on technology
More Photographic Tests
My last post was about Dirk’s new camera. Well today we took a half day to test it out. We had planned the date two days ago, when we woke up this morning, it was pouring rain. Since we are members of Kew, and it five minutes away, I grabbed a visitor pass and we headed over to take some pictures in the Palm House and Temperate House.
Our plan was to take three pictures of each subject at three common aperture settings, and allow the camera to adjust the shutter speed. Unfortunately, the light was severely limited and uneven. So we ended up taking three pictures of each subject in three aperture settings that were reasonable. The goal was really to test depth of field. I also brought my point and shoot cameral along to compare.
The first thing I should mention… it is very hard to see the difference online (specially in the thumbnails, so open them up). On top of that, I had to reduced these images to either 900×600 or 800×600 which pretty much hides a lot of the detail on the better camera; however, the difference is very real. Not only can you print up to A3 (legal paper) size images, but the depth of field really is superior. I also think the colors are far more true.
Basically we need to do another sunny day test to get better, more even results, but you can see the difference plainly.
I have picked three photos which show the differences between the high-end Cannon and the point-in-shoot Panasonic. If I can, I will get an example of the three aperture settings next.
| Canon | Panasonic |
| Short Distance Test | |
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| Medium Distance Test | |
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| Long Distance Test | |
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December 31, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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8 Megapixels of Fun
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| full | inset |
I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. This weekend I was walking around Richmond Park with my family and good friends Dirk and Gulin. Drik has recently gotten back into photography and just last year bought a film SLR and just last week got an eight megapixel SLR body. We took it to the park to test it out.
First off, I should say, I don’t really know much about his camera. I think its a pretty low end Cannon by the feel of it, but still fine for any amature. But I carry a two pound 1985 Ricoh around… so they all feel a little cheap to me. However, its nice. He has some good lenses and it has very nice aperature and auto-focus features that make shooting sophositcated and easy. The fast memory made the camera quick too. Very nice to handle.
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| full | inset |
What I couldn’t believe was the quality of the images that came out. Right away you can see the difference in the depth of field compared to my little point and shoot Panasonic. Dirk couldn’t even email me the full size images, so these examples are reduced 75% by him and then again by me to be a little more ‘web-friendly’. The ‘inset’ images are straight 800 by 600 pixel cuts from the 75% reduced images. I only did a little ‘light balancing’ in Photoshop.
Pretty impressive. The bottom image was taken at long range with a telephoto lens as well.
I think the question is really going to be about storage now. If your images are averageing 8 megabytes and you can easily take 1 gigabyte a month, where will you store them all? How will you upload them to get printed? I know iPhoto and broadband can get you pretty far, but I think these high megapixel cameras are really going to lead to people upgrading hardware, potentially software and requiring bandwidth. I know that designers and professional photographers have been dealing with this for years, but now average people will start buying these ‘super-cameras’ — I think it will push the need for external storage, bandwidth and and better photo management software.
December 21, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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MeasureMap from AdaptivePath
For the past two weeks I have been looking at a new blog stats package from Adaptive Path called MeasureMap. What follows is a feedback email that I sent them. I haven’t heard anything from them, but they welcomed people posting the information.
Overall, I like it very much, but naturally had lots of comments.
First of all, let me say that I am very impressed with this application. I can imagine a whole world of hosted bloggers who have never seen these kinds of stats before being blown away by some of this data.
Also, before I start telling you what I would do to improve the application, I should state upfron that I don’t understand your business model to understand how you are going to make money doing this — I am assuming it will be by up-selling other services (advanced tracking, realtime tracking, advice, etc…)
That said, here I go…
November 7, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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Killing Spam with Mailfront and CVM
I manage the email for a 20 or so domains. A long time ago I moved everything to qmali with vmailmgr which I love, despite how hard it has been to get up and running as a non-programmer. The combination of safely and flexibility of the combination have been great. The problems have really been around all the other ‘stuff’ that you really need; IMAP (Courier), Span filters (SPAM ASSASSIN), etc… all of which have their own complexities and the start-up scripts start getting insane — for me anyway.
However, there is one set of scripts that I have added that have made my life and my CPU’s immeasurably better — Mailfront and CVM. These two together can reject an email before it even hits the email system, in my case Qmail, by seeing if the incoming email is a real user on the system or not. It doesn’t stop Spam to an account, but it will reject all the ‘dictionary spammers’ or whatever you call the people who hit every name in the baby book at every domain… This might seem simplistic, but if the email hits Qmail, it can sit there for something like 7 days. If you get a few thousand of these, it can really hurt the system — not to mention all the additional Spam Assassin time, etc..
Considering we get something short of 7 times more emails to addresses that don’t exist that do, this is a lifesaver and has really helped our system’s performance.
If you manage an email server, I strongly recommend you look into these tools.
October 28, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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Apple with Intel — My Personal Take :: Part 2
Well, as I shared here my wonderful Apple G4 died recently a horrible death… a memory chip and one of the two CPUs kicked the bucket… and the cost of repair was greater than the value of a new machine — naturally.
Of course I didn’t even want a new system, but with my job situation (aka I am soon to be unemployed) and everything else going on, I really missed it more and more everyday. So I finally broke down and got a refurbished one that was 30% off (naturally today they dropped to 34% off the day it arrived).
It seems a little faster, but the best bit is that its about 50% quieter than the jumbo jet fans of my last one!
Now I need to get some more memory!
June 20, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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Apple with Intel — My Personal Take
Well, seems everyone is weighting in on the Apple to Intel move. I thought I should relate my personal dilemma surrounding the switch.
Background
I have/had an Apple Power Mac Quicksilver 2002. This is a dual 1GHz machine with 1.5 GB of memory. Perfectly good for my iLife work, HTML and Perl coding.
Was it Tiger?
It all started around my move to Tiger. I upgraded, but I started to get some intermittent crashes and problems. I couldn’t really pin-point the issue, so I did a backup and install installation over the upgrade install, preserving my user preferences. This only seemed to make matters worse. I was nearly convinced that it was some Tiger compatibility issue with my older system.
Based on some of the errors, I began to think that I might have some bad memory. So I pulled out the faulty chip (after a little trial and error) and still the crashes kept occurring, in fact more and more often. When I couldn’t even boot from CD, I finally realized that this wasn’t a “Tiger Issue” but a hardware one.
Seeking Professional Help
I live a little outside London, so I thought I was going to have to travel quiet a bit to get some technical help. Turns out that Computer Warehouse are within two miles of my home. So I took the system in. They claimed there was a six week wait for help due to the sheer number of new macs that were being configured by the staff.
About a week later they called…
Diagnosis, el morto
Yes, the worst of all possibilities, one of the CPUs was deal. A replacement (with labor) was £800. A good friend confirmed I could get an upgrade CPU for about £600. This is nearly the cost of this system on ebay.co.uk right now! I can’t really justify fixing the thing…
Quick Thinking… Get a Backup
I do backup regularly to DVDs and mac.com; however, it would stink to pull it all together… so I convinced the rather nice tech at CW that if I bought a Lacie Big Disk from them, could he backup my disks with the temporary CPU he put in to test… Phew! ( From what I understand my older drives don’t fit in the new macs. )
‘I’ Day
Yes, the Apple World Wide Developer Conference is today, the day of the bad news… and wham… Apple is moving to Intel. DOH!
Not only is my computer dead and I need to get a new one. Not only was I saving to get a Powerbook, but can’t because I think I really need a Powermac replacement first. But Steve Jobs announces the switch to Intel!
What do I do!
Option and Help!
Here are my options as I see them:
| PRO | CON |
| Buy my identical system on ebay and stick my old drives in and wait to see what happens with apple over the next 18 months. | The price of these system for the past few days is nearly the cost of the current low end new Apples… the morons. |
| Buy a Powerbook now (I want one anyways) and see what happens. | The Powerbook is likely to get the biggest boost from the switch to Intel |
| Buy a mini now and give it to the kids later. | The mini is also like to get a big boost from Intel and might not be powerful enough for iMovie and the like. |
| Buy a refurbed Powermac now and just wait for second generation Powerbooks to come along as I won’t be able to afford it very long. | The cost is high and it will still be a good system when the world stops writing apps for the PowerPC architecture… what a waste. |
So, what should I do? If anyone can help, please let me know.
June 12, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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Smith Barney Access Adopts Web Standards
Congratulations to the team ( including my brother ) at Smith Barney on reducing their homepage size from over 350k. They have moved to a far lighter and faster 80k that very nearly validates and uses a pure CSS layout (they have also overhauled their portfolio pages.)
They still have a ways to go, but clearly they are on the path towards CSS driven layout. I know it hasn’t been easy for them as they had to abandon support for certain browsers and touch a lot of code in a lot of different system, but the ROI is real and the site look good.
March 17, 2005 |
Category » on technology
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editors
What text editor do I use/prefer?
Emacs
By far my favorite. Its installed on nearly all unix systems and my mac. It has nearly everything I require:
- Unlimited file size
- Powerful Search and Replace
- PERL Mode
- 100% keyboard driven (unless you want to use X11)
- keyboard macros
- pretty strong with character sets, including UTF-8
- available on nearly all Unix based systems
Here are some key commands for the uninitiated:
| Control-x Control-c | close/exit |
| Control-x Control-s | save |
| Control-s | search forward |
| Control-r | search backward |
| Escape-x replace-string | search & replace |
| Control-x k | kill buffer |
| Escape < | go to start of file |
| Escape > | go to end of file |
Ultra-Edit 32
For windows, its as close to Emacs as I have found that can use all the windows conversions. I know you can use Emacs on windows, but moving around the filesystem stinks. The things I like about Ultra-Edit:
- FTP/SFTP built in… keeps me from having to learn VI on systems without Emacs
- Regular Expressions for search & replace
- Deduplicate sorting
- Encoding conversions
- HTML preview
BBEdit
On my mac I use BBEdit. It is pretty amazing, but it don’t find it as intuitive as Emacs or Ultra-Edit. It is also expensive to keep upgrading it…. which I hate… I don’t mind shelling out a lot once, but after that, keep me on the upgrade path for cheap… Here is what I like:
- Very good with HTML
- Emacs keybindings
- HTML preview on steroids
- and the best…. tab to 4 spaces option… I love that!
February 2, 2004 |
Category » on technology
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