Archive for February, 2007

This man should be better known. He died at 93 after receiving a Grammy Award in 1997. He created a world of couch potatoes. He favored petty fights in front of the TV set. He fathered the TV remote.

Source: BBC.

On the 1st of January 2000, some people were expecting to see the world crumble because old software applications had been written using dates coded on 2 digits. At the turn of the century (or rather at the change from 99 to 00), there was a need for upgrading/patching applications to support 4-digit years in order to avoid the end of civilisation.

The nightmare did not happen for the world, but there was a boom for the IT industry around the correction of the Y2K bug. Today, we are reaching a point where we could see another similar drama: The Y2K7 bug.

In 2005, the US Congress decided, as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, that the date used to switch for Winter times to Summer times and back (in application of Daylight Saving Time) would be changed. Instead of being the usual 1st Sunday of April and the last Sunday of October, these dates would be moved by 3 weeks for the US and a few followers like Australia. This becomes applicable in March 2007.

It wouldn’t be much of a problem if that did not have to be hard-coded in the many software applications using time information. Most of them need to be patched to behave correctly.

Most certainly, any unpatched pre-2005 application is doomed to behave incorrectly next March when time comes to change times. Did you notice that Windows 2000 is still counting as 10-15% of installed Windows PC? Did you notice that Windows XP was launched in 2001? Maybe your calendar application or some airlines reservations software has not yet been updated… As for the Y2K bug, the Y2K7 bug may have influence on more hidden systems: routers, photocopiers, PDA, cell phones, room/conference reservation services, energy metering systems and -of course- the blinking digital clock of our VCR (OK! This last one should first be set to the right time once).

The patch dance should be started by now.

For those really worried about it, Windows XP has already been patched by Windows Update. No need to rush and buy Vista just for this.

Sony Alpha-100

After making a successful entry in the market of the digital SLR photo camera with the A100 in July 2006, Sony should be preparing the extension of its product line (still containing one camera only). Most people expect it to take the form of the addition of a higher-end camera that could be named either Alpha 10 [A10] or Alpha 200 [A200] (Wanna bet?) This would be a good complement to the A100 and would fit nicely after the Konica-Minolta D7D.

It is definitely interesting to notice that there is still no information leaking out of Sony about this future product. However, we should remember that the Alpha 100 was not preceded by months of pre-launch propaganda; Sony went shot for a quick launch followed by months of heavy advertising (and kept its word on the launch date).

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You were told repetitively so: It’s bad to download movies, this is really bad; Each time you donwload a movie a cute little kitten dies. But in reality, there are movies that you can download for free without going ilegal, without risking the ire of the MPAA. We presented several here. But it is now time to present a very recent movie: Elephants dream.

Neither Cary Grant, nor Ava Gardner. Neither Mel Gibson, nor Spike Lee. But enlightened amateurs, a few pros and a lot of passion to produce this short Open Source film (everything is available: the software programs to do it or redo it, the models, the scripts). Anyway, it is not a technological demonstration of prowess (which took 125 days of heavy computation on 240 dual-core servers to be created) but an art work with its own life and heart.

Synopsis

Should we really talk about synopsis? The scenario is a little troubling at first. But you can easily find your marks. The two characters, young Emo and wise Proog, seem to evolve in a kind of machine that recalls memeories of 1997 Cube of Vincenzo Natali. But there is also a dark fantasy side that may remind you of The Matrix. Proog tries to lead Emo among the dangers and the surprises of the machine. This is the occasion to meet images and environments that can only be described with superlatives even if the depth of characters is not the main argument of this movie.

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

It seems that there would be some internal information spread on 12th/13th February inside Canon to prepare the announcement of the Canon EOS 40D digital SLR camera.

Around there, it is said that the AF will be using the 9+6 sensor of the 5D camera.

Stock-Photo-blogspot is also very precise in the list of rumoured characteristics it describes. This is a kind of rumour consensus list:

• 10.1 M-pixel
• Dust removal like the EOS 400D/Rebel XTi
• 1.6 crop factor
• Weather-sealed (this seems unsure even if it would make it very competitive against the Pentax K10D -sold at less than 1000$)
• Less than 1200€ (following the market epxectations)

Wait for the end of an embargo on the 24th of February.

“Can you improve your conversation skills? Certainly.

It might take a while to change the conversation habits that’s been ingrained throughout your life, but it is very possible.”

The rest of the article is on The Positivity Blog.

Source: XKCD.

Google sells advertising. There is some of it on my web site pages. Normally, as a web site owner, I don’t really look at the price ads are sold (I don’t buy ads to publicize and market my web site). But, nonetheless, I was curious about the price ads are sold to Google customers. More precisely, I tried to identify the ads that are sold at the higher price.

To scrutiny those, I used AdWords, Google’s tool for vendors; It allows to evaluate prices. The result is nearly shocking if you look at the highest scores. They are systematically grouped in a few narrow categories:

• Loan financing or refinancing - often to pay college
• Automobile insurance
• Attorneys and personal lawsuits

First, we can notice that this is significantly skewed towards the American way of life. But these are obviously related to commercial topics linked to professions and skills that can earn you A LOT of money if you can sell them right (isn’t it the main purpose of any publicity and advertising?)

I collected a list of the most expensive search words I could find.

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In the world of P2P, Bittorrent is clearly the protocol of choice for big file transfers. This is true for videos (pirated or not), for GNU/Linux dsitribution CD-ROMs, for collections of photographic images, etc.

Among the Bittorrent-compatible P2P software applications, Azureus is clearly the one that receives the favors of the greatest public. It is proved by the participation to the networks. It quite certainly comes from the Azureus versatility, but also from its flexibility allowing it to be present on many different computing platforms (written in Java, it was ported to almost anything including a microprocessor: Apple, Linux, Windows PC, Unix workstations, etc.). But it comes with one hidden cost: Configuration nightmares, hundreds of options, some of them nearly impossible to understand at first. Azureus makes it a bit easier by breaking the configuration in several expertise levels, but it still is very complex.

When I wanted to install Azureus, even with my own computer experience, sometimes I was a little lost when lokoing for the best options to configure my machine. So, I decided to share this recently hard-earned expertise, with some of my own comments.

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The largest collection of Darwin’s writings ever assembled. This is the promise from the University of Cambridge. With the help of the Charles Darwin trust, they are assembling more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts from the father of the theory of Evolution.

Unfortunately, all is not available yet. But they are actively preparing 2009 (the 100th 200th anniversary of his birth) by digitizing documents as fast as possible. They are providing documents which were not publicly seen before and they intend to finish by 2009.

Since today is already the anniversary of Charles Darwin birthdate, it seemed adequate to tell you about it in the context of the renewed battles against the theory of Evolution in some countries that would appear otherwise as scientifically advanced like the United States of America.

Two other websites provide uniquely important, complementary Darwin materials: The Correspondence of Charles Darwin and The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution.

Reminder: All documents are in English (the language that Darwin used).

Today, this is not a record image that we show, but the publication of a scientific paper about the design of an camera for astronomy to be installed in a giant telescope (8.4m), probably in Chile.

The 3.2 giga-pixel LSST camera will produce approximately half a petabyte of archive images every month. These data need to be reduced in under a minute to produce real-time transient alerts, and then added to the cumulative catalog for further analysis. The catalog is expected to grow about three hundred terabytes per year. The data volume, the real-time transient alerting requirements of the LSST, and its spatio-temporal aspects require innovative techniques to build an efficient data access system at reasonable cost. As currently envisioned, the system will rely on a database for catalogs and metadata. Several database systems are being evaluated to understand how they perform at these data rates, data volumes, and access patterns. This paper describes the LSST requirements, the challenges they impose, the data access philosophy, results to date from evaluating available database technologies against LSST requirements, and the proposed database architecture to meet the data challenges.

To be published in SPIE.

The web site for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).