You may be thinking "surely he means bowling". I Don't. I mean jowling. It is apparently a phenomenon of taking photos (with a fast shutter speed) of people shaking their heads rapidly while their face muscles are at rest.

This post is only tangentially related to birding but ultimately this web tool I am working on will be a widget to draw data specific to a birding location at Western Maryland Birding from the eBird database. This tool will allow users to generate a table of birds seen at the location by specifying how many days back and how many miles away from that location they want to search (with some limits set so as not to tax the e-bird database).

I read about this Beetle Cam Project on the Digital Photography School website. These guys used a remote-controlled vehicle and a 400D camera with strobes to make a mobile wildlife camera with some interesting results. The story is on their blog as well (Burrard-Lucas Blog). They got some interesting shots and learned a few lessons about what not to do as well.

I spent part of today learning a new tool called exiftool by Phil Harvey. It is a pretty cool command line tool for reading, and writing exif data from your photographic images. It is kind of nice to have it updating the geographic data in my images before I upload them to Flickr. I posted a little more about it on my GIS blog http://gisblog.jbchurchill.com/

I have upgraded this site to Drupal 6 (just in time for Drupal 7). This blog has not received a lot of love lately but this upgrade is my excuse. It took me a while to get through it but I held off with new content while I got a Drupal 6 version running on my localhost and worked on debugging the Drupal 6 version of the theme. One good thing that came out of it was that I started displaying the category icons using CSS instead of template files.

I saw this re-posted on the MDOSPREY listserv. Its really cool watching this female hummingbird sitting on the nest. The video is amazing. Check out the Hummingbird-Nest-Cam !

For a short but interesting take on some web statistics read this Firefox Article on Sitepoint. Apparently if you go by version number Firefox 3.5 is currently more popular than any single version of IE.

Just a cool photo that's all. I saw it on the Digital Photography School site and wanted to share. I can only imaging what it took to organize this and how you would account for how perspective changes with the distance between camera and subject.
A 90 Year Old Example of Forced Perspective Photography

I've been using Google translate (among other things) to try and learn a little bit of Spanish in hopes that if & when I travel I will be able to speak a little of the native tongue. I know that the Google Translate site can translate an entire web page when you type in the url but perhaps I missed this tool that you can add to your site (see my left sidebar near the bottom). It's pretty cool. I might have ignored it thinking it would be difficult to implement but it was very easy.

I just finished listening to an interview that Paul Boag conducted with Jeremy Keith about what happened with the W3C working group and the split between XHTML2 and HTML5. He explains a little bit behind why things went the way they did and why its for the best. Jeremy Keith is the author of the Friends of Ed book Dom Scripting Book which has great examples of javascript and DOM scripting used in a way that supports graceful degradation.