News

September 2005

1999: The reader of this web site may have noticed that the list of previous news (on the right-hand column, here:) has grown with newsbits from the year 1999. As a matter of fact, I collected pages as they were published in this year on my site and I revived them (the interest is mostly for the historian, I guess).

For 300 Go, Maxtor is (sligtly) noisier than Seagate: That is what I observed after my recent purchase of a 300 gigabyte SATA hard drive from Maxtor. I could notice a (small) difference of noise level between my previous Seagate 160 GB and the new Maxtor 300 GB (16 MB cache). Not a lot, but Seagate is still the king of silence for hard discs (and I may close the PC box if it really annoys me).

New laser printer: Finally my HP LaserJet 1022 is arrived and installed. I cannot overstress the incompetence of multe-pass.com: They needed exactly a month to ship a product annonced as available within 5 to 9 days.

Sigma 28-105mm f2.8-4 DG: I do not intend to buy it just ofr a review but, from what can be read in the specification, this is a very nice lens that just appeared in the Sigma line. Its focal length seems either well adapted to full frame digital single lens reflex (D-SLR ou DSLR) or pleasant for a small sensor DLSR when you prefer long focal lengths (like I do). Nice diaphragm aperture (f/2.8 is quite well).

Exists with Sigma, Canon, Nikon, Pentax and Konica Minolta AF mounts. Less than 200€.

Today (but not only today) Opera is free: After the 10-year birthday give-away operation of Opera, my prefered web browser is becoming totally free. You can get it for free (as in free beer).

Immediate consequence: more than a million of downloads in a matters of days.

My advice: Go and get it at least because Opera is a web browser with very few security flaws and an exceptionally good mouse movements management to help browse more easily (real great idea!).

DRM #8 (P2P tactics): The legal attacks of the RIAA or the MPAA against individual downloaders using P2P networks leaded some to choose tactics limiting riscs. In the article from Slyck.com, there is a small set of these summarized as:

Not using Fastrack: The majority(96% in 2004) of those getting caught have been using Fastrack (Kazaa, iMesh etc)
Switching to Usenet
Using Peerguardian or Protowall with a known firewall
Not sharing hundreds of Top 40 tracks or newly released movies.
When choosing mainstream Top 40 stuff, using other ways of getting their music (such as Streamripping Shoutcast etc)
Not leaving your PC on and running P2P application for days or weeks at a time
Avoiding using other people’s networks (College, work, etc) as they are generally well policed and anxious to avoid implication
Using removable drives for archived downloads and keep this away from your PC when not in use
Being cautious against malicious downloads, to avoid downloading a Trojan or a virus by the use an up to date virus checker
Keeping up to date with what is happening in the world of P2P, as what happens to others can equally affect them
And taking independent legal advice if things go wrong

Interesting, a bit bizarre, but probably quite efficient taking into account the actual strategy of the adversaries.

Stock exchange: I grouped the links to web sites about Stock Exchange, investissement and financial analysis on a single page.

Projection calculator: is the perfect tool for the potential buyer of a videoprojector. Indeed, it is difficult to decide if this important equipment of your Home Cinema will be precisely installed at the right distance for the right screen size (zooming is only a partial solution to this problem). You will find there, for all models of all brands (Sony, Panasonic, Sanyo, Hitachi, Epson, inFocus, etc.), a web page that will allow to compute all of the parameters involved and to judge the margin left by each and every videoprojector model.

Quelques autres idées :

Mes liens préférés
Old bookmarks

Firewall and local network security: This is the common and somwhat technical link between the best web links to products, solutions and information I assembled about computer security.

Tux Linux test #3 (Linspire): Among the many potential competitors to Microsoft coming from the Linux world, one instantly built itself a name a few years ago: Lindows. Of course, this being a Linux distribution willing to bridge the gap between open source distribution and the Windows interface, Microsoft sent its lawyers to stop this name and the company is now named Linspire. It survived and distributes an Operating System (OS) relatively cheap (20-40$) willing to be particularly welcoming to users already experienced with Windows. I had recently the pleasure to take advantage of a one-day promotional offer for free licenses. Again, this is a LiveCD (you can merely boot from the CD-ROM without needing a full installation on your hard drive - no formatting, no partitionning, no such dangerous operation but you still keep the option for a later full installation as usual).

The test shows one thing difficult to evaluate in mathematical figures, but it is nonetheless perceptible that the Windows user is immediately at ease with this system. Menus and dialog boxes are different but, believe it or not, everything falls neatly into place and you easily find what you look for (more or less in the place you epxect it to be). Very pleasant indeed. Default interesting applications are:

Graphic windows use a transparent mode that shouts "Modern interface!" all along. This puts Linspire in the most pleasant category.
The Internet suite seems to be proprietary (at least it does not tell were it comes from). It works well despite a weird sudden crash of the web browser I had to observe once.
Network services are very well organized and contain everything you'd want for Internet as well as for you Windows-compatible LAN (Samba software is easy to use and configure thanks to a clear wizard set of questions).
Upgrades are easily handled thanks to the CNR interface that gives access to upgrades as well as additional applications (free or commercial). Efficient and simple. But the applications are not always fresh and young; For example, the WINE Windows emulator is a very old version of the product; You will need to do manual installs from download sites.

Pros :

Download was reasonably quick and the BitTorrent links works to accelerate this for people using this P2P tool. It even works for the downloads of registered/paying versions.
My ATI Radeon 9800 pro graphic was immediately recognized (up to 1600x1200 at 60Hz). At last some good Radeon driver!
The network was automagically configured (using the DHCP server of my Linksys BEFSX41 router), but the reconfiguration is very easy during the installation.
MP3 could be read right out of the box.
OpenOffice applciation suite is installed as a good replacement for MS Office.
The firewall is easy to configure using the simple questions-led choices. Good.
If you want to build your own web site, the excellent NVU program is installed.

But some cons, too:

Live-CD load time was astonishingly long. Not a major problem, but at times I wasn't sure the PC was not crashed. I hope this would not be the case for the hard drive installation.
No printer is recognized during installation, but you can easily add them later. Unfortunately, the experience is less than pleasant. My Epson Stylus Photo 750 received a driver strictly unable to print anything. No driver is available for my HP LaserJet 4L (the LaserJet 4 driver prtoduces prints that are wrongly sized and flow out of the page). Very bad in my eyes knowing that these are not new printers and that both come from top-sellers list of their markets.
I couldn't read a single DivX file. Apparently, a video driver issue, but I couldn't neither confirm the cause nor solve the issue.
WINE only available through CNR download but in a version that saw the Great Pyramid of Egypt being built.

Anyway, the user is astonishingly well received and it is very confortable. No doubt this is a voluntary effort of the whole Linspire development team. Starting with Linspire seems a good idea, but migrating from Windows is still questionable. Note 14/20.

300 GB more: I stay fascinated by the ever-growing size of the hard drives available on the open market, like any child who would see his prefered cake growing by the day. I just bought a 300 GB SATA hard disc from Maxtor for my main machine and it cost only 133€.

It is immediately named DAWKINS in praise of the emminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins whose most known book I am currently reading (“The selfish gene”). As the computer itself holds the name of Darwin and one of its hard disc has already been named BEAGLE (the name of the boat Darwin embarked for the exploration that inspired his theory of evolution), that only seemed normal.

DRM #7 (recording from web radios): Where exchanging MP3 files on P2P networks is legally challenging, listening to a web radio is still quite normal (the radio has full responsibility to pay the broadcasting rights). A few software tools (including Replay Music from Applian Technologies and Audacity) allow to rip and store songs in MP3 while you listen to them. It is not legally approved (only listening is authorized as for any kind of radio), you do not choose the song that is broadcasted, but this seems quite undetectable.

Abandoned Britain: photographic images of abandoned industrial sites in Great Britain.

The best card for the best game: It's the ultimate dream of the PC gamer. Even if it is not 100% feasible to compare all cards against all games, X-bit labs did a good approximation with its 17 graphic architectures match against 30 games.

Port-forwarding: For many applications installed behind a router or a firewall (P2P applications like BitTorrent, Kazaa, eMule or eDonkey or networked games), it is necessary to configure port-forwarding in order to give it full access to the Internet through the router. This is exactly what this web site does for dozens of routers:

http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm
PortForward for the LinkSys BEFSX41 router

Have fun finding the keyword: While looking at the results of a search using Google Images, try finding the keyword that was used to produce the list of images. A stragely fascinating game.

Hibiscus at Kleptography.com Kleptography: A nice web site with very abstract design kind of photographies.

Browse anonymously: Some web sites that accept to make your visit anonymous.

Canon CMOS sensors: With the annoncement of a mid-range Digital SLR (near 3500€ and 12 Mega-pixels with a full frame sensor), Canon shot the competition awake. Today, they follow on this specific promotional support of their CMOS sensors with a targeted web site.

There, Canon promotes the high quality of its CMOS (theoretically less well adapted than CCD sensors to the photographic market, but often less expensive and highly optimized by Canon) and insists on the large size of its sensors (24x36mm, or full frame) that gives them a significant competitive advantage.

Xerox - Counterfeit Deterrent Marking and Banknote Detection System Counterfeit Deterrent Marking and Banknote Detection System: This is the nice (Editor's note: Are you sure?) name of a technology implemented by a large number of printer manufacturers in their laser color printers (see my own color laser comparison). It means printing (usually on the document border) a group of small fot color in light yellow (nearly invisible) that encode the brand name and the serial number of the printer (to help authorities in the fight against counterfeit doucments and banknotes, because of the excellent quality of the color prints from these machines). You may find more information on the web sites of the manufacturer (at least an indication at the bottom of the technical specification datasheet on the printer, but not always), but there is a full analysis done by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

They forgot to make a backup copy (did you?): the English Inland Revenue Department just made public that they seriously scraped their taxpayer records.

This resulted in some 364,000 people who cannot be identified being owed £82m, while another 22,000 did not pay tax due of around £6m.

As a matter of fact, this was the result of a bug in a cleansing routine that did too much work. But, worse, like you and me, they did not have archived backup copies. And it took three years to notice the glitch. Did you say eGovernment?

Chinese copies of original art work: Maybe you wondered from where came the hand-made copy of the original painting you just bought in a city of the Western world. Most probably, it came from China where they are manufactured (more than painted) by local artists. In this paper in New York Times, you will meet Zhang Libing who thinks he has painted more than 20,000 copies of Van Gogh (he is only 26, but paints them by groups of 100).

Nagin's Nightmare: CNN just sent out the full transcript of the New Orleans Mayor's emotional and (understandably) expletive-laden interview on local radio yesterday: "excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed."

ROBINETTE: What can we do here?

RAY NAGIN, MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS: Keep talking about it.

ROBINETTE: We'll do that. What else can we do?

NAGIN: Organize people to write letters and make calls to their congressmen, to the president, to the governor. Flood their doggone offices with requests to do something.

[...]

Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

DRM #6 (Windows Vista goes too far with DRM - retro?): Bizarrely, rumours about the use of Digital Rights Management in Windows Vista seem to go in all directions now. Specifically, it is said (by crypto guru Bruce Schneier) that Microsoft is stepping back and tries to avoid including it in Windows Vista. For a minimalist example, Vista would not ship to the general public with DRM functions enabled. It would be reserved to enterprises. More precise information later.

Dynax 7D tip #20: Most amateurs of digital photography when searching for a computer screen forget one little bit of advice. They will run to the flashy LCD screens in front of the store but they should run around it and look at the (old) CRT displays.

As a matter of fact, the CRT has several key advantages (and some may become decisive for digital images and quality photo production):

CRTs have an excellent gamut (number of reproducible colours). It is enough work to calibrate a screen without fighting against a limited gamut LCD.
Even if they progress quite quickly, LCDs still have a colour rendition varying with the angle of view. It's impossible to really calibrate colours in these conditions (everything is broken as soon as you move your head off the vision axis of the LCD screen), it's more difficult to produce homogeneous prints from your expensive new photo printer.
CRTs may be bulky (sure!) but they are cheap (and it does count when you already paid for the nice shiny new D-SLR). The difference is more and more perceptible with size.

How long will last your ink jet prints ? Today, inkjet printers are everywhere outputing photo images. Yesterday, silver-based prints were known for their good permanence (lasting up to a century). But is it the same for the latest inkjet prints? Henry wilhelm (of Wilhelm Imaging Research) is really the expert in evaluating this. The web site contains links to consumer-level articles (e.g. PDF copies of PCWorld articles), technical white papers for the high-end consumer, and news for the expert.

Kodak drops its films in Asia too? Kodak had recently justified its closing of plants producing silver/argentic films in Europe (and the associated job cuts) with a reply into Asia as the only viable market for camera film. the Kodak Xiamen plant, too, is now planning its output reduction....

Pro photo prints from Vandystadt: Vandystadt photo agency is in dire straits despite the exceptionnal quality of its work that stays the true world sports photo reference. You certainly know a number of their best shots (in a collection of more than 51000 images).

Today, on the Vandystadt.com web site you can order professional prints at very moderate prices (12€ and less for 22.5x30.5cm pro print, 250€ for a 40x60cm framed print). You just go and choose yours in the Vandystadt collection.

Computer security, virus and firewalls: Among my prefered web links, I selected those that seemed the most important, the most significant or the most useful in the general field of computer security. If you want to fight against computer viruses, protect yourself against all kinds of attacks (think "firewall" here), you should find exactly what you need.

Computer security, virus filters, firewall

Dynax 7D tip #19: Did I tell you what you should think about the Flash memory cards announcing ultra-high-speed data transfer rates? No? An error I am going to correct here and now. Well, with a top-notch digital camera like the Maxxum/Dynax 7D (but it's true for the other D-SLRs from Canon or Nikon), just buy the cheapest one. Let me clarify: You are told that the highest data rate is key to avoid locking your digital photo camera after a snapshot. But modern Digital-SLRs are now equipped with very big memory buffers to allow motorized shoots (9 Raw+Jpg images at 3i/s for my Maxxum/Dynax 7D, before it stops). But it also means that if you don't use long sequences (I never did this apart from rather inept demonstrations, I never went other 2 or 3 images in a row on my 7D as well as on my old Minolta 9xi), you just let the memory buffer emptying itself into the Flash memory card even if it's not the fastest SD card on the face of Earth.

I admit that I'm not a fan of sports photo. But, honestly, even if it's your case, do you go to such extremities? So, don't buy the absolute bootom price (quality is useful too ;-), but invest in larger sizes rather than higher speeds. 40x or 50x Flash memory cards are for the poor owners of a compact digital camera (with no or nearly no memory buffer).

Free reverse directory for the following european countries : France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Italy.

Dynax 7D tip #18: I found a few PDF documents to download for free from Lulu.com and they may be interesting photographers (including those using a Dynax/Maxxum 7D or a Dynax/Maxxum 5D).

Flash with the Konica-Minolta 7D by Peter Gregg (good!)
Lens Bokeh Ratings by Mike Johnston
Megapixels and Medium Format by Mike Johnston

F.E.A.R.: A new FPS (First Person Shooter) game is arriving. F.E.A.R. is already available as a downloadable demo. But you will need Windows 2000 or Windows XP (Win98 excluded).

Khoomei: This Siberian technique of harmonic polyphonic singing (but for one singer only!) is still as ignored as the small Tuva Republic. khoomei.com is the home for the International Association for Harmonic Singing, and there you will find tutorials as well as MP3s and videos.

Debunking science myths: Some assertions - considered scientifically sound - aren't even worth the paper (or the web page) where they appear.

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September 2005

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