Archive for September, 2006

I had already told you about Yotophoto, the image search engine allowing you to choose the kind of copyright or legal rights associated to the image (and, thus, giving you an east way to find free images for your web site, while keeping you in the legal high road).

Today, Yotophoto disclose another very interesting and complementary development. You will be allowed to search images by its dominant color (They simply call this feature Search by color). The few already existing experiences in this direction were limited to choosing between red, green or blue – not enough to be of any use. But, here, you get a color picker to choose your color from. You get teh exact fine color tone you need. This way, you will be able to select your images in order to keep your fine WordPress post as elegant as requested by the high quality of your web site.

All the details are presented in the promotional page for this search feature. But, it’s as easy as selecting Advanced Search and using the color picker at the bottom right to choose you prefered color.

After several weeks of companies lining up to recall portable PC using Sony Lithium-Ion batteries (Dell, Apple, Lenovo/IBM, toshiba, etc.), the Japanese manufacturer decided to move boldly: In order to avoid further spontaneous combustions and explosions, all laptop PC batteries using the Lithium-Ion technology from Sony are subject to a worldwide recall.

There were already 7 million batteries recalled, but the figure is sure to climb quickly knowing that Sony is the leader in Lithium-Ion batteries and produces for a number of other companies that only rebadge the original product.

Side note: After a first move of prohibiting laptops on a brand-based rule (by three airlines already after last week incident in Los Angeles airport), Virgin Atlantic has been starting to limit flight only for those models at risk: You may be flying with your old Dell on Virgin if its battery technology is different.

When you are managing a Unix machine (it is about the same thing for GNU/Linux machines), you are often interested in maintaining a good level of security. For this, one of the most important things is to ensure that the process list (the list of all activities) is containing only secure processes. Checking this is often a bit more difficult than beginners would like: So many questions to ask and we are a bit unsure about the important ones.

Today, I found a checklist easy to use to perform this quick security audit (online version)on your *nix machine. Also, I prepared word-processed versions of the checklist (see the box on the right).

Undoubtedly, this should not be the only security measure on your GNU/Linux machine, but it’s an easy one to start with and it will give a better grasp of the basics for beginners.

This is the product offering of an American company (TreasureKnit). You can ask them to knit a plaid, or the surface of a pillow or a blanket starting from the photographic image that you would provide. Even better than the large format prints, here comes tailor-made tapestry.

I doubt it will always produce fine art of the best taste but we can now print our photos on nearly any kind of surface.

Notice: Deliveries are only possible to the United States of Amercia and Canada, for the time being.

Posts about EOS 40D: EOS 40D initial scoop All of them

Canon seems to have its hands full with the presentation of the low-end Canon 400D (Rebel XTi) and nothing is seen about any future replacement of the ageing 20D and 30D high-end SLR.

Some are now saying that there would be no 40D, but a lower-priced full-frame solution heir to the superb (but too expensive) Canon 5D.

This is really the feeling you have when you visit the web site of Christine and Michel Denis-Huot where you will find some of their best images or those that were most successful, from their work as wildlife photographers.

I heartily recommend the images primées (awards).

Michel and Christine spend months out of their home (several month per year in Kenya, in the Masai Mara Park) to ensure the best possible conditions for photography and bring their own bright eye to offer image series as they can be regularly published in the press (both printed and TV).

Here it comes! Sigma finally made its new camera public. The SD14 is the serious successor of the SD10 digital SLR camera. The Sigma web site tells us much more than the teaser it was presenting in the recent weeks.

As could be expected, the center spot of the show is the Foveon X3 sensor bringing 2652 x 1769 pixels of 3 colours (where the competiton is taking only 1 colour per pixel and has to interpolate missing data, Sigma Foveon literally piles up 3 pixels of different colours in a single pixel), leading to a total of 14 million pixels. This is not only more than the current competiton (Rather in the 10 M-pixel ballpark), but it makes without additional calculations and interpolations that always produce some little more or less visible coloured effects. Hurrah for fine colours!

Moreover, the SD14 – at long last – brings JPEG format images to ease life of most amateur photographers. In this context, Sigma is specially proud of its new supporting software Photo Pro 3.0.

Another feature where Sigma heard the same call than its competition: Dust management. This time, there is no cleaning of the sensor but a protection located far enough from the sensor to avoid any dust left to be visible.

But the two big advantages – to my eyes – come from the shutter and the viewfinder. The first is protecting well the sensor and bring a very long life time of 100,000 exposures (let’s not forget that today’s digital photographers are shooting infintely more than their analog predecessors). The viewfinder is served by a superb pentaprism (certainly bringing a very clear view), with 0.9x magnification, an 18mm eye point and –3 to +1.5 dpt dioptric adjustment for those of us with less than perfect eye-sight.

What is left for scrutiny in the upcoming test models: The autofocus with only 5 measuring zones may prove limited compared to richer offerings from Canon or Nikon; 3 image/second continuous shooting is only capable of 6 images at the highest quality.

All in all, Sigma is certainly participating in the race for the best digital single lens reflex camera of Year 2007.

So, you don’t want to spend too much time checking benchmarks and prices before buying your next PC graphics card. Tom’s Hardware has a nice solution in an article that gives the solution: The Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money: October 2006. The selection may change in time (this market is a real ground for testing competition and fast evolution), but it gives you a quick shot at a good graphics card for your budget (even in AGP and PCIe technologies).

For some time now, I use a small plug-in that I feel is quite nice to help me manage specifically the advertisment banners from Google AdSense on my web site. You may have already noticed one or two of those ads that appear right in the body of a posted article. Usually, it is quite difficult to do this when you publish using WordPress, but AdSense-Deluxe is flexible enough to allow this.

I hope that the ad banners so produced are not too unpleasant. On my side, I feel that they play a positive role in the financing of this little publishing activity of mine (your clicks on the ads bring me a tiny revenue; But small sums can pile up).

Anyway, feel free to tell me if you are uneasy with too much advertisment here.

Currently, the wonder kid of AMD microprocessor sockets is the AM2. But, up to now, it was a bit difficult to find comparaisons between the available motherboards. This is what Tom’s Hardware corrects nicely with its “Socket AM2 Motherboard Summer Slam“. There is no winner (only good motherboards), but with a lot of different feature sets.

• Asus M2 Crosshair
• Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe
• Biostar TForce590 SLI Deluxe
• Epox MF570 SLI
• Foxconn C51XEM2A
• Gigabyte M59SLI S5
• MSI K9A Platinum
• MSI K9N Platinum

You are thinking about moving from Microsoft Office (expensive commercial bloatware ) to OpenOffice (free). A few questions you can ask to orgniaze your transition, before you jump ahead.

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For a very long time, one of the greatest hits of search engines sending visitors to Roumazeilles.net has been “free download word”. Now, we are nearly in position to offer another advice than the usual Go download OpenOffice.

I still consider OpenOffice as the best replacement for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but new opportunities are appearing. First, Google announced the availability of Google Spreadsheets and Writely. While still in beta stage, these applications are downloaded on the run from the web freely and will be supported by advertisment in the application as soon as the beta-stage is off.

Feeling the heat of the competition no doubt, Microsoft revealed that it was considering seriously the possibility of putting Works (too often not considered by buyers of MS-Office) on the list of freely (and legally) available application. They would use the same business model of including ad banners in the application itself.

For the moment, it is difficult to assume the success of such a strategy. Google is offering a very simplified product (Writely does not include in its free word processor important goodies such as mail merge or WordArt; And Google Spreadsheets still does not have the ability to create graphics) and Microsoft is probably just trying to kick Google while it’s still young with Works which has always been their cheap solution to counter the arguments against Word and Excel.

Furthermore, it is not decided yet if you – the user – will accept the presence of advertisment inside the application. I know that the Opera web browser has long been ads-supported (I did not really mind the presence of the banner at the top of the browser window), but the arrival of ad-free Mozilla Firefox forced them to remove completely this feature. So, advertisment may stay as a temporary option in the strategy of a software developer and basing all your business model on that may be very difficult and dangerous.

So, for the time being and probably for the near future too, this is still Go download OpenOffice (remember that it is also available freely for Mac OS X (under X11)).

For a few months already, we had dual-core CPUs. Try forecasting the next marketing step for Intel and AMD. Any idea? Right! They are rushing to prepare CPUs hosting four cores in the same package (usually dubbed QuadCore). AMD goes to a solution on its socket F: Three versions clocked at 2.6GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz. Intel promissed (not exactly, but not too far from it) its QuadCore Core 2 Extreme before the end of the year.

In both cases, we will start to see prices exactly adjusted to push your eyes out of your orbits and to pull the banknotes out of your wallet.

You were wondering how much it could cost you to rent a business jet for your next private trip. Just go to http://www.avion-affaires.com/. They present you the opportunity to request an online quote.

You’ll see! This is no so expensive (!) after all: I believe that I did not find anything under  10,000 euros for a roudn trip in Europe.

Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image. Maybe you thought this deer was belling in rut; But no! He’s just bored to death during a photo session near the park border and he’s merely yawning.

Some of you may have noticed the lack of updates in the recent days. Apart from some personal unforecasted obligations I had to serve, it comes from a heavily occupied weekend: I had the possibility to do a two-day photo session in the Rambouillet forest, organized by the ASCPF 50km South of Paris.

In the middle of the rutting season for deers, it seemed a good idea to go hunting with people used to this kind of hobby and to take advantage of excellent conditions. The photo session is organized by the Association Sportive de Chasse Photographique Française to initiat some people to the association and the art of photo hunting with big tele-lenses. For a mere 50€ (covering 2 days), a complete newby like me is guided in a 180ha park (the Espace Rambouillet, managed by the French Office National des Forêts) where we can find boars, deers, roe-deers and fallow-deers roaming freely but slightly less afraid of man than in the open forest (Despite that, there is strictly no chance to reach and touch the animals; This is not even a zoo).

This is indeed an engrossing experience for a photographer interested in animal life. The advice provided by Guy Mallet and Daniel Trinquecostes are precise, concise and to-the-point, for hardware as much as for hunting techniques. But this is not a class course about photo hunting; It is mostly oriented toward practical application (and they can be long for a city dweller with few sports habits like me who is not used to slow walking in the woods and in wet pits during hours). And nature photographers are nice people indeed. We knew that most photographers like to share their passion; This even more visible in this context.

Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.

All in all, these two day produced a few dozen images. The camera is not stressed, the flash memory cards are not flooded (with data), but some good snapshots can be collected if you apply a few basic rules:

• No need to rush and press the trigger from afar; Be patient.
• A good telelens is required: A 300mm on a digital camera or a 400mm on an analog camera seems to be the bare minimum to reach if you want to grab a few good images.
• Light is missing in the forest and under vegetal cover, all means to compensate this issue are welcome: stabilized lens or camera sensor, tripod (or – even better I think – a monopod), large aperture lens (my clear Minolta APO 300mm f/4 was most welcome and much more confortable than the Sigma 400mm f/5.6). And, when time comes to press the trigger, hold your breath for half a second.
• Camouflage and smooth quietness are needed. I don’t believe that the camouflage nets and similar green-looking garments are not absolutely necessary, but white, and bright and light colours are the first major error (you quickly learn why so many seasoned wildlife photographers use gaffer tape and sock-like to cover the tube of white or pale grey lenses).

Now, I let you look at the other images I could produce. (more…)

Lithium-Ion batteries from Sony are currently in the eye of a major communication tornado. Everything that could go wrong is going wrong. We had heard of the exploding DELL portable PCs; This was followed by a major recall of batteries. Then, we heard that the Apple iBooks were also subject to the same: explosions and recall. Today, this is Toshiba who’s heard annoncing a giant recall of 340,000 batteries manufactured by Sony.

I would forecast that, one after the other, it’s all of a family of Sony Lithium-Ion batteries that will return to Japan before the end of the year. And, in the mean time, we start hearing that commercial airlines start refusing cabin travel for some batteries. Korean, then Virgin Atlantic, announced indeed that portable PCs branded Dell and Apple will no longer be allowed in the passenger cabin if they contain their batteries (the ugly, heavy, dangerous little black block will have to travel as checked-in baggage in -relatively safe – storage. Most corporate managers will now have a hard time playing Solitaire or MineSweeper in the plane).

The marketing company e360insight sued SpamHaus for wrongly listing it as a spammer. But we just heard that SpamHaus lost and will have to pay a record 12 million dollars fine.