Latest iStockphoto addition.

This photo was taken in the Zoo of Buenos Aires this past June. The couple of white rhinoceros(es?) were just laying there, not very amused it seemed. They looked just like they were having peaceful moment.



Oh, forgot to mention that it is toned mapped also, I made it as subtle as possible so as not to incite iStock's approval gremlins fury, but it really shows on the textured animal skin.

You can buy it now in iStockphoto.com

Making Flex Profiler Work

Trying to improve my Actionscript debugging skills I decided to finally investigate what Adobe Flex 3 Professional Profiler is all about. David Gassner's Flex 3 Bible was not much help unfortunately. It just references it and limits itself to telling you what buttons to click in the UI to start it but doesn't give a detailed explanation on it.

Obviously, it didn't work for me. Opened up a project in Flex, clicked Run/Profile and nothing happened. At first I thought it was because it was an pure Actionscript Project but then after researching a bit I found out that I was not alone, it is a fairly common problem with FB3 Pro.

This post from arielsommeria.com helped me the most but I still couldn't make it work. Trying out different things, I finally made it work when I entered the ProfilerAgent.swf path like so in the mm.cfg:

[Windows Vista]
PreloadSwf=file:///C:/Users/[profile name]/[Flex Workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/com.adobe.flash.profiler/ProfilerAgent.swf?host=localhost&port=9999

This is, the file system path not the paths that appeared on every post online.

I hope it helps somebody and also check out the following video explanation of Flex Profiler from Adobe TV

Twitter Flawed Profile Status Options

I really hate OAuth, the secure authorization open protocol which allows applications to get access to Twitter profiles without requesting the user to enter a username and password. I've worked with Google AuthSub for a Dopplr feed integration before and it was much simpler to work with...

I believe that there is a profile status option missing in Twitter.I think they should have a profile status that is private, meaning that you authorize people to follow you and chose whether to follow them back and still have the twitter timeline public for all to see, subscribe to through RSS or consume as XML.

The way it is now is that you are either completely public or completely private but the reason many users (like myself) are protecting their accounts is due to fake followers that have nothing to do with you or your interests and are simply pushing Twitts to your account. I want to decide who follows me and who to follow and at the same time have my timeline public. Another downside to the private status is that you won't appear on searches, so people cannot find you by things you write and tag.

Oh! and Twitter also closed their crossdomain policy file so no direct flash consumption of any syndication or service they offer.

Tiny URLS and Search Engines

I was wondering today while posting to Twitter if tiny url references would be counted towards Google, Yahoo and other search engines rankings... It turns out that it doesn't.

From Tiny.cc:

We block search engine robots and spiders from following
our redirect URLs. Using Tiny.cc in an effort to boost
search engine rankings is useless.

It makes sense from the anti-spam point of view but it is also killing legitimate references... I guess it pays to have a short domain name and link urls as it relates to Twitter specially.