by R.I. Pienaar | May 22, 2004 | Photography Equipment
After my recent purchase of the Nikkor 70-300mm lens – which was intended as a cheap way to find out if I would like a zoom lens – I now purchased an upgrade on this based on my experience with it – the Sigma 28-300 Hyperzoom.
The Nikkor is a good lens though it suffers from heavy Chromatic Aberrations, especially at 300mm and in high contrast areas. The problem with a 70-300mm lens is that it does not start wide enough for holiday or walk about type shots, I often found myself wanting to change lens to my 18-70mm to get certain objects in frame that was too close or too big.
The 28-300mm is a good middle ground lens, I used it a bit today and found that I was unable to produce any CA and that I was not tempted to swap to a wider lens ever. Lens swapping on DSLR’s are notorious for getting dust on the CCD which requires rather scary cleaning using expensive CO2 based systems or cleaning swabs. The 28-300mm gives the equivalent of a 10x magnification when quoted in the typical digital camera speak. The lens was a bit hard to find, but eventually I found a dealer with stock and paid £200 for it.
View the full entry for a photo of the lens, also my first attempt at a studio type shot using some black cloth and a desk lamp, will need to get some velvet.
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by R.I. Pienaar | May 21, 2004 | Front Page
Via Geek News Central I got a link to a very thorough side-by-side comparison of various blogging tools. If you are considering moving or even deciding for the first time on what tool to use then this will be very handy.
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 | May 11, 2004 | Usefull Things
A quick update on my experiences with allofmp3.com.
Initially when I started out using them they were being terribly slow – the ‘current users’ counter constantly sat around 2000 users so I imagine they had a bit of unexpected traffic. By the weekend of the 1st of May they were actually refusing connections and eventually on the 2nd they were up again after posting a note about maintenance.
Since then the service levels have been acceptable. The 1 Gig of mp3’s I downloaded from them were all perfect quality and their online encoding system is really nice and definitely a reason to return to them in the future. I was surprised with their music selection covering some bands that I had trouble sourcing in London. My bank statement shows a perfect deduction from them with no funny business.
A big thumbs up to them then. The question about the legality of their service still remains, The Register has some interesting things to say about it but still no-one is being clear on what this means for the consumer and if music purchased from them will be considered illegal copies of copyrighted material.
The answer is far from clear. The site is not licensed by any labels. However, currently there is an exemption under existing Russian copyright legislation (Article 39 for the aficionados) allowing phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorisation of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. A similar argument can be applied to copies in the cache memory of computers.
So as IFPI Russia’s legal adviser, Vladimir Dragunov, concedes: “Because of these loopholes we don’t have much chance of succeeding if we attack these companies who are using music files on the Internet under current Russian laws.”
