by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 19, 2004 | Uncategorized
The Luminous Landscape has a good essay on the current battle between DSLRs and Digicams. Having recently moved from a prosumer Digicam to a DSLR I can agree with much of what is being said here, and like the author I now have multiple working cameras. The D70 for serious photography and the iXus 400 for walk about, concerts etc.
No sooner does is one battle over than another begins. Just a few years ago it was between film and silicon. Now the latest punch-up is between DSLRs and digicams. What you say? Digicams? Get a life!
No, actually, this competition is quite real. One couldn’t have said so as little as 12 months ago, but the game has changed (as it does rather quickly these days), and so a fresh look at these two distinct camera categories is in order — with a summer 2004 perspective.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 19, 2004 | Uncategorized
Photoxels has a nice tutorial on White Balance.
If you come from the world of films, you may remember using filters to correct for incandescent or fluorescent lighting. Most people don’t bother and their indoors pictures invariably come out with a yellow/orange or bluish cast. In the digital world, these correction filters are no longer necessary, replaced by a feature found in most — even the entry-level — digital cameras called, “White Balance.”
Link via PhotographyBLOG
by R.I. Pienaar | Jun 19, 2004 | Uncategorized
weblog.cemper.com:
I cannot even remember when last this thing validated correctly, Sauce Reader, Sharpreader, Newzcrawler, nothing will view it. Does people not check their own RSS feeds?
The Story of Feedster:
For ages now the RSS links provided on the frontpage of this blog all return one word – “hi” – this is a blog by a company that specialises in a search engine for RSS feeds, you would think they would get it right?
London Underground Diary‘s Feedster built feed:
This is yet another example of Feedster just not working as advertised, introduction of RSS search by Google is well overdue! Instead I will use either the RSS feed or the Atom Feed – assuming I go back to using Newzcrawler.
Feedster Blog of the Day:
While this is a handy little function that I quite enjoy, the fact that this feed shows a entry in it as updated or new when the blog updates – not when the entry in this list gets changed – means that old stuff keep bubbling to the top and annoy me, be gone.
by R.I. Pienaar | May 16, 2004 | Uncategorized
Six Apart made what they call a “brief explanation clarifying some points” on their current PR Nightmare.
The big one is basically that they now say a single weblog may be a collection of weblogs as long as it displays as one entity. I am contemplating splitting some stuff off my main blog, photography related things that many people just don’t care for, so with an additional blog that means extra RSS feed etc. This is something that a lot of people do and they have now recognized that their 5 weblog limit would ruin it for a lot of people. Now it is unlimited.
They have also made a nice compromise on licencing for a setup like mine, I could install the basic Personal Edition for $70 which allows for 5 authors and I can buy additional authors for $10 each. That is good, it is a solution I can afford and use, I can easily move the $10 once off fee to whoever I am hosting the blog for if they are that eager to get it hosted.
I think though that this is too little too late, they have effectively made themselves the poster child for the evils of Free but not Open Source software and so I will still be contemplating moving to something else, currently I am leaning towards the GPL WordPress system but it requires MySQL and that is something I need to still contemplate since I am not a fan and do not have it on my primary server.
I need to weigh up the time required to move away, redo the web design etc and the fact that no doubt my permLinks will now be not so perm anymore. Loss in Google penetration etc. Maybe WordPress can output stories in the same format as MovableType, at least in the same URL’s so that won’t change. Good thing is WordPress has a MT import function so that’s half the battle won.
by R.I. Pienaar | May 13, 2004 | Uncategorized
I have been a big Movabletype fan and use it on my blog. Thankfully I have never contributed code to the community. They released version 3 today in the form of a Developers Edition and introduced new pricing schemes.
Previously MT was free for non commercial sites. I could host blogs for friends without charging them and without paying for MT, multiple authors multiple blogs, fantastic. As long as you advertise them with little ‘powered by’ logos it was all good.
The new pricing structure shows how committed to a free version they are by removing all the mutli user support from the free versions. And even then with just one author you are only allowed 3 blogs.
For me to support just the few blogs I host I would need to fork out $70 to $120 at their 33% discounted introductory price. This is a huge step away from their previous licencing structure and one that is driving the community raging mad since a lot of people have provided free plugins, free development work, free beta testing and sent sixapart huge amounts of great ideas and so forth, only to be shafted by them. You only have to do a feedster search on the subject to see the outcry, you can also see the trackback on their posting that I linked above for a snip of it.
My only option to ever move away from MT 2.x is to install multiple versions of the free MT 3 on my machine, one per author and restrict them to 3 blogs. Creating a administrative nightmare for upgrades and so forth.
I suppose it is time one of these volunteers put their effort where it will be appreciate most at this point – write a migration tool away from MT 2.x to something else like Drupal, Typo3 or something Zope based ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 25, 2004 | Uncategorized
I purchased the Casting Shadows CD by Wolfsheim. I did not look at it properly in the shop and it turns out its a copy protected CD.
I never listen to my CDs directly, I rip them as soon as I can and then put them away for save keeping, listening to the MP3s on my iPod or Laptop via the radio if I have to. I don’t pirate music all my MP3s are from CDs I actually own and I don’t share any music.
Now with this Wolfsheim CD I had no choice but to resort to asking someone to look on P2P networks for me since it does not work in my PC and for most does not work in my 1999 Sony Surround system. He found an excellent 192k bit rate copy, now at least I can listen to the music I bought the way I want. I do not know how a small band like Wolfsheim (they are big in Germany) would sell out to the big record labels like this but it is definately giving me second thoughts about buying any more music of theirs and I am now definately not going to the live show that is here next month.
