Anyway, here’s a regex recipe that might be useful for someone else who wants to redirect a domain while still being able to access the old wordpress admin area. If your url structure is the same for both sites, links that point to posts on the old site should automagically redirect to the new.

Just put this in the .htaccess file for your old domain:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/(wp-login\.php|wp-admin/|wp-content/|wp-includes/).*
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdoman.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I get what he’s trying to do with this. See, race in the South is still a much more confrontational issue than in the rest of the US. I’m going to speak plainly about perception and stereotypes here…the perception is that black folks are lazy and don’t wanna work, and with food stamps and all their welfare babies they can take advantage of the system so they don’t have to. Which is why so many white Southerners are Republicans, because all they see is abuse of the welfare system and they’re sick of paying for LaTonya’s Section 9 housing while she drives a newer car than they do (my family maintains low-end rental housing, sadly I have seen this). And since small Southern towns are small and everybody shops at the same Wal-Mart, the racial divide is very prominent.

And for a specific personal example, the first time I encountered racism was in middle school, must have been the early 90′s? My new best friend was a black girl, which I didn’t think had any significance whatsoever, because kids never do until they’re taught so. I asked my mother if my friend could come spend the night, and my mother — my dear mother, who I love — said no, because “it just wasn’t right.” It was completely unfathomable.

So he’s trying to start the conversation where white Southerners are today, which is very far back, to bring race issues to common ground. Which is honorable. But to do this, he also includes immature thinking about how his generation didn’t cause slavery, or fight to protect the institution of slavery, but is still blamed for these horrible abuses. He just wants to fly his rebel flag, because Southern pride! Brad Paisley, do you realize that even though the current generation of African Americans weren’t personally enslaved, that they’re still suffering the social and economic consequences? It’s not directly your fault, but that doesn’t mean it’s an accident.

And, omg, LL Cool J. Cool J, no. Don’t advocate for erasing your OWN historical context. In his own words:

I wasn’t there when Sherman’s March turned the south into firewood
I want you to get paid but be a slave I never could

If you don’t judge my do-rag
I won’t judge your red flag

Quite frankly I’m a black Yankee but I’ve been thinkin’ about this lately
The past is the past, you feel me
Let bygones be bygones
RIP Robert E. Lee but I’ve gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me, know what I mean

Do you, really, know what he means?

I’m going to monitor my Facebook feed (99% Southerners) to see what kind of conversation this song stirs up, if any. Who knows, maybe it’ll actually do some good. It’s not the song about prejudice Southerners need, but it’s the song we deserve.

Today is my last day at Palm. I say this with regret, both for what could have been and missing out on what is yet to be, but also with relief for being able to begin a new chapter in my career.

The image above was taken at the Palm campus store during the first hours of the infamous TouchPad fire sale, where the device suddenly became a hot commodity and eager buyers lined up across campus every day for weeks just to get one, and for a brief, shining moment, the TouchPad was the #2 tablet on the market. This is how I choose to remember Palm, being stunned and a little high with the unexpected excitement, minus the knowledge that we were trying to make the best of an unwinnable situation.

Yes…the sad story of Palm has been beaten to death, so I choose to remember the fun I’ve had.  In a failing semblance of chronological order:

• Getting invited to the webOS launch party in 2009 (this was actually a couple months before I got hired).  Met someone who at the time I described as “that cute guy with the glasses,” and for the past two years have had the privilege of calling my boyfriend.
• Organizing preDevCamp, which had 1000 attendees and was held in 80 cities around the world shortly :) after the launch of the Palm Pre.
• The New Year’s Eve 1000th app countdown, which actually required so much last minute, half-drunken coordination with the App Catalog ops team that we were all kinda surprised we nailed the timing right at midnight.
• Referring to the ops team as “the nerds” whenever the App Catalog broke, and getting away with it.
• The App Catalog blanket.
• The App Catalog license plate (which I’m not giving up).
• The Oprah moment when every attendee of NYC Dev Day got a Pre 2.
• Ok, so…there’s this style of drinking glass I really like.  I mean, this glass shares a piece of my soul.  But you can only buy them by the case, which is way too many glasses for one person to handle.  So when Josh Marinacci and James Harris and I found these glasses on our table when we went out to eat after NYC Dev Day, we took the obvious course of action.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to steal water glasses when an attentive waiter keeps hovering to refill them?  So hard.
• Getting kidnapped by SCALE9x attendees while screaming “The hackers! The hackers have got me!  Help, someone file a DMCA takedown!” (Whoever successfully delivered me to the WebOS Internals booth won a phone or something. Also, this stunt almost got security involved thinking I was being kidnapped for reals.)
• Being named one of the most influential women in mobile tech by LAPTOP Magazine.  (J and K, thank you for the roles you played in this.  You are forever on my good side.  :)
• Inside jokes:  Snoopy.  Unicorn boy.  Jiggly Boobies.  Palm Frogger, aka trying to avoid getting hit by a car when walking across Mary Ave. to get from SV1 to SV3.  Last man standing.  The Enyo baby tattoo bounty (which is still open).  Midgets on unicycles.  I’m no meteorologist, but I’m pretty sure it’s raining bitches.
• Launching the Pre 2, Veer, and especially the TouchPad.  Hell, I’m giving myself technical credit on the Pre3, too. (But nothing else.  You know who you are!)
• Getting to know so many great developers.  You guys are my extended family.
• Everything WebOS Internals has done to build the most elegant, civilized, trustworthy hacker community a company could ever hope for.

There are surely more good memories that I’ve missed, so feel free to add yours in the comments.

As a friend who’s been ex-Palm for longer than I’ve worked here once told me, Palm DNA is strong.  Employees will come and go like so many renewed cells in a body, and they will continue to make amazing products.  Enyo 2 exited beta just last week, which marks a new beginning for web developers to bring this DNA beyond webOS, same as I’ll bring this DNA with me.  I will always consider myself a friend of the Enyo project, and will continue to support and promote Enyo developers as I can.

As for what’s next, I’m taking some time to spend with family before starting my next thing, which I’ll share soon enough.  But as I’ve said several times this week:  the Internet is a small place, and may our projects intersect again in the future.

PS: Your mom, bitches.

A couple months ago, I found a beautiful vintage camera at a thrift store. I had no idea how to even open it, or if film was still available…and the $50 price tag was just outside of my impulse buy zone. I copied down all the info I could and went home to research, and by research I mean that I asked twitter for permission.

Dieter has seen this play out before, so of course he immediately told me to buy the damn thing and get it over with, but I wanted to make a rational decision here. Yes, I could get film, but the price was a little high, especially for something that may or may not even work. But once dear friend and smart gadget nerd Greg told me to go for it, I apparently bolted out the door immediately to go snag it.

Once it was mine and the acquisition adrenaline wore off, then I started really appraising my new toy. My Land camera turned out to have a few flaws, but thankfully nothing that seems to impact operation. If you find yourself in the same adrenaline-fueled situation, here’s a handy list of what you should check:

Inspect the bellows
Turn the camera upside down and flip the little switchy thing on the right side to open the back. Inside, the first thing you should notice is the nice, neat folds for the bellows. If there’s a metal cartridge thing in the way, remove it but don’t throw it away. If the bellows are rumpled in any way, most experts recommend passing on the camera since they’re a real pain in the humps to fix. However, mine are moderately crushed and will probably get worse with time, but they aren’t a problem so far.

Check for roller corrosion
Check the silver roller on the inside of the back. When pulling out prints, this roller squeezes chemicals over the paper and can get corroded.

Extend the bellows
Now look at the front of the camera and find the white arrow pointing up. From this angle it’ll be right below the red shutter button. Push this piece up to release the bellows and gently slide them out until you hear a click. This piece is also labeled with the number 1, and is your focus mechanism. Move it left and right with your index fingers to adjust the bellows and focus.

Check for light leaks
With the back open, point the bellows towards a light source and look inside for light leaks. If you see holes but the bellows are otherwise sound, then this is an easy fix.

Meet the viewfinder
Now finally, look through the viewfinder! It’ll be dimmer than a modern camera, but that’s ok. There are actually two viewfinders, the big square one for framing and a small circle for focus. Look through the circle and move the focus levers back and forth to align your subject.

Test the battery
Land cameras have an “electronic eye” to calculate automatic exposure, so that means there’s a battery in there somewhere! Pull up on the left side of the back of the camera and you’ll probably find a big corroded mess. This is easy to clean as long as the connector and wires are still sound. Land cameras take funky batteries, but you can get the No. 531 used in the 100 from Amazon, or you can modify it to use AA batteries.

Fire the shutter
This step will probably fail on thrift store cameras, but it’s worth a shot. To test the shutter, push down the white #3 lever to cock it, look through the circle viewfinder and move the #1 levers to focus, then look through the square viewfinder and press the red #2 button to fire the shutter. No, these instructions don’t follow the clearly numbered sequence, but trust me, it’s a better habit to get into. Anyway, if you hear one click that means the shutter mechanics are probably ok but the battery is dead, if you hear two clicks then you lucked into finding a working battery, and if you hear no clicks, then…well, there’s probably something broken and unless you’re a genius tinker type, I don’t recommend buying the camera.

If your camera passes these tests and is $50 or less, then buy it. It’s still an unproven gadget until you pull out a successful image, but this should be good enough verification to give it a shot. If you want to skip the uncertainty and throw down for a known working camera, you can try ebay (although most are untested) or buy a fully reconditioned and/or upgraded camera from the up and coming landcameras.com.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through your first image and share what I learned while shooting my first pack. I suggest starting with Fuji FP-3000B black and white film (I buy from B&H or Amazon) since it works well in most indoor light situations, but you can also buy Fuji FP-100C color film if you know you’ll be shooting with plenty of light (for scale, FP-3000B is 3000 speed film, and FP-100C is 100 speed film). You can also get film from The Impossible Project and other sources, but save the special film for when you know what you’re doing.

I have a one-week opportunity to pre-order a Lytro light-field camera. It’s a revolutionary way of thinking about focus, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and I haven’t decided yet if I’m willing to bet $400 on Lytro having the right answers.

They’re pitching their product as a solution for the focus problem, framing the technology to make the camera seem more accessible to the everyman. This is all wrong. Auto-focus is smarter than the everyman, and there is no focus problem. Fortunately for Lytro’s marketing team, this product has landed squarely in the sights of the hardcore photography enthusiast (and based on comments on Lytro’s blog today, looks like they weren’t prepared for that). Hardcore enthusiasts understand that the point of this technology is to create a new photographic genre, to use interactive focus to tell a story.

I’m approaching this format moreso like video. Single images tell a story, but interactive images develop as you explore them. These storylines could consist of unexpected objects in the fore/background, different expressions on people’s faces as they react to an event, a sense of moving through a scene, accentuating infinity…and I can guarantee that there will be Lytro porn.

The hardware, in this case, isn’t enough. To nurture their niche userbase, Lytro also needs to create a system that connects users to share techniques and inspiration. Enthusiasts just want a creative outlet and recognition, so this could be very compelling. When outsiders stumble across this energy, they’ll be drawn in and want to belong.

But there are considerable downsides. Lytro’s v1 product offers no control of the image. I could live with auto exposure, maybe, but it gives me pause that these images won’t be compatible with conventional photo editing tools. No brightness, no levels, no color balance, no pixel destroying Instagram filters. As much as I would love to see a revival of doing that shit with glass, Lytro would do well to release an image processing library and give 3rd party developers a place in their community, too. This has an added benefit of maintaining momentum by giving users new tools to play with after the initial novelty wears off.

And in a few years, Adobe will be able to do this with photos from your existing camera. At the Adobe Max conference last week, engineers gave a sneak peek into technology that can take a blurry image taken from any camera, apply motion sensing algorithms that detect exactly how you wiggled when you took the photo, then line those pixels back up again to create a sharp image. It’s still no small feat to compile this data into an interactive file format, but the company who extends photographers’ existing toolsets with a pure software play will ultimately win.

I’m eager to explore a new creative format NOW, but $400 could also buy an iPhone 4S or the Galaxy Nexus next month. Or half a Nikon 1. Like most other gadget purchases, I’ll probably spend several days trying to talk myself out of it, then go ahead and buy one just so I’ll stop wasting my time dwelling on it.

TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of anything. Certainly no one at TechCrunch. This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark.

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I still too freshly remember the anxiety of waiting for news to unfold while the house you’ve poured your heart into suddenly comes crashing down, the frustration of wanting to take matters in your own hands, to DO something, say something, reach out to the people who care and ask for their help to make your story known, to say how much you MATTER…

Unfortunately, companies rarely have approved messaging ready for this kind of situation.

Emotions are high over at TechCrunch right now, and the team clearly isn’t going for the standard radio silence PR play and waiting for the situation to play out. Because politics and bad decisions aside, for the people on the front lines, the world they know is fucking solid. I respect the hell out of them for standing up to their critics and saying that, raw emotions and all. Especially so.

My sage advice for TechCrunch? Focus. They will never break you if you stick together and keep telling your story.

Edited to add a comment from Scoble:

Several years ago Arrington and I were headed to some conference and I asked him about how he sees himself. Did he consider himself a blogger or a journalist, I asked. His answer stuck with me all this time: “I’m an entertainer.”

After finishing this post, I was sitting here in the dark of my office thinking the same thing (but without the real life story to back it up). The web responds well to showmanship. Not that anyone should be over dramatic or start shit just for attention — Internet showmanship is a realistic balance of emotional highs and lows, and few are able to take their readers on a journey quite like Michael Arrington. I leave the discussion of whether journalism is an appropriate environment for that kind of theatrics as an exercise for the reader.

I’m having trouble finding words right now, so I’ll let the post speak for itself:

“Openly admitting on her website that she is “passionate about sharing life’s little details,” Lisa Brewster proves her dedication with the microflashes of her life that spill out via Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, and her personal wiki. Now she has to convince those making apps to become passionate about webOS, as HP and Palm try to jumpstart the platform. With the tech world impatiently awaiting webOS tablets and a wave of new smart phones to compete against iOS and Android, Brewster’s goal of making developers “feel like they’re part of something awesome” will be key.”

This same page consists of an Intel fellow, a startup founder, a professor…and then me, that webOS girl on twitter. I could understand if this were a post about interesting tech women in social media, but these people are making serious change in the world. Mind = blown.

The world is watching us, guys. Everybody on.

Tools are as creative as the minds using them, and the best tools get out of the way to help us live better (inspired, connected) lives. And for all its pixel destroying flaws, Instagram is great at that.

Since I couldn’t actually use the app without an iPhone (which I later bought just so I could continue this experiment), I was racking my brain trying to figure out why everyone found it so compelling. I got in a discussion with Patrick about it during my last trip to San Diego, and he thinks it’s because constraining everyone to the same set of tools essentially gives us all the same camera, and constraints fuel creativity. I feared it was an anti-web conspiracy, something about how Instagram was making itself to be a first class sharing mechanism rather than the web (which is a Thing these days, aka Path). I think both of these hypotheses play a part in Instagram’s success, but what it really boils down to is the simple fact that this is the only app that nails the mobile photography workflow.

Before really letting myself get sucked in to Instagram, I tried all the other iOS photography apps I’d heard of — many, many more than I mention here. Hipstamatic is great if you’re in a fiddly mood, but it’s also slow and you risk losing the moment you wanted to capture in the first place. Camera+ is powerful, but I find the editing step unnecessarily complicated for mobile, I think because it offers a plethora of options but none of the ones I want. I realize this is an ironic criticism for a pro-Instagram post, but most of the time I just want to bump the sharpness and contrast instead of plastering my photos with a “look.”

On Instagram, the workflow is to either take or select an image, choose one of a few filters that are way more heavy handed than I’d care for (but are defining the photographic zeitgeist of 2011), then one more screen to enter optional location, description, and toggle sharing services. Shoot, edit, share…done. I capture a moments without taking myself out of them, which leads to much more introspective results and therefore better photos.

That’s what I love about cameras on Android. I can add a little punch within the camera app itself and immediately see how the settings are affecting my scene before I take the photo — 99% of the time I just leave it on +1 sharpness, contrast, and saturation. Auto white balance with the Evo is spot on. Getting basic settings out of the way allows me to focus on composition, which is the ideal way to start taking better photos instead of knowing I can rely on a vignette or leaky filter to cover up the boring spots. I don’t really need sharing settings, because I email my photos to flickr and have flickr configured to post them to twitter.

webOS doesn’t have a lot of play in this area yet since the camera APIs are still in private beta, but so far developers have come up with creative solutions like doing the image processing on a remote server. MOLO‘s filter set really stands out, and I hope that by evaluating other experiences my guys burst out of the gate with some of the best mobile photo apps on the market. PS: Even without editing apps, Palm’s exposure and white balance algorithms are smarter than the average bear. Now if we could just get rid of all these fixed focus lenses…

I’m still gonna hold Instagram’s feet to the fire about building a stronger web presence (and an api), but at least now I understand why they made the tradeoff to first perfect their core functionality and build an audience. In the meantime, you can check my flickr stream to see all the moments I otherwise wouldn’t have captured.