Archive for February, 2006

There are many web sites showing a photograph per week, but I usually do not find a single reason to come back the following week. In general, the quality level is rather poor, when it is not frankly low. But this time, I found a shiny gold nugget (Photo.net). The photograph of the week is often striking, interesting or surprising.

Lost, by Francisca Rivera

If you own a digital photo camera from the Nikon brand, you will certianly be interested in finding the forums of NiconCafe.com. All subjects are freely discussed (hardware gear is currently more about Nikon D200 and other digital single lens reflex cameras or lenses that would be attached to them than about compact digital cameras or analog ones) and you will also find image galleries.

How many images, how many repetitions of the same photos will we need before publicly admitting that the American autorities in Irak (and maybe in Washington) went overboard and that the image of western democracy is torn down by the acts of those soldiers who told they were coming to bring democracy, peace and freedom to a country who did not ask all that flood and with powers that have nothing to do with Churchill depiction of “the worse system, except all others”.

Let’s hope that the next American elections will bring some hope. In the mean time, I am ashamed that some people may think that a freedom lover could be associated with the Abu Graib acts.

According to The Inquirer, it is a wooping 50% of all current PCs that will not be able to display the nice new graphic interface of Windows Vista. Be ready to buy a new graphics card in just a few months for this.

This could become a real problem for Vista because one of the best reasons to upgrade Windows has always been to have the added pleasure of the newest graphic candy that a new version brings to the old operating system.

Her Majesty’s police force is worried by the promised arrival of Microsoft Vista and its feature to protect data on a PC hard drive by sophisticated encryption methods - to a result of leaving a foreigner unable to read any information from the PC hard drive. As a matter of fact, this feature could well be helping bad guys (the usual suspects: terrorists, child pornography amateurs and spy-pirates) to keep their data outof the prying eyes of the police investigators.

Scotland Yard would have been asking Microsoft to provide them with a backdoor into the system in order to allow them to watch the contents of an encrypted hard drive without the password or the help of the owner (rather needed if you want an easy police investigation).

We will see if Microsoft gives in to the friendly requirements of the official authorities (taking the risk to jeopardize the ultimate security of the data protection feature of the upcoming Windows Vista). I believe that they will not, but your opinion is as good as mine here.

Maybe not all the secrets, but a good number of ideas to keep in mind about the storage and archival of data that is pouring out of our digital cameras. Here is what is proposed by the article “Storing Your Digital Images”
(by Vincent Bockaert) seen on dpreview.com.

All you have to keep in mind is that optical media is not eternal (far from that as you know if you have been reading this web site lately).

This is just a silly attempt to create some search engine buzz around a merely invented word. Some bloggers are currently trying to give this word a maximum visibility. And it works, despite being mostly silly.

You may have wondered were the drawings of the Linux penguin come from. As a matter of fact, there was indeed somebody who draw the cute logo and it is rather easy to find the real author.

Larry Ewing is this guy with a pen. You will find nearly everything you want on his web site. Including a description of how he drew these penguins.

Consequently, we can learn everything about drawing Tux - this is the nice name of this nice penguin.

US girls are easy to date online! At least, that is what is told by The Register. Don’t miss that special issue article for Valentine’s day.

I thought this one was for you, Frank

This is the blog I use to test the operation of the ready-to-be-used blog installment in WordPress.com:

Microsoft announced that the poor sequel to Halo (the console video game shooter) will appear on the PC platform. But this is going to bring a new marketing twist: It will only run on Vista, the upcoming Operating System of Microsoft.

It is not known if the reason is to use an environment where copying a HD-DVD media will certainly be more difficult than on any other platform (software copy protection), or if the reason is just to try and find a way to promote Vista (surprisingly, Vista is not considered by the consumer as the next great thing).
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When you use a blog engine software as WordPress, you soon discover (as I do right now) that one of the great helps this is bringing to the web site owner is the quick and easy reconfiguration and the fast adaptation of the web site that becomes possible.

For example, the categories list (the news themas appearing in the menu on the right side here) can be modified in a matter of seconds without the need for a lot of HTML code. A few clicks and the list is changed. A mere program line and the presentation changed.