I've coded up SHA-1 Secure Hash computation and HMAC-SHA1 secure signature computation in pure Lua and thought I'd share them in case anyone else would find them useful. The download is over on my so-inventively-named "SHA-1 and HMAC-SHA1 in pure Lua" page.

Lua is a horrid language, so these were not trivial, but I needed them for the Twitter support I just added to some of my plugins for Adobe Lightroom (I added Twitter support to: Zenfolio, Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug, and Picasa Web). I hope someone else can get some use out of the result.

My reaction to their "these are not the droids you're looking for" attempt was to bypass it. Heck, I haven't even installed IE7.... but then again, why should I?.... I never use the IE6 that I do have.

Does anyone know of a command-line method to fetch the location currently centered in the display of a running Google Earth? I have spent untold hours trying to figure this out, and have always come up with a blank. If I can find a small command-line program that spits out a latitude/longitue/altitude of the current center of the Google-Earth viewpoint, I can greatly enhance my geoencoding support plugin for Adobe Lightroom. I'm looking for solutions for both Windows and Mac, although they don't need to be the same.

I do know about the Win COM library, but I'm not a [...]
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The photo above is a repeat of the first photo in yesterday's post. They're some cherry blossoms that were overhanging our car in the parking lot of a restaurant on Awaji Island. The image has some strange artifacts that I'm at a loss to explain, so thought I'd ask whether anyone understands their source.

Here are two full-resolution crops – one from near the center, and another from left of center – that show some odd haloes around some items, but not around others...

Clicking on any of these images brings up the full-resoltion 4,256 × 2,832 pixel image.

These [...]

While visiting Zak the other day at his place in Otsu, I happened to step into the hallway outside his 15th-floor apartment just in time to notice that the tower crane at the construction site next door was about to be raised a notch. Having always wondered about the details of how these cranes worked, I left Zak with three highly-energetic preschool kids (one of mine and two of his) and stepped out into the calm to watch the crane.

These "self-climbing tower cranes" are popular in Japan. They can be broken down and their pieces can be transported by [...]