by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 6, 2004 | Usefull Things
Someone on IRC mentioned that Google Labs has released a new service that personalised Google results based on your own preference. It is called Google Personalized and it roqs.
You start by telling it your preferences, basic categories that interests you, this gets saved as a cookie on your machine. Thereafter searches that you do default to no personalization but it has a nifty sliding bar for level of personalization which changes the results accordingly.
I did a simple test by choosing only an interest in Open Source and then did a search on Windows, you can see the results pre and post filtering in the following screenshots.
click on the images for bigger versions.
Kudos to Google for this, if this is a sign of things to come I am very impressed. I can only hope that Google will eventually allow us to filter our searches using something like regular expressions, there are a few domains that I never want to see in a search result.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 6, 2004 | Front Page
After recent announcements from Google about GMail a small fry company in the web email business announced that they are offering 1Gb email to all current and new subscribers.
The company in question is Spymac for your free membership you get:
1Gb Email space
250Mb photo hosting
100Mb web space
Blog and Forums
WebDAV access to all your files
FTP Access to all your files
iCal hosting
You can read more about it here. Thanks for BoingBoing for the mention of this. I will try it out soon!
UPDATE: I tried it out, read the extended entry for my experience.
(more…)
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 6, 2004 | Photography
After much waiting and conspiracy theorizing on forums DP Review has finally released their full review of the Nikon D70. For many potential buyers this is what decision making is all about, they simply will not buy anything before dpreview gives it the thumbs up.
This review is seen is important especially in this case where the camera has pronounced moire under some conditions and colour casting issues under extreme conditions, the community has been strongly devided between those with a D70 who recognises the quality of the camera and the trade offs in obtaining the image quality and those without the D70 who have been trolling and over emphasising problems. The Canon community is also hugely up in arms due to his slight favouring of the D70 over the Digital Rebel and 10D. I am glad it was not my duty to make such a decision.
Today much of that has been answered in the review and is well worth a read for any prospective buyer.
Nikon have achieved three major improvements with the D70 (compared to the competition / the D100): (1) They have improved the performance of the camera, with its instant on availability, very fast shutter release, superb continuous shooting and image processing speed and smart use of its buffer. (2) They have maintained build quality while still delivering a smaller and lighter camera, the D70 doesn’t feel much less well built than the D100 but is lighter, it certainly feels much more like $1000 worth of camera than the EOS 300D could. (3) They have improved image sharpness and detail, while we could niggle about moire the compromise between artifacts and sharpness is worth it, in many instances the D70 delivering more detail than our previous benchmark, the EOS 300D / EOS 10D CMOS sensor.
There’s not much more for me to add other than I am very pleased to see Nikon stepping up with a quality camera which doesn’t compromise on build quality, feature set or image quality and yet offers superb value for money. There’s no risk involved in the D70’s slightly higher price compared to the EOS 300D (Digital Rebel), it’s absolutely worth it.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 4, 2004 | Usefull Things
I bought 2 120Gb Seagate drives for some archival storage due to massive files being produced by the new camera and Photoshop. The 2 drives will be rsync’d so that I have a backup copy of the drives themselves but this left the problem of getting the Windows machine to easily copy its files to the server.
The difficult thing came in that the directory on my laptop will not be identical to that on the server since I do not intend to carry all my photos with me all the time, it is already almost 10Gb big so a simple copy of some sort wouldn’t work. I did some searching and came across SyncBack which is an awsome Windows Freeware tool for doing all sorts of complex syncing even supporting FTP servers as destination, has a scheduler and options for emailing reports etc. If you ever need to sync or backup a Windows box to somewhere else then this is the tool to use.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 1, 2004 | Front Page
There is a bit of discussion on the Bugtraq list about a new Fragmentation Attack that seems to be able to take out most operating systems. The author has named it the Rose Attack. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
Of the machines I have had access to, this attack has caused any number of the following problems:
1) Causes the CPU to spike, thus exhausting processor resources.
2) Legitimate fragmented packets are dropped intermittently (unfragmented packets get through fine)
3) Legitimate fragmented packets are no longer accepted by the machine under attack (unfragmented packets get through fine) until the fragmentation time exceeded timers expire.
4) Devices like Cisco routers can have Buffer overflow, i.e. packets are dropped at high packet rates if there aren’t enough buffers allocated.
The following devices were tested and showed some or all of the above
symptoms:
1) Microsoft Windows 2000
2) Mandrake Linux 9.2
2) Cisco 2621XM
3) PIX Firewall
4) Mac OS/X V10.2.8 (FreeBSD 5?)
Nasty.
