Archive for April, 2007

This is a delicatessen reserved for HTML- and CSS-loving palates. It could be helpful to some CSS developers : in an article titled “Really undoing HTML and CSS“, Eric Meyer offers a CSS file that undo all default values preset by the default interpretation of HTML by some browsers.

As a matter of fact, some additional explanations may be useful and they can come from another article written by Richard Rutter: “Resetting default padding and margin“.

Additional thoughts from Eric Meyer on the same issue:

• Reworked reset
• Reset reasoning

For HTML and CSS specialists.

Small predators, but a dangerous set of fangs:

Yawning jackal


Wild dog
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

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

It was quite some time that anybody had any news of the long-expected Canon EOS 40D digital camera. Today, a rumour is popping from a forum. It would be arriving on the shelves in July.

From Fred Miranda forum.

To be confirmed, of course.

Shooting a few good images is quite often a matter of time. The following sequence extends over slightly more than an hour (and sometimes, fed with waiting the photographer looks for a different subject like in the last photo of the series) and we only stopped because night was about to come:

Cheetah


Cheetah


Cheetah,
marking its territory


Sitting Cheetah


Sitting Cheetahs


Lying cheetah


Yawning cheetah


Yawning cheetah


Two cheetahs, a portrait
[my prefered]


Cheetah on video
By a photographer tired of looking at
the same suject from
the same point of view…
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

You knew that I had been buying STALKER (officially S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl – Did you ever see a worst-to-type PC game title?) Today, I finished the game playing at Stalker level (not the easiest rookie style, but neither veteran nor master).

I can tell you it’s real fun all along. I had a real difficult time to enter the Chernobyl plant: It’s quite well defended, there is a simultaneous attack by the military (these guys decidedly don’t want to make a difference between the defenders and me; Worse, they use helicopters against me!) and you need to manage your equipment nicely if you want to run and shoot simultaneously on a very large open ground…

Highly recommended. I’m going to redo it differently (higher difficulty level and different approach to the overall cooperation). It’s worth it because the end is depending a lot on what you did during the game. Obviously, I appeared as a greedy person when I arrived at the final stage (I believe that there are at least seven different endings). We’ll see next time.

Performance note: I used 800×600 resolution with minimal quality during most of the game. However, my AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with 1GB of DRAM and old ATI 9800 Pro also allowed to use a good anti-aliasing (not full, but some makes it nicer).

As you certainly know, continental/communist China is one of those countries that have an institutionalized censorship system to protect its citizens. It starts with a very strong management of Internet cafés, but it is also based upon a stringent filtering of many web sites out of the country and judged as undesirable. Very efficient, but what are the filtered web sites? You only have to test on GreatFireWallOfChina.

I am happy to report that roumazeilles.net is not censored there and can be read from China.

A magnificent web weaving spider observed in good light. It is a nice female of 3-4cm and you can recognize a much smaller male a little higher on the web:

Golden orb web spider (femelle and male, back)


Golden orb web spider (femelle and male)
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

If you are willing to discover the entrails of your prefered technology gadgets but you do not want to loose the advantage of the warranty that goes with your purchase, here is a solution: Go to the web site open by EEtimes that allow you to visit the deepest of many consumer electronic devices that we enjoy: Under the Hood.

For the curious photographers, the archvies have the following camera wide open:

• Nikon 4800

Amongst the big five (the prefered game of safari hunters in the 19th and 20th centuries), there is -of course- the mighty lion. I did not kill any, but I shot several images:

Lion cub


Lionness
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

Most wildlife photo amateurs are very found of long focal length tele-lenses. Quite often, the ideal is to be able to go up to 400mm. However, ideally, we should have a zoom to adapt up from a shorter focal length. These last years, the technology evolved so significantly that there is no doubt the 100-400mm span appears as quite natural with an aperture never tighter than f/5.6 (Canon has it and Nikon has a 80-400mm zoom too). Sigma joins the competition with the 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG OS.

The Digital Picture has a review of this Sigma lens that should be of interest to many wildlife photographers.

80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG OS lens review.

If there are so many predators in South Africa, it’s because many big grass-eating ruminant mammals are present too. They are the walking larder of big cats and other canines.

Impala (male, jumping)


Gnus


Nyala antelope (male)


Kudu (female)


Kudu (female)


Cobb
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

The Hubble space telescope just went through its 17th birthday. Unfortunately, its future seems to be pretty much compromised since the Moon and Mars ambitions of the President of the United States of America forced NASA to reduce drastically the number of space shuttle missions: There will probably never be any other repair mission to Hubble and the space telescope will soon die of old age.

For the time being, NASA and ESA take time to celebrate the event with a huge panoramic image (29,566 x 14,321 pixels) Carina nebula, a space region of intense star creation.

The WWF announced that hunters in Eastern Russia recently killed one female of the critically endangered species of Amur Leopard. The animal was shot and them beaten to death with one blunt object apparently. She was one of the last seven (7) female animals still living of that species. The end is approaching fast for them.

Sources: the Register, New Scientist, Futura-Sciences & AFP.

Ultra-specialized, the web sites below will allow you to build or create easily enormously personnalized images:

• Clapper board: As if you were clapping for your own motion picture
• Cigarette pack
• Warning label 100% tailor-made
• Official-looking seals

South Africa is the country of the big five. But, they also have pretty big birds. Some of them are here.

Various vultures (lappet-faced vulture, white-backed vulture, hooded vulture)


Lappet-faced Vultures


Fishing eagle
(Click on the thumbnails to see the larger image)

If you can help me identify them precisely, I’d appreciate your help in the messages below.

Lightzone is a RAW manipulation tool (”Your personal digital darkroom“) that some people like a lot for its specific set of qualities (clean neat interface, support for a lot of RAW file formats, ability to handle batch jobs, end-to-end color management) despite its hefty price tag ($150 for the Basic version and $250 for the Full version for Windows or Mac).

Now, thanks to Download Squad, I noticed that there is more than the 30-day trial version that you could be interested into. Light Crafts made LightZone available for free for those of you running GNU/Linux. I would say that it make sense to have a partition running Linux on your PC (or maybe even a LiveCD boot and some reserved disk space) just to be able to run some useful applications like LightZone on your computer.

The Linux-based LightZone is essentially the Full version of the software application, so it’s a really neat bargain.

However, you will not find it on the corporate web site of Light Crafts. You should go to the specific LightZone for Linux web site. Light Crafts is OK with it, but does not want to support this version. However, since this is good software…

PS: After all, it looks a little like the shareware strategy of some years ago. You can use my software application, it should be attracting you to pay in full later for additional benefits (here, to get to run it natively on your Mac OSX or Windows).

Update: Modified the link to LightZone for Linux.