Archive for January, 2007

It is often difficult to make nude photography and to stay in the realm of arts and good taste. Todd Essick certainly succeded in finding his own ways in this direction. He directs young beautiful scarcely clothed women without letting them become just… nude. And it happens in a surprising location: Under water. Even better, it is not only a matter of inviting young divers to exhibit their lovely bodies, but to really build a dream-like universe that happens to be using sub-marine elements to create a very personal work.

Nevertheless, it is not automatically recommended that you follow the link to his site if you are either minor or at your work/job location.

Image Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Todd Essick.

The AquaGallery is a little graphic experiment about aquatic forms and how to draw them in video.

Enjoy!

In the spotlight: Sony Alpha 900 Canon EOS 5D Mk II Nikon D700 FX Download Nero for free

After posting previously about 25 top quality fonts, I also got a link to an interesting web site providing a LOT of free fonts. It does not mean that they are all useful, interesting or good-looking, but you have some impressive choice: 13,000+ fonts in one search engine.

SearchFreeFonts

I have been writing about OpenSuse previously here. So, it is time to tell you about a nice little review made on the grand-daddy of all techno-computer information web sites (not that it was the first, but because it is following in the foot steps of the exceptionnaly successful Byte Magazine). Byte.com just published an OpenSuse 10.2 review by Eric A. Hall.

Good reading.

There are plenty of cases where people copy part or all of the pages of a web site. It you use Google it may be more or less easy to find the copies. Copy Scape is the solution: You give the a web page address and Copy Scape will find copies on the web for you.

If you have a web site, you’ll love this.

It seems that the previous news about HD-DVD copy protection being broken are true since, this week, BitTorrent users started to see an unprotected copy of Serenity (a 2006 Science Fiction movie) flowing on the P2P network.

We always love to receive those phone calls from a telemarketer ready to sell car insurance, phone subscriptions or financial services, don’t we? I previously advised to keep them hanging, but here are two web sites providing other ideas:

• How to prank a telemarketer to fight back.
• When you absolutely want to go to provide good excuses to leave.

Needing to quickly install a web server on a Windows PC, I was drawn into looking for a free software suite providing such sevrices in a simple and nice package.

I already knew EasyPHP from Emmanuel Faivre, Laurent Abbal and Thierry Murail, three Frenchmen who put in a single tool box all the free open-source tools really needed for this:

• an Apache server
• the PHP language
• a mySQL database
• a few tools that makes nice complements to it:
• PHPMyAdmin
• SQLiteManager

It is always possible to grab them independently and to install them by yourself, but it’s such a pleasure to do this in a single simple move on your PC!

But, I was told that there is a competing solution, WAMP from PHPteam. After reading in the forums that WAMP seems much simpler to install on a Windows PC than EasyPHP, I decided to test WAMP.

In a few words, I can confirm the ease of deployment. The installation program is perfectly up to the level of what is normally epxected from a Windows pro installer. User choices are clear, well described and easy to understand, supposing that you know about the general issue (we are installing a web server, not yet another mini-calendar XP application…). And, there lies the only problem with WAMP (but it’s shared with EasyPHP): If they allow you to work with tools that are well known to a specialized public, don’t really believe that you could install your own server without first understanding the issues at hand with Apache, mySQL or PHP.

Nevertheless, the overall feeling I got from WAMP is even more favorable than with EasyPHP. Even better, in both cases, the support is very significant in several language (most notably in English and French). I know that this is a prerequisite for some of our readers.

You had been reading here that Linksys (subsidiary of Cisco) launched recently a VoIP phone named iPhone, a direct threat to the brand that Apple wants to use for its newest phone line. Now, it seems that the situation does not seem as clear-cut as it appeared initially. Immediately after Apple’s announcements, Cisco had filed lawsuits claiming trademark infringement. But OUT-LAW.com has shown a way out for Apple.

In European law (and possibly in US law, too), if a trademark is registered but not used in the following 5 years, it may be challenged by others. Actually, this is the situation for the iPhone trademark: It is quite old (I could not find the registration date) and it may not have been used. So, Apple may be able to grab it right from Cisco hands…

There is currently a talk in the US legislative body whose intent is to force all writers of blogs having more than 500 readers to register themselves as lobyyists or face jail time. This is the result of an amendment introduced by Senator David Vitter that is currently struggling to be transformed into law, but it would be one of the strongest blow against the US Constitution First Amendment rights.

Sources: PRNewsWire and GrassRootFreedom.

Sometimes, the Internet is not at all about new technologies but a way to reach old ones and old science. This is what happens when you visit Historical anatomies on the web, a quietly presented web site showing us reproductions of anatomical atlases from the US National Library of Medicine’s collection.

This is all about the way anatomy was taught and shown in the past centuries (from 15th Century in Iran or Japan, to German 19th Century). Most of these documents are extremely beautiful, some are very interesting and all are a nice testament to the ingenuity of medecine in the history of our world.

Cousin, Jehan, Livre de pourtraiture (Paris: 1608).

The US National Library of Medicine is located in Bethesda, MD.

You may have noticed a new logo appearing on our web site since the redesigned interface went online.

If your web browser supports it (Opera 9, FireFox, Internet Explorer 7), a similar orange icon may appear on the web address bar.

This is a feature that is good both for users and for web site designers. For the users, it provides a simple way to access to the information on our web site by allowing FireFox or Opera to directly collect the news from the web site without even opening the page. If you click on one of these RSS feed icons , your web browser should propose to subscribe to the feed. After that, you will be informed more directly about news on Roumazeilles.net even if you do not open the web site. You will never miss interesting headlines!

The RSS feed icon is a standardized way (proposed by FireFox) to easily point you to this fast access to the web site information. By itself, this is good news for the web designer because it gives a common recognition standard: I don’t have to explain (like I do here) the meaning of the icon, I don’t have to invent some explanation or title. It looks the same on all web sites supporting this feature.

Initially, it RSS feeds were created to syndicate content (to allow other sites to seamlessly include the content of Roumazeilles.net in their own pages). This is still possible (this is what is used by news management web sites like MyYahoo!, MyAOL, Google, or Bloglines), but it has been greatly extended by the creation of specific tools integrated in your own browser.

Responsible adults should always use sexual consent forms. Or so it seems if you want to have really safe sex. But it may lead to some really weird situations if you need assistance.

Not safe for Work.

As you certainly noticed, we changed significantly the look-and-feel of our web site. The plastic surgeon used its scalpel to give a new face to the web site: reduce the size of the pages (faster downloads for you), improve readability (the white background increases the contrast), come back to a more sober graphic design (only a few graphic signs and homogeneous colours).

But there are some new functionalities too. The most important one is certainly the addition of the ability to send an email to your friends to let them know about a post that you would find particularly interesting (for whatever reason). Just before sending, do not forget to copy the code that is provided (it allows to protect us against robots that would be trying to send automated emails using this form). In any case, be reasonable and polite with your use of this nice little feature.

Just look at the link at the bottom of articles on the front page (or in the box at the bottom right for post pages).

I just noticed a small thing in Windows: Everything points to the fact that if I connect a network drive to a server directory (from the Tools... menu of the file explorer), the acess to this newly created drive letter (R:\) is much faster than access to its direct equivalent shortcut (\\Server\directory\).

I don’t know what is the underlying reason (I guess that there is some kind of specific optimization involved). If you know more, please, feel free to explain it to me here.

This is decided! This year I’ll go on a photo safari in South Africa in private natural reserves (not far from the famous Kruger National Park). It’s set specially for Leopard by Objectif Nature (specialized tour operator from France). Last year, I went for the first time to a photo safari to meet the felines along the Mara river in Kenya and it blew my mind. So, why not try again?

But this time I will bring some additional equipment (I’ll be living in lodges instead of bush camp): a photo flash (there should be opportunities to meet animals at night) and good prism binoculars (it’s no fun to use the 400mm telelens just to sweep the landscape looking for hidden animals).

This T-shirt has been designed specially for typographers with a sense of humor. The word KERN (the spacing between two letters) is nicely printed on it, but cut in halves by a zipper that allow to change the kerning of letters E and R.