is Useful

Thanks to researchers who recently presented at SIGGRAPH, we may soon have intelligent image resizing in Photoshop to help fit photos into any size and scale area. The technology looks at an image and tries to work out where the important parts are - so that when you re-size the image, it knows which parts can be reduce or expanded with minimal impact to what the image is trying to convey. Very clever indeed. The movie below gives some great examples of this.

And why might this soon be in Photoshop? Well Adobe has hired one of the co-creators to join their team so expect cool stuff like this in the future. Perhaps they’ll even release some kind of image server that lets you define important image areas and then vend right-sized thumbnails or reduced images on the fly without having to go through the manual slog of intelligently cropping it yourself. That would be pretty cool. [From Wired]

A random CSS thing: there are many reasons why rollover image replacement fails to work in IE, when it works fine in Firefox et al, however I just found a new one; if you forget to put the HREF into the anchor link (<a&rt;) then both Firefox & IE render the link correctly - but Firefox will activate the :hover state and IE won’t. Simply putting the HREF back in again makes it work.

In this case you could argue that Firefox is at fault, as a link without a destination isn’t a link. Either way it was a waste of time finding it.

I’ve just been banging my head against an issue with my Rails Action Mailer (action_mailer) not sending emails. I know the application used to work, but thought the upgrade to the latest Rails had scuppered it. Every time I’d try and send an email the server console churns and then simply says: 302 Found.

So I turned on the full debugging in my config file (config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true) and this meant I got a time out error shown. Pinging my mail server gave a rapid response, so that was obviously not the problem.

Turned out it was simply that my local host blocks port 25, the standard SMTP port - forcing you to use their local SMTP for all outbound mail. Simple. I used this handy guide to connecting to SMTP from the command line over Telnet to help identify that port 25 was blocked. [ADDENDUM: If you need to authorize yourself on your telnet server then read this to find out how, and this to learn about base 64 encoding on the command line].

Luckily my host provides an alternate SMTP port number for just such an eventuality, but otherwise it means you have to set up your local development SMTP to match your local ISP information.

O’Reilly have just released a new book on harnessing the collective intelligence of the Web 2.0 masses. Founder Tim O’Reilly is very excited about this book, and though you might think he’s biased he’s not one to shout about every single book they release as that would probably fill every day of his life. If anyone has read it let me know if it’s as good as it sounds.

A recent study of IP addresses of people who edited wikipedia entries seems to indicate the CIA, Democratic Party and even the Vatican have made edits. Obviously since this survey is only based on IP address there is a high potential for fraud, but it’s interesting that people are starting to look at this open information in this way. There are already a slew of services for public figures and corporations to review their web presence, but I’d expect to see more of these ‘open source’ efforts allowing anyone to see who’s changing what.