Archive for August, 2006

In September, for the Photokina, we will see a wave of new digital cameras rushing onto us (there is already the Alpha A100 de Sony (already here) and the Nikon D80 (just appearing)).

What will be the features that will make the success or the failure of these new Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras? I offer you my own decoding list:

1. Less than 999€: The maximum price to reach the consumer market (not only the enthusiasts)
2. 10 Mega pixels: This is the needed resolution to reach A3-size prints
3. Image stabilisation: To allow super-tele lenses, there will be more and more image stabilisers (either in the lens or – better – in the body)
4. 1600-3200 ISO sensitivity with low digital noise: This is the most interesting distinction between a D-SLR and comapct camera in terms of image quality
5. Automated cleaning of the digital sensor: A very appreciated addition
6. Continuous shooting for more than 5 images, or more than 10 images, or until the memory card is full

Unfortunately, it seems that there will not be in this list anything like a standard battery pack size (we’ll still have to shuffle batteries from one body to the next).

You can also offer your own features to make it a top 10.

A meme is a form of idea that propagates almost by itself as if it had its own life (possibly undergoing modifications and evolution). The basic principle has been first described by Richard Dawkins in his world-famous book “The selfish gene” where he draws a clear parallel between gene and meme. I had previously described the evolution of a meme that I liked a lot: This series of funny sentences attirbuted to various famous people assumed to be answering the question “Why did the chicken cross the road?“. I’m sure that you know it as it appears again and again all around the Internet.

But, I also noticed another meme whose existence and wealth is quite impressive to me. It lives on and on and most people do not even perceive the weak reasonning hidden behind it.

More and more, whenever an investigative journalist wants to speak about a new phenomenon or an upcoming news trend, he/shee will rush to Google to tell us hwo many times the keyword is found on the Internet. So, assuming that it could inform us of the growing interest into it, “avian flu” had to be evaluated on Google as if the large numbers supported the seriousness of the symptoms. After some famous soccer/football player reacted violently on the field to some remark made by an Italian adversary, it was possible to look for “Zidane head kick” on Google again.

I am quite happy to see the efficiency of Internet and one of its flagship tools. But there are two things clearly annoying in the use of this Google-based meme. First, anybody using the Google search engine knows that nobody actually take this quantitative information as significant relatively to the on-going search. This is purely anecdotical even Google does not try to overblow the importance of this minor information. Just think! When did you actually look at this during a search? Did you even notice it in the last 10 searches you performed on Google? But in the context of news and journalism, it became common to see this used in the opening paragraphs of an investigative article on a new trend.

The second issue I have with it is that in most cases, it is merely a search not on an isolated word (all journalists would recognize that a “Zidane” search would only lead to “information” about a soccer player fame) but on a group of words (”hydrogen car”). And in nearly all cases, results are terribly skewed by a thing often forgotten. Without adding quotes around the group of keywords, the result tends to return all page containing either one of the words instead of both tightly linked. This gives seriously inflated results.

• hydrogen car: 15,100,000 results
• “hydrogen car” : 198,000 results

There goes scientific precision and significance!

I guess I will not really influence this meme’s development. It will keep growing and thriving until Google leaves its dominant role as world’s search engine or stops returning this information.

Additional material

Some more links to interesting and loosely related things:

• Google trends, to compare the search trends of up to 5 different keywords.
• Google suggest uses search statistics to help you by suggesting search terms while you type your own keywords.

Oops! This one is certainly more thoroughly complex than the rest of the steps of this “creating a new web site” tutorial. More positively, usually, you do not need to take this step.

In my personal case, for the creation of the Lexyk.com dictionary web site, I needed to add a small specific helper. I wanted all the sub-domains of Lexyk.com to point to the same location. In 99% of the web site, the only sub-domain used is www. The only address that the visitor knows about is http://www.lexyk.com. Nearly all the web site servers are configured to use www as the default sub-domain and nobody will notice anything peculiar.

But sometimes, you need to handle more sub-domains. The only easy way is to request access to a special information of the web server. On Apache servers, this is what is called mod_rewrite. As I needed to be able to route all sub-domains to the same location, I requested the following mod_rewrite from my hosting provider.

I really love this sentence that says so much about the freedom and the dangers on the Internet.

The above cartoon by Peter Steiner has been reproduced from page 61 of July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20) only for academic discussion, evaluation, research and complies with the copyright law of the United States as defined and stipulated under Title 17 U. S. Code.

Essentially, after renting some space from your web hosting company, only this company and you know where your web site is hosted. Nobody else has this key information. Even more important, the company your hired to provide this information to the rest of the Internet (the registrar you hired to provide Domain Name Service – see Step 1) does not know about your hosting decision. You have to inform them.

In most cases, the registrar has some administrative interface to help them in this. In the case of the registrar I selected for my own lexyk.com domain, Gandi.net has such an easy administrative interface. They need to know where to find the right DNS information. This is the data that was provided to us at the end of Step 2.

So, I informed Gandi.net of the primary and secondary source of DNS information (ns3074.ovh.net and ns.ovh.net for OVH.com, the hosting company I’ve choosen for the web site of this tutorial: Lexyk.com). After providing this information, it’s only a matter of time and patience. As you may imagine, there are millions of computers to inform. This is done by the DNS protocol which will help distribute the information around the world. Generally, this take 24 to 48 hours. It may be faster in some cases, but your mileage may vary. You are a few hours from having your web site visible throughout the global Internet.

The grand-daddy of all gore and zombie movies. A cult movie. George Romero invented nearly all when he did this film. A group of people isolated from the rest of the world in a farm is assaultd by flesh-eating and blood-thirsty zombies (living dead eating human flesh). This is not a big budget movie. But it set the pace for all future films of the gore-zombie genre allowing crude special effects that are still used in today’s productions (like the 2002 28 days later…)

Synopsis

The fall of a NASA space probe back from Venus submit inhabitants of a rural United States countryside to high level of radiations. Recently deceased are turned into a living deads eagerly looking for fresh human flesh. A man and a woman take refuge in a farm they believe was abandonned, but find other people hiding in the basement. They will try to find the ways of survival in fighting together against the endless stream of zombies.

Basil, as he’s better known among his friends, is a journalist from Chisinau, Moldova. While his activities in this field are quite notable, Vasile Botnaru is also an artist I have been appreciating deeply for several years. I thought it was time to give his work some additional light.

You will find here an Internet gallery of his paintings and a French-speaking interview.

After reserving a domain name, your web site does not really move yet. You need to have some space where to put your data (your text, your images, etc.). Usually this is a space rented to a hosting company.

Note: It is true that you could buy this space (instead of renting it); You would just have to get a computer or some Internet appliance, but this solution often is not really applicable to a site that do not expect more than a few thousands visitors per day (most personal web sites will not get more than a few visitors per day).

Then, you will be crushed by the amazing choice option available (probably, if you just look at the ads on this page, you’ll find more than 4 different offers for hosting your web site). Choice is only more difficult, but I will just give a small bit of advice that you wan even use as a reference comparison. For me, it will be OVH.com and I point at a low-cost but very good offer named 20gp.

When I say low cost, I may mean cheap (but feature-full): 1.20€ per year (+1.20€ one-off installation costs). This will lead us to a full expense on the first year of less than 20€ (counting the domain name reservation). Indeed, it is affordable to anybody also able to pay for an Internet connection.

We will then be able to create the link between the domain name (still Lexyk.com in our example) and the hosting company we just hired. But before leaving the premises of the hosting company we must get an information that is usually provided in the email you just received after paying the hosted web space: The name and/or address of the DNS server located inside the hosting company. Write it down and keep it safe for now.