The moon rises over the new National Theater in Beijing Wednesday July 16, 2008. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

The Big Picture is one of my favorite new websites. Every few days developer and curator Alan Taylor publishes his latest photography finds from the news wires.  And like the title suggests, the pictures are big, bigger than you see on most sites.  I especially liked a recent collection of photos taken around Beijing as that city prepares for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

You really owe it to yourself to start using OpenDNS for three reasons: it’s free, it’ll speed up your web surfing (a little), and it will help protect you against phishing attempts, drive-by downloads, and other evil things created by the evildoers of the Internet.

The last reason is the most important, especialy now. In case you hadn’t read the news, the domain name system (DNS), which is basically the address book of the Internet, is fatally flawed. And this week an exploit was released to take advantage of this flaw. The flaw allows evildoers to “poison” a DNS server’s data with phony addresses, which allows them to “hijack” domains to make you think you’re browsing the site you see in your address bar when really your browsing the evildoer’s site. Imagine this happening to your bank’s website and you start to see the problem. Usernames, passwords, anything you enter and submit into web forms all go to the evildoer. Game over.

There are patches for the DNS flaw, but many Internet Service Providers, even the big ones like ATT, haven’t fully deployed the patches yet. OpenDNS is fully patched. So if you switch to OpenDNS now, you’ll be protected right away.

Try out OpenDNS for a week or two and see if you like it.  I bet you will.  (And, no, I’m not being paid by OpenDNS to write this. I just think it’s a great service.)

And this is the same photo as seen by Firefox:

Safari’s rendering is exactly how it should look. Firefox both brightens the exposure and softens the colors.

Another example, and this is the one where I first noticed the problem. Here is a photo taken specifically to highlight the bright red color. This is how it looks in Safari:

And here it is in Firefox:

The reds are much more muted in Firefox and it looks like a completely different exposure. Safari comes much closer to the original.

So what’s going on? Why do I only notice this for some of my own photos? Well, I think it must have to do with my photographic workflow. The photos above were taken in RAW format with my Nikon D50. I imported them into Adobe Lightroom, played around with the exposure and color a bit, then exported them to JPEG. There must be something about the process that messes with Firefox’s little brain and causes it to reinterpret how the images should look.

At least, that’s my guess. Does anyone have details on what this effect is and how to overcome it?

In the meantime, I’m considering switching to Safari when looking at photos online. It seems to most accurately present a photo as it is meant to be seen.

Here’s all you have to do: choose DreamHost to serve your web site (like the one you’re reading right now); then suggest to your friends and family that they do the same. Ask them to name you as a referral, or to use your referral code, and you will earn money. Also, put your referral code in a link to DreamHost on your web site; then when someone clicks on it, and signs up for a hosting plan, you get paid. Now that’s easy.

How much will you earn? You decide. Either get 10% off everything your referrals spend on hosting, plus 5% for people they refer, or choose a $97 one-time payment per referral, plus $5 for sub-referrals.

I’ve been with DreamHost for 14 months. The service has been excellent. And in those 14 months my net earnings from DreamHost are in the three figures. That’s after deducting two years worth of hosting fees.

Like I said, it’s a little bit of money, but it’s easy money. Get it while you can.

Further reading informed me of a fictitious rabbit character in the comic “Bloom County” named “Hodge-Podge” who is “extremely conservative and fanatical about most things, though often ignorant and naive about just what those things are.” He later had “an affair with Rosebud the Basselope, resulting in Rosebud’s pregnacy with jackabasselopes.”

There is, of course, hodgepodge.com, an apparent placeholder domain for a mysterious startup called Product Pipe, Inc. They are seeking investment capital in case you may be interested.

There are the Hodge Podge Cottages located on Caddo Lake in Uncertain, TX. Caddo Lake’s claim to fame is to be “the only natural lake in Texas and by far the most mysterious.” I’m quite sure it is.

And don’t forget the Hodgepodge Society, who’s website invites you to “Please, by all means, depress our royal crest to enter.” Perhaps another time.

So as you can see, a hodgepodge of information about the word “hodgepodge” is available to you should you seek it. In fact, one might say the Internet is a great hodgepodge of information which does, in many ways, resemble mutton broth with vegetables, or perhaps a litter of jackabasselopes.

Until next time…

Let’s see if it can post an image…

Yep. Now about this ability to insert a map or aerial image from Windows Live Local…

Wow.

Me: Yeah, that’ll never work. eProject file uploads usually fail on files greater than 30MB. Try the new file transfer appliance and let me know if you have any questions.

Him: Thanks, but he wanted to get this file to the client yesterday so we decided to make a CD and Fed/X it to him.

Me: Wow, FedEx can deliver it yesterday? That’s fast!

Him: Yeah, they are fast.

ThickBox is Cody Lindley’s take on LightBox which is a technique for using JavaScript to overlay images on the current page. ThickBox takes it further by letting you overlay HTML pages as well.

(Google Analytics = kills!)