Archive for April, 2006

This is probably the shouts heard in the corridors of the marketing department at Universal Video when preparing the launch of HD-DVD. In the coming month, the first titles for high-definition DVD will be:

• Serenity: action and science fiction
• Doom: horror, action and science fiction
• Apollo 13: suspense and action
• Cinderella Man: boxing and love
• Jarhead: US Marines in Kuwait
• Assault on Precinct 13: action
• The Chronicles of Riddick: action and science fiction
• Van Helsing: vampires and action
• U-571: underwater suspense
• The Bourne Supremacy: action and science fiction

Of course, you’ll have to have one of the rare HD-DVD players, the right TV set, etc. But Universal clearly targeted its public for this debut.

As we are interested into the HDCP/HDMI technology that the manufacturers are preparing for a wide distribution, we start finding a few amazing facts.

We had seen previously that HDCP was a technology doomed to fail in front of the attacks by the media pirates, but there is already worse (for the legal users).

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The Masai Mara National Park of Kenya does not host only felines. Dogs are also present in the carnivorous fauna of the country. We’ll see some hyenas later on, but here is a jackal encounter. Little fearful dogs, nervous hunters, they are quite difficult to approach.

 

A few images I shot last weekend while the sun was shining in the French Vexin (near Paris).

Green hair

Before the flight

Colors

This is more or less the promise of the Freenet project. They just announced the availability of their fully-rewritten software program in its 0.7 version. But what is it really?

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We’ve been warned. Win98 is now nearing its official demise. In July Microsoft will stop supporting it altogether.

My machines still using it will have to move to a more recent Windows or Linux.

The technology supposed to protect the equipments aimed at digital TV with a semi-secret protocol using techniques borrowed from the military in order to ensure that only approved devices can see the previous digital data of our movies, seems to be on its way to be broken and is already the target of very serious cryptological attacks.

I just found a couple of papers describing its detailed operation and proposing an attack mode worthy of attention since it has the capacity to break the secret quickly.
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When looking for a digital single lens reflex (D-SLR) photo camera for prosumer (mid- to high-end consumer application for the enthusiast), you necessarily notice the recent Canon offer. The Canon EOS 30D is a nice beast of a camera looking a lot like the EOS 20D, that was already a success and that merely was in want of a small lifting. Good web reviews I found:

• DPReview
• Digital Outback Photo
• Canon EOS 30D review by Imaging Resources
• Canon EOS 20D review by Imaging Resources

I would summarize by saying that going from 20D to 30D may not have been a revolution for Canon, but progress is still very visible and produced a pretty good Canon photo camera perfectly aimed at the prosumer market (the digital enthusiast is as demanding as any other enthusiast).

Actually, on my web site, a number of pages have been moved around in the last year. Additionally, some pages are now located so deeply in the site structure that access paths are quite convoluted.

The solution seems to go through the use of server page redirection. In Apache (the web server roumazeilles.net is based upon), this goes through the writing of one or more .htacess files. Let’s see how this is done.

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Or so it seems! This Linux distribution, famous for being very user-friendly and targetting the normal user and providing desktop applications that can be considered more normal than the usual GNU/linux distro, is readying its launch of version 10.1. On its road, Release Candidate 1 was just made available.

Previous versions were somewhat worryingly fragile. But RC1 (and RC2 starting next week) should bring the best since it is bringing (in 5 CD-R) all the elements of a modern Operating System (including partial transparency of the windows) and a lot of interesting critical applications like OpenOffice (in order to forget completely Word and Excel) and a SPAM-filtering tool for your email reader.

Test recommended.

Complementing an article I wrote previously about renting planes (yes! yes! a business aircraft or business jet, exactly like the Hollywood stars and the international enterprise CEOs), I discovered a British company using the planes from NetJets (people who sell shared ownership into business jets (and up to the Boeing 737 equiped for 18 people – there is certainly more space for your legs)) but it puts them at your disposal as simply as when you rent a car from Hertz, Sixt or Europcar: European Sky Time rents sets of 25 hours of flight, straight from the United Kingdom.

I guess that some people will also be renting helicopters as well… Next time, we’ll see if Virgin Space is able to rent a space plane, too.

Some people had encountered focusing problems (usually back focus) at the launch of the Dynax/Maxxum 7D. But it seems that this is not finished as I just received an email from somebody suffering from it on a brand new digital camera.

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Sigma just announced that customers that use their lenses on the Nikon D200 should upgrade some of their Sigma lenses if they are part of the list below:

The bad news is that these lenses may produce a wrong exposure. But the good news is that the upgrade is free from Sigma.

Since this question is regularly asked here in the recent weeks, I decided to answer directly. Easier than pirating Microsoft Word, nicer, faster than finding a hacked warez version without a virus, a Trojan horse, you just have to go to OpenOffice. I can’t repeat it enough: Forget Microsoft Office, don’t try to copy this commercial software, use OpenOffice v2.0 freely available and as powerful as the original.

Disney just announced that they would start a test trial of free distribution of some TV shows. During a 2-month (maybe more) test period, shows like “Desperate Housewives” or “Lost” will be free to download.

Info Reuters

The Nikon D200 seems to be the real high-end prosumer digital camera from Nikon. Different reviews for this fabulous Nikon camera:

• DPReview
• Imaging Resources
• Digital Outback Photo

Definitely a nice body for an enthusiast. Maybe a bit on the heavy side (830g instead of the already heavy 760g of my own Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D), it has the advantage of a really good LCD display (6.35mm or 2.5″ diagonal as on the Konica-Minolta Dynax 7D – which was really innovative in its time but has been joined by the Canon EOS 5D, EOS 1D MArk II n, and the more recent EOS 30D). I would recommend the excellent 11-point autofocus and the great color-matrix auto light exposure.

The only source of hesitation would certainly be the price. 2000€ for a mere camera body! This is still a lot despite the enormous memory buffer (18 images in mode RAW or 29 JPEG images).

This week, Peugeot started the product launch of the new 207 car all over Europe. You can now see the replacement for the Peugeot 206. While the 206 will still be available (and the 206cc is not replaced at all for the time being), the 207 will broaden the product line.

I worked on some parts of the 207 when I was in PSA. I admit I am partial when I say it is a fairly nice new car worth trying, worth buying.

More information about the Peugeot 207.