them together might be painful. Creating panormas from images is something I’ve heard of, but never done. Now if you have panoramic images, and you want to display them on your WordPress blog, you can.

© Copyright 2004 Carthik Sharma - WordLog.com. All Rights Reserved.

Really clean and simple for display of panoramas, might be useful for future projects

(Via wordlog.com.)