Archive for November, 2006

Ok! We already knew that Japanese people were not thinking exactly like the rest of the world (it makes them both loveable and totally foreign to us Westerners). But, this time, I admit they caught me by surprise with this major (?) technological innovation serving what is at the core of every woman in the world, but maybe more in Japan than elsewhere:

Bras that transform themselves into a handbag

The operation does not seem to complicated as can be seen below. It does not take more than 10 seconds. But it leaves me wondering about the real-life circumstances where the elegant Japanese lady would really appreciate the ability to move from one to the other.

Source: Triumph web site (in Japanese).

Again in the Espace Rambouillet (South of Paris), here are a few deers that I shot in the limited sunlight of the woods. They honour the quality of the light exposure of the Dynax 7D.

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

In the rush for higher resolution images, HAL9000 Iconos has a significant advance over the competition with its 8600 mega-pixel image.

They obtained this enormous image by assembling it from 1145 individual photos of about 12 Mega-Pixel each.

The result is on the Italian web site of HaltaDefinizione.com and it is impressive. You can also get a printed poster copy of the image, if you want to.

We already wrote here about it when the HD-Ready and HD-TV programs were launched, the nice black and white little logos supposed to bring the guarantee of compatibility of electronic devices with High Definition (HD) video are only adding to the confusion of the consumers.

At best, the buyer wonders what is really covered by the HD-Ready branding. At worst (and it is often the case), it ensures that purchases are done without understanding and lead to future disappointments.

Let’s be clear and simple: HD-Ready doesn’t mean a lot. In most cases, it only means that you can plug the device one onto the other. Practically speaking, if you want your screen to be really high definition capable, it needs to have a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. Less is not HD!

If the TV set is only 1280×720 (the most usual resolution), the HD-Ready logo does not warrant anything more than the HD image will display… in low reésolution.

Marcus Karlsen is a young photographer who is publishing a lot of nice images from his many travels around the world. But it is not only because of his photos that I want to point you at his web site. He is also hosting very detailed and pro-looking reviews of some of the best tele-lenses from Minolta (later Konica-Minolta and Sony).

• Minolta AF 200mm f/2.8 Apo G
• Minolta AF 300mm f/2.8 Apo G (D) SSM
• Minolta AF 600mm f/4.0 Apo G
• Minolta AF 70-200mm f/2.8 Apo G (D) SSM
• Minolta AF 300mm f/2.8 Apo G
• Minolta AF 28-70mm f/2.8 G

Very interesting reading.

A nice little video about penguins, found on YouTube:

The next one, titled “Do penguins fly?“, is a special offer for photo amateurs. Wildlife photo may be difficult in some cases:

You’d suppose that bad news could end for Sony, but no. They just announced that they found a defect in eight photo cameras of the CyberShot series sold between September 2003 and January 2005. It would be an LCD display problem with camera refusing to shoot pictures (a software problem?)

Sony offers a free repair to camera owners but did not indicate how many cameras where subject to this issue.

Sources: AP-Yahoo, PhotoReporter.

Christmas is coming with the usual rush for techno gifts. Digital cameras are going to be (again) one of the successes for Christmas gifts. Even more, the Digital Single Lens Reflex (D-SLR) cameras are going to be impossible to avoid. Customers seem to be understanding that compact digital cameras are limited and the SLR cameras are a hit in the stores.

What should you buy?

Then, it’s up to you to decide. It seems that there is no longer bad products, but price differences are significant between all those models (from 590€ to nearly 2000€). And Canon and Nikon are overwhelmingly leading the digital single lens reflex camera market.

This is becoming obvious for those who discovered that one of the twin daughters of George W. Bush has been robbed of her handbag in an Argentinan restaurant. Not that the country is such a security risk, but the dinner was happening under the protection of the best of the best: The American Secret Service agents attached to the protection of Barbara and Jenna Bush. They did not see it happening! The thief probably did not even recognize the daughters of the more powerful man in the world, or even notice that he was making those men in black the laughing stock of the rest of the security world.

Source: BBC.

Sure! I’m not really into Thanksgiving (I’m French), but I thought it was a good idea to try and help you all Americans to have a great Thanksgiving. So, here is a link to a long article titled “How to Have the Best Thanksgiving EVER!“, for those who are not easily offended.

As Art Burchwald said once in a column, “it’s the one day of the year where Americans eat better than the French.” (Thanks Laurel!)

Al Jazeera or Al Jezira, the TV news channel from Qatar, is now available in English. It often made the news headlines of other information medias since its creation on 1st November 1996, with its policitical stance very favorable to Islam and often considered very favorable to extremism and sometimes terrorism.

Today, the channel not only broadcasts in Shakespeare’s language (originally, only in Arab) but also has a web site in English. Not even counting the additional point of view this brings to international issues and politics for people not speaking Arab, you will quickly notice that the web site is very clean, neat and tidy (it could be a good example for those web designer tempted to add one after another kludge to already heavy user interfaces). Nearly no ads, an easy browsing.

This is the tough question that BrowserShots.org web site anwsers for you. They provide a simple way to test your web site in a large variety of configurations and browsers. This is a very nice idea founded on the voluntary help of computers installed all over the world (widely distributed architecture).

This way, you will know how Roumazeilles.net looks on a number of exotic (or not) browsers:

Recommended to any web designer.

Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure communications over Internet).

But German cryptologist, Jean-Pierre Seifert (Universities of Haïfa and Innsbruck) seems on the bring of reavealing an unusual line of attack to this critical technology. He is set to present this in the next RSA conference in 2007. This could be a shattering blow to Internet security as we know it.

Essentially, the attack relies on the possibility to observe the operation of the CPU itself. Today’s microprocessors include a technique known as predictive branching that tries to anticipate results of some calculations. If the prediction is right, everything is very fast, if not the microprocessor still has to do a lengthy calculation. This results usually in huge performance improvements, but for the cryptologist it means that without knowing too much you can identify (from the exterior) what the microprocessor calculation results are, just by looking at the time it takes to do the computation steps.

This opens the door to a new generation of spying software that could rather easily crack the secret keys of some of the communications we consider quite secure. For the moment, since no precise details have been given, and since no demonstration has been made in the public, we are rather secure, but the vast majority of the specialists already consider that approach will certainly lead to a flurry of new easy-to-write spyware (before that cracking the secure key of those communications could take from years to millions of millenia of heavy computation; now we are speaking of near instantaneous break through).

Solutions exist. In most cases, it involves either a heavy modification of the microprocessor (Intel security manager is currently reported as unavailable for comments for the coming weeks and it does not look like an easy solution) or many software modifications that could have impacts from minor to nearly-impossible-to-implement in the real-life computer (software patches may not be possible to create for some of the applications since the problem comes directly from how the microprocessor makes its computation).

Sources: Various including PhysOrg.com and Le Monde.

You can expect this to be discussed at length in the coming months.

Even if I am usually in favor of designing web sites using tables, I wanted to provide a link to an interesting article taking exactly the opposite position: Why tables for layout is stupid.

For those wondering, my preference goes to HTML tables because they are easier to implement the 3-column designs that I prefer (those are really difficult to grasp in pure CSS).

OpenSUSE is one of the most famous GNU/Linux distributions. It got a recent additional attention when Microsoft announced that they would support specifically the execution of SUSE in the virtual environment that will come in the future Microsoft Windows Vista.

Knowing my previous failed attempt with SlackWare Linux, I decided to try again with another (hopefully better GNU/Linux distribution). Here is my experience for those who would like to know.

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Not only for exclusive insect and arhtropod lovers, but also for those who want to see nice photo snapshots, the spiders are a bottomless source of nice pictures. A web site is offering an impressive link collection about these: Arachnology.

Not all links are working (far from it), but the choice is impressive and leaves a lot to look at.

After a previous post about a photo ballad I made in Rambouillet, I decided to go back to the same location (a little South of Paris, France) and to try by myself again to surprise a few of the large animals that can be found here.

Since I was alone, I could take advantage of being more silent and discreet than a full group of amateur photographers and I could approach more easily some roe-deers.

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.