(Saturday, February 10th, 2007)
Minor event here: With today’s purchase of a Seagate 400 GB SATA-2 hard drive (in an external USB-2/eSATA enclosure), the accumulated storage went over the 1 Tera-Byte limit (1024 GB). And I can still envision myself seriously thinking about buying my first hard disc - it was a 500 kB external disc for an Apple ][e…
(Saturday, February 10th, 2007)
This is official now! The Canon EOS 40D, that some are awaiting with strong impatience as the sequel to the successful Canon EOS 20D and 30D, should be classified as science-fiction more than photography gadgetry. At least this is our opinion when looking at the scoop from Samuele Silva:
Rumours are sometimes more than funny. And you, would you buy such a digital camera?
(Friday, February 9th, 2007)
The music industry is a large ship that moves slowly. But when they saw the arrival of the Internet, most of this industry decided to jump onto technical measures to close and protect the music they produce in order to protect their rights: Hence the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Today, things did not really change, but they could.
Two informations of today:
(Friday, February 9th, 2007)
Currently, the D200 is a big sale at Nikon. However, people already started speculating about its future successor that everybody (except Nikon) seems to have named D300.
Let’s try and summarize the little information/rumours that are available.
Nothing has been announced yet, but Ken Rockwell stated November 2007, which is copied in many other web locations.
Let’s look at the timeline for Nikon digital cameras:
| 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| range | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | Q1 |
| pro | D1 | D1X | D2X | D2Xs | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| high-speed | D1H | D2H | D2Hs | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| prosumer | D100 | D200 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| consumer | D70 | D70s | D80 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| entry-level | D50 | D40 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On such a table it is quite clear that the end of 2007 could be a reasonable time for Nikon to replace the D200. Does that mean that a D300 will appear then? Your guess is as good as mine, but there is an obvious market pressure for regular model replacements.
Here is the highest amount of rumours about the D300. Mostly, it seems that people are just fleshing up their dreams. But there seems to be two main approaches to the issue:
In any case, the main background issue seems to be: “What sensor would be available to feed this sensor frenzy?” For the time being, we did not see anything very precise here. Has somebody any internal news from Sony about the next generation of sensors (Nikon D200 has a Sony sensor that contributed greatly to its success and both companies partnered deeply to get it working early).
As much as people would like to ponder more details, it seems that nothing precise is coming up here. 50-3200 ISO from (Ken Rockwell), faster shooting (5+ FPS).
As Thom is saying, don’t base today’s buying decisions on these yet. There is still a lot to come and if you plan to buy some camera now, don’t use rumours to orient your decision.
But we will keep reporting about what information may come up from time to time.
(Friday, February 9th, 2007)
If you look at the left-hand side menu on this page, you will notice that there is a link to either register yourself (Register) or login (Login). These links are here to give you the ability to identify yourself when your are visiting the Roumazeilles.net web site. It is a two-step process:
But what are the advantages for you? There are several of them.
Once you are identified, you can directly send replies or comments to the various posts. Without further ado, you can help other readers with your experience relating to an existing post that you are just reading. Just click on the comment link you will find with each post/article. If you are identified and reading the special page for a post, you will also see a large empty box to type your comments.
When you are identified, you have access to the web site administration (Site Admin). One important possibility here is that you can write a new post/article. It will be submitted for approval and may end in the web site front page, like some other people did. In that case, your name (or pseudo-name) will appear along with the post/article.
If you are worried about providing personal details, don’t. We request only a very limited amount of data. The only compulsory information is a username (or pseudo) that you can choose freely and an email address that is not shown to the visitors. If you indicate a web site address, it will be associated to your username any time it is displayed (isn’t it a nice advertising feature for your own blog?). You will be provided a password that will protect your access rights, and that you can modify later by accessing your account.
(Friday, February 9th, 2007)
Two of the most anticpated 2007 FPS PC video games just started to appear in the form of previews. They are not ready for the stores yet, but journalists start getting preview access to versions that are nearly definitive (the nearly word is critical here because it leaves a lot in between bugged version and final version).
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is previewed by bit-tech.net. The game is a little more linear than what was announced six years ago (when the first words went out about it), but it still seems to be one of the most interesting games forcing gamers to cooperate with non-playing characters.
TwitchGuru was able to test CRYSIS and produced a small video out of it:
One of the important bits of information from this test is that while the game is supposed to be used with DirectX 10 and Vista, it will be playable with some other (unspecified) Operating Systems.
(Thursday, February 8th, 2007)
The youngest of our readers may not know what this title is all about, but some of the dinosaurs here won’t need a music encyclopaedia to remember Sex Pistols’ “Never mind the bollocks” (1977) and their alternative music (well before they coined the word in for this context).
Today, the punk wave largely left the music ground and let itself be transformed. But there are some amateurs still. And some others will be interested in rediscovering freely these music groups that broke all rules.
Punk music is a web site that offers free download of punk music.
(Wednesday, February 7th, 2007)
Among the various things I have been looking into while trying to identify the origin of PC crashes I have already been disucssing (I was looking for possible explanations in the possible death of RAM memory), I went and checked the graphics card.
Apparently, there lies the origin of my recent PC problems. It appears that the replacement of the current AGP ATI 9800 pro card with an old AGP ATI 7200 card led to a total disparition of the issues. Of course, I lost a tremendous amount of 3D graphics performance, but it still has the capacity to drive the CRT to high resolutions like 2048*1536 (did you notice that high-resolution is no longer a constraint for graphics cards? It’s only the display that introduces some kind of limitation).
I am a little unsure about the exact reason, but it seems that the cause of the problems is that the small fan cooling the GPU has been ageing and is now longer runnning fast enough to keep it quiet. I suppose that if I would try to run 3D games, it would fail even more quickly. Unfortunately, there is no speed control for the GPU fan on this family of PowerColor ATI cards. So, I can’t check the exact speed but the temperature of the metal heatsink is defintely too high to touch it after a few minutes of operation. I will have to either replace the heatsink and fan or move to a high-power solution.
Knowing that we are discussing the arrival of kick-ass new games like Bioshock, STALKER and Crysis (all these FPS games will have a hard time with only a Athlon2600+ AMD CPU and ATI 9800pro), you can imagine that I won’t jump on a new card, but I am clearly preparing for a shift to a completely new platform. It is already planned, so the only question is “what graphics card will it be receiving?”
Last minute note: I have been able to replace the failing fan with another one (I had to push hard to insert the new ones, but it won’t move now and air is still flowing correctly). This seems to solve the issue. Confirmation of the initial analysis.
(Wednesday, February 7th, 2007)
As I described in another post, I wanted to test RAID technology on my GNU/Linux OpenSUSE configuration. In the previous post, I have shown how to create/install the RAID array.
Now my intent is to see what happens when a hard drive fails, as it is supposed to protect me against it. But I prefer to test rather than believe the hype. Just after that I will need to observe what happens when we plug a new drive to replace the failed one. And I will suppose that once again it’s a different drive (after a few years of operation and a failure, there is no reasonable chance of finding an identical drive).
(Tuesday, February 6th, 2007)
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are a very powerful way to apply styles to an HTML page. It has the advantage of removing most of the formatting (styling) and putting it in a single location. However, in my first tries I tended to create a lot of styles which where very similar one to each other.
For example, I would write:
I wanted to improve and optimize all this. It took me several steps to get it. The first (nearly obvious one since it is described clearly in all CSS tutorials and books) was to group exactly identical styles (like ul and ol, in my example), leading to the following:
No big deal, but it is reducing the amount of redundancy.
After that point, I was left in the dark with trying to group styles which where not exactly identical and so could not obviously be grouped. What I needed was to understand that a style can be defined in separate (additive) declarations, like:
|
In the spotlight: |
Now, it becomes nearly obvious how to combine styles even when they are not fully identical: Group what can be grouped, keep the rest separated.
The final code for my example is then:
15 lines instead of 21, nearly no redundancy left (none except what I chose to keep for readability); This has been leading to significant simplifications of my style sheets. I hope it will be the case for you too.
(Tuesday, February 6th, 2007)
I am currently in the middle of a string of problems quite annoying on one of my home PCs. Apparently randomly, and more and more often, it stops, locks down or reboots without warning. If I don’t use the PC, it may take a long time; But when I am trying to work (with OpenOffice, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, Corel Draw! or any other useful software application) it will take anything between a few minutes and half an hour. Rather annoying. More than merely annoying…
After a few initial checks because I noticed that the first symptoms seemed to appear near the recent upgrades to Opera v9.10 and to a newer Flash plug-in, I now think that it may come from ageing hardware and some related failure. But this leads to very difficult sleuthing.
First things, first: check the RAM memory. I started by stopping the computer, removing the memory boards, then setting them again into their slots (in case of bad contacts or small corrosion issues). Nothing very conclusive since it did not change anything. But I wanted to dig deeper there and, for this, I needed a more conclusive tool.
I remembered the existence of a PC memory test utility tool, named Memtest-86. Not difficult to find on the Internet. Nevertheless, I found even better: A Live-CD containing this utility and dozens of others, UBCD or Ultimate Boot CD. Advantage: No big effort need; I boot on the CD, all the tools are immediately available from a DOS menu. Ten seconds, two key presses and Memtest-86 confirms that there is nothing obviously at fault with my RAM memory.
UBCD has the enormous advantage of including only free software tools, easy to start without any installation. Many of them run from a mini GNU/Linux install; The others use their own pseudo-MS-DOS.
The main categories of software tools foudn there are:
|
In the spotlight: |
There are quite many checks available. Some are long to run (some are very long). My own tests and trials went through:
With or without the solution to my PC configuration problem, the Ultimate Boot CD is clearly a critical tool to keep on a CD-ROM ready for emergencies. It is a the kind of jack-of-all-trades tool box. If your approach to PC maintenance and repair does not stop to Windows re-install from scratch and new PC purchase, you must have Ultimate Boot CD wainting on a shelf. A kind of cross-breeding between life insurance and ER team…
(Monday, February 5th, 2007)
You are willing to observe our planet Earth as seen from space in an interactive form? There is no better place than Flash Earth, a Flash software application allowing you easy navigation through the images from Google, Yahoo Maps, NASA, etc. This is a sort of cute synthesis for all these services in a very pleasant form.
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