Archive for April, 2006

It’s bit quite a bit of time that I repeat I use RawDrop as my prefered tool to convert RAW images produced by my Dynax 7D into TIF files. But some wondered what configuration I use. There are not a zillion options in RawDrop, but to obtain a clean result, it’s easier not to fool around blindly.

Here is my advice and my own experience.

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As all cats, felines from the Masai Mara National Park (Kenya) have fascinating eyes.

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From time to time, I notice the ads on my own web site. I admit some are a truly fascinating sight. They seem so unattractive - when you think about it - that it is surprising they still exist. In some case, it looks a lot like snake oil.

Last I saw with mild surprise, 29.99$ for the submission of your web site to 750,000 search engines. On the one hand, I did not know that there were so many existing on the planet Earth (blown up assumption, or counting each and every Google affiliate as a single search engine), but truth shows that only an extreme minority has any notable importance (or you may say that the immense majority is plain useless or only copying data from the big ones).

The best mean to appear quickly in a large number of search engine is: get a link from an already referenced web site. Go and negociate a nice link from one of your friends’ web sites. Don’t spend your energy on ten of them. Don’t spam the world for it.

In order to be listed in Google, just go and register yourself manually on Google submission page. A few minutes are enough (maybe less than one minute in most cases) to pop into the database of the Internet search engine leader and thousands of web sites affiliated to use directly or indirectly its data. Allow 4 to 8 weeks for the first real inclusion; But it is not slower than with the detection through a direct link from a friendly site.

If your web site is clearly targetted, you could easily have a reasonable advertisment in your email signature and this would pop into the archives of the email lists and forums you visit.

Go and check the contextual ads of this pae, they must include links to plenty of web services like “site submission”Â�. But I don’t believe this is worth your money. The only thing is that if you click on their ads, they loose a few cents of advertisment (and I share a small earning with Google). Why pay for something you can do in a few seconds? Really!

Hippopotamus are large herbivorous from the same family as the horse. they seem quite peaceful but have a lot of available energy (and a considerable mass). Even if it is possible to encounter them out of water during the day, they prefer to avoid sun shine (they risk dying from sun exposure) and only eat grass at night.

Hippopotamus and Jacanas

Hippopotamus in the Mara River

I plan on living forever. So far, so good.

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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