Archive for March, 2006

For all those who wonder about the compatibility of Minolta lenses and accessories bought before the move to digital technology with the recent Konica-Minolta Digital SLR (Dynax 7D and Dynax 5D), I can give some bits of advice that may be useful before buying a body from Konica-Minolta.

First, the Minolta lenses seem to have no compatibility problem. In some rare cases, it has been heard that Sigma lenses had to be brought back to after-sales department to be refitted with a new chip and be made compatible again with the new Konica-Minolta bodies. In my case, Minolta Xi 28-105mm zoom (with its featured motor-actuated zoom feature), Minolta 200mm/2.8 APO G tele-lens (and not a young one) and the Sigma 400mm/5.6 tele-lens all worked well at the first try.

On the contrary, flashes seem to be in trouble. For me, the Minolta 3500xi flash never produced a correct image (as announced by Konica-Minolta). I bought a second-hand Minolta 5600HS (I got a considerable power boost, too).

For Jean-Pierre A.

During my recent photo safari to the Masai Mara park, there is a time to be singled out. It allowed me to take the following photo.

As a matter of fact, this magnificent female cheetah is less that two meters from me…
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I’m back from a full week of photo safari in the Masai Mara park (Kenya). Here are a few figures to sum it up (before the photos).
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Some information for the photographer going to Masai Mara.

Maps

Some maps collected on the Internet to give you minimal directions or some orientation. As you can see, this is really bordering the Tanzanian Serengeti reserve (South to Masai Mara).

The safari from Objectif Nature happens in the Western part of the Park, South of Oloololo gate.

Animals

Apart from the animals I spotted and you can see on the photos (including lions everywhere, some cheetahs, rare leopards), I was told there are a few black rhinos (very hard to see).

Best time to go

July/August is the time to see the migration of wildebeest (and zebras) over the Mara river. Millions of animals moving at the same time, impressive sights, compelling occasions to hunt for all carnivores (lions and crocodiles). But the exact date depends heavily on rain patterns and change each year.

On the web site of the United States Secret Service, you will find a very deep article about money, banknotes and counterfetied banknotes, describing american dollars of course. But, more generally, this information is also applicable to countless other currencies.

If you find a similar article about Euro banknotes, thanks to inform me in order to add it here.

This little file is used to protect part of your web site against the visits of some automated robots (like the one sent by Google to index the pages of yuor site).

• The syntax
• My own web site was checked

This glossary contains brief definitions of terms frequently used in reliability engineering and life data analysis. The purpose of these entries is to provide a quick explanation of the terms in question, not to provide extensive explanations or mathematical derivations. For those desiring such detailed descriptions, links have been provided when possible for more extensive coverage elsewhere in ReliaSoft’s reliability engineering knowledge base.

From Weibull.com.

It’s now done! I just left to Kenya. I intend to spend more than a week in a small camp in order to shoot (photos) at lions, lepards, antelopes, and other big game animals. I’ll select the best images for this web site when I’m back. And I’ll try to give you feedback about how to go in the wilderness with a digital camera (my Minolta-Konica Dynax/Maxxum 7D D-SLR). See you later here!

As my friends and the readers of this web site already know, I am ready to leave for a photo safari in Kenya. In such a trip, the question of what you need to bring with you is always an important one. As a matter of fact, you cannot (or don’t want to) be loaded like a beast of bruden, but it would be a pity to travel 10,000 km to discover that you forgot an important part of your photo equipment or that you are taking an unexpected risk.

If my bag description can be considered representative or useful (I still try to make it as simple as possible), I invite you to check it with me.
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Everything shows that the French Members of Parliament (Députés) are currently discussing the end of the attempt to install in France a law that would favor freedom for Internet downloaders.

The new law currently lacks any reference to the global license (and its explicitly included remuneration of artists whose music would be downloaded by the 3 to 4 million French P2P downloaders). On the contrary, it legalizes DRM (that will soon limit the rights that the user have in front of the CD she just bought).

Hope seems to be disappearing rapidly during the current debates.

Some of you may have detected like one visitor (who left a message in the comment zone of an article) that the contact page was no longer working. It was a quick and dirty solution to protect us against a spammer trying to (and succeeding to) use my contact page to send email to another destination than the one originally intended. It’s know as an email injection attack.

I had to insert a protection code inspired from the one proposed by Christian Lescuyer on his web site.

If, despite my attention and my tests, you notice something fishy or not working, please, send me a short message (writing directly to my bad_email roumazeilles.net.

Download from Internet Archive Movie information from IMDB.org

This is a great classic movie from Robert Wiene (Germany, 1920). Even if the plot unfolds a bit more slowly than most today’s horror films, even if the quality of the image pales compared to 21st century blockbusters and their budgets, the movie is leaving a significant trace in the viewer’s mind. For sure, the make-ups and the studio sets are extraordinarily modern to the point that they are setting a style by themselves.

On the screen dump above, we can have a view of the Dr Caligari’s office where the studio set is most visible with its slanted walls and furniture, the black and white curly paints on the floor.
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The Internet Archive Movie information from IMDB.org

Thanks to the efforts of a few half-mad half-genial men, The Internet Archive is attempting to archive all the contents of the world wide web. This led to the creation of an exceptional hardware/software combination (for example, there are hundreds of Terabytes of memory online).

While they had created this, they started collecting public domain material and – most interestingly for us cinema lovers – they have now a nice collection of full feature movies (mostly dating back before 1964) gone back into the public domain. I will try to give you some examples and a selection of some of these films I believe are the most interesting culturally and historically.

It happens when several PC are configured as serveurs on the same Microsoft network using one of the many versions of Microsoft Windows. If the PCs can all assume the role of a server (for files or printers), it sometimes happens that the network services seems to stop working unexpectedly (one PC becomes no longer visible by the others).

In this case, there could be a small configuration error which usually has no impact on anything but can become really annoying if several Netbios servers are present on the same Microsoft network without a WINS server (there are a lot of conditions, ain’t it? but this is common on a small networks hacked too quickly like mine).

If you go to the configuration panel, then to the network configuration, you will find the configuration for sharing files and printers on the Microsoft network. There, you must ensure tha:

• parameter Announce LM is set to No
• parameter Browse Master is set to Auto

It’s as simple as that. But it’s taken me hours to build the solution from the Internet.

Surprisingly, a large number of people come right to my own web site just to collect the OpenOffice logo. I am sure that this is only a fluke, but I’d like to help them finding what they want.

If you need a copy of those logos for your web site, please, do not directly include these images in your web site but make a copy of them locally. It will improve the snap’ness of your web site and reduce the undue load on mine.

Remember that OpenOffice is the right tool to replace Microsoft Office. I recommend it heartily (and I have been recommending it for months if not years now).

This is obviously not fresh news, but there are significant differences between the old Star Wars movies filmed by G.Lucas in the beginning of the 1980’s and the DVD versions currently distributed. The SciFi fans fight over these differences. More simply, I found a review of the DVD Trilogy of Star Wars including comparaisons supported by images.

Imagine a second! You are in Tokyo without no change in your pockets. But you still want to have fun an bring back some impressive souvenirs (at least very different from what most tourists have been experimenting). there are 10 things to do for free in Tokyo.