Archive for December, 2006

A man living near Johannesburg (South Africa) was recently fined by a court for a bizarre reason: He stole a pregnancy certificate and forged it to get seven days off work.

Apparently, he did not think that somebody would notice the ‘difficulty’ a man would have to become pregnant.

Source: BBC news.

Firefox 2 is hardly out that developers are already working hard on the new version 3 as shown by the apparition of an alpha version on the FTP server.

Some visible improvements:

• Bookmarks will be replaced with “places” that will end in a left-side menu (an innovation to be tested).
• Tabs will be easier to sort and re-organize (as in Opera).
• Auto-update of the browser will be possible (good for reliability, security and ease-of-use).

Reminder: An alpha version of any software ahs no good reason for being stable or debugged. So, nobody will be surprised if the cold-blooded testers have bad surprises. You have been warned now.

Dodie Legaspi is a photographer I foudn on the Internet (he exposes on Multiply.com)

Image courtesy of Dodie Legaspi - all rights reserved

I invite you to check specially the following series:

• Roovin & Maela (marriage shots)
• Street photo
• Studio portraits

BitTorrent, the leader and creator of the P2P technology that is driving most of the video and large-file peer-to-peer exchanges just announced that they bought µTorrent (micro-Torrent or uTorrent), the company providing the smallest, lightest (and maybe, fastest) BitTorrent client.

Apparently, they intend to re-inforce their presence, possibly in preparation of an extension of the technology to appliances like TV sets.

The brand new slick nice digital SLR camera from Sigma -the SD14- is announced late. Sigma published that the Digital Single Lens Reflex will be available not in November (we knew it), not in December (before the Christmas purchases), but in March 2007.

This is very bad news for this good product. After having missed the Christmas season buying spree, the SD14 may have itself in a tough strugle with the new products bound to appear in Spring 2007.

The Nikon D40 should arrive now in the shops (if we believe what Nikon announced). So, it is the right time to try and summarize the tests, reviews and comparisons available on the Internet about this digital camera that, if he is not a real revolution, represents a major step forward in making digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras accessible to the masses thanks to a nice price.

• Let’s go Digital (en français or in English)
• Imaging resource - detail review of the D40
• Nikon D40 on Photography Blog
• Nikon D40 hands-on preview on DPReview

Comparing directly the entry-level Nikon D40 camera with a high-end monster like the Canon 5D is out of question, but it is quite sure that with the upcoming shopping season, many consumers will be attracted.

Here is a photo gallery with nice macro photos of little critters and bugs. Some of them look like actual ETs from StarShip Troopers.

I do think that these are really great shots from Igor Siwanowicz.

On a PC computer equiped with Windows 2000, I had a major problem of network slowness (when accessing the network, all operations seemed to atke ages to complete). I admit I was somewhat lost without a solution. So, I decided to use the ever-powerful solution: Google. It allowed me to find a web site with a very deeply documented page specially built to solve problems of slow network on Windows. The page contains everything you shoudl check and solutions to a lot of cases. And there is a lot of choice!

Thus, I was quickly stopped by a remark about the use of several network cards on the same machine. And my mind suddenly lit like a candle! It happens that this problematic PC has no less than 3 network interfaces including an unconnected one. So, it was only a matter of checking -as advised- that they were all disabled (except a single one) to get a proper operation back in seconds.

This is the obvious conclusion of this minor news that may attract the attention of the engineers among us: Apple now has no less than seven suppliers for the Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) of its iPod (they expect a strong growth in 2007):

• Tripod Technology,
• Nan Ya Printed Circuit Board (NPC),
• Unimicron Technology,
• Compeq Manufacturing,
• Wus Printed Circuit
• APCB
• Gold Circuit Electronics (GCE)

In some industries, second sourcing to secure a supply merely means to add a second redundant supplier (its better to have two malls near your home, rather than only one). Apple pushes this strategy to the extreme.

When a good idea appears in the Internet space, it attracts people, a lot of idle people and a lot of marketing people. Of course, with marketing comes its shameful brother: SPAM.

This is exactly what is happening right now on MySpace, the virtual social network where teens have been spreading and sharing for months now (nearly 50 million users in this end of 2006). An example that borders on caricature is the appearance of pseudo user Red Passion (not only a user with a pseudo!). Here is how she present herself:

What I adore… Strong and skillful people, tolerance and freedom, the ambiguous side of life, testing… in every sense, excitement and thrill, sharing, seeing and being seen. What I hate… Strictness, simple-minded people, stupidity and foolishness, fear and shame, prejudice, meanness… in every sense and, more than everything, the lack of imagination. This is me, female, from a place you’ll never know. Explore my world…

With such an invitation, on a dating web site (even more than on a social network site), the first contact is virtually automatic. Red Passion is not a real woman (after all, who could blame her for that since false identities are plentiful on those sites - or at least identities that are fantastically more generous than the mere reality), but - more importantly - she is a real advertisment.

Yes! This is an online ad for Campari (the Italian alcohol drink) and HotelCampari.com the accompanying web site.

Some feeble-minded observers would think that this would not stand for long, but no. SPAM - here as everywhere else - uses the proven theories of advertising to extend them to their worst extreme. Isn’t abuse too big? Alcohol beverages advertised in a virtual location obviously crowded with teens.

While Vista will soon be available in a 64-bit version (and that GNU/Linux went down this path several months ago), it is time to ponder the following question:

And the answer is surprisingly simple if you look at it. Currently, PC are more and more often equiped with 1GB central RAM memory. Some enthusiasts (video games users and those intensely using photo and graphic software applications) already went to 2GB. But, there, we are reaching the limits of what 32-bit Operating Systems can do naturally.

This is the exact reason why 64-bit Operating Systems where created. So, if you think you are a user of big machines (or will be), the clock is already ticking. Do not forget that Windows XP was asking 500MB of memory for its own use and that Vista is announced with a minimal personal claim on 700MB of RAM. If you buy a Windows Vista license in the coming months (and you don’t intend to play the software upgrade game too soon in case of hardware upgrade), it is time for you to look toward the 64-bit version of Windows.

In the evening of November 25, a poetry reading happened in the Equipages bookstore, rue de Bagnolet in Paris. It was organised with the help of Editions L’improviste. As I was in the public and that I had my camera with me, I shot a few pictures:

   

Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.