Over the past month I’ve been trying to re-organize the layout of my BLOG to make it a little easier to navigate.
If you have an old link to a page, you might need to update it.
Most notably I’ve done away with my gallery site, and incorporated those pictures into a gallery page on this site.
Secondly, I’ve create a page hierarchy that better organizes related information; like recommenations and price searches.
As always, I welcome your comments and constructive criticism.
Since when does every website seem to think they have to use Adobe Flash?
In my opinion some of the crappiest software on this planet comes from Adobe, and they are one of the very few companies that seem to believe that installing their software on your computer gives them every right to take it over.
The only other software that I know that acts like that we refer to as a VIRUS and work diligently to keep it off our machines.
Wake up — and just say HELL NO to web sites trying to force you download and install ANY software. If they can’t figure out how to give you a WEB 2.0 experience without you needing to install viral agents — just spend your money elsewhere… they’ll get the idea soon enough.
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Neither of these digital SLRs are the top of the line or new models from either manufacturer; but I own one of each, and both are considered to be extremely good pro-sumer models.
With a DSLR, like an SLR, the quality of images you take will depend on the lens and skill of the photographer every bit as much as the equipment.
I’ve be interested in photography since I was a teen; and to be honest, I’m a technically great photographer, but I’m not a great photographer. Or as I tell my friends, I’ve taken millions of technically perfect photographs in my years; and I have one or two that are actually good photographs.
What’s my criteria for comparison?
That’s easy.
I think you need to consider…
Price; that’s not easy with these two — in the years since I bought the D20 this technology costs significantly less — and even purchasing the 20D refurbished it will set you back substantially more than a D40 (you really have to go with a Rebel XSi or XTi or XS to be at a comparable price point, and those have plastic bodies like the D40 but more resolution than even the D20).
Construction; here there’s no comparison, while there’s nothing technically wrong with the D40, the 20D is solid, the magnesium alloy makes the plastic D40 body look like a joke. And of course the additional weight of the 20D makes it handle like a “real” SLR, the D40 is so light that it has a bizarre center of gravity with even the lightest of lens attached.
Controls; both cameras are made by a camera company, so they act like cameras and you’ll be able to control them much like you can any SLR. You might find the controls a little different than an SLR, but both companies have made an effort to make the cameras similar in many ways to their comparable SLR lines.
Ease of use; though rather than call it ease of use we should probably define this as straight forward controls that don’t require inordinate steps to do useful tasks; here the two are fairly similar, though I’ll have to say Nikon’s inclusion of “editing” features seems like a total waste, and serve only to clutter the menu.
Available accessories; both have an incredible range of accessories you can purchase for them, but I’ll have to say that in general the Nikon accessories will cost less than Canon. Third party accessories for both are, of course, substantially less expensive.
Lens; again, both Nikon and Canon have an incredible range of lens for their cameras. Nikon has, unfortunately for those of use who own an F series film camera, changed their lens (AF). Third party lens for both are, of course, substantially less expensive — and you can argue the quality.
Raw imaging; both have raw imaging. And both cameras offer
Image quality; both have impressive quality. The 20D has more resolution than the D40 (you can get higher resolution Nikon models for about the same price, but the D40 is considered to have one of the best CCDs, and of course has a very attractive price). The real difference for me in the image quality is I think the Canon has a more accurate rendering of color and detail (now you’re going to find people who say the exact opposite, in fact I was looking at a comparison between a Nikon and Canon model and the person was saying the Nikon was better, but in my mind 90% of the images looked like the Canon was better). The bottom line of this is it’s going to depend on what you like individually — there’s no right answer, both of these cameras do an incredible job, and it’s DIGITAL, so you can apply some corrections with your favorite photo editing software.
Which is better… well, I’d give the Canon 20D that vote, which is interesting since I’ve used a Nikon F4 for years.
Whether you choose a Canon D20, a Canon Digital Rebel XSi, Canon Digital Rebel XTi, Canon Digital Rebel XS, or a Nikon D40 you’ll be getting a quality photographic instrument made by camera company that will be a good general replacement for a SLR. While all these DSLRs offer “point-and-shoot” modes, it really only makes sense to buy one if you’re a little more serious about photography. As I said before, it’s also going to depend on the lens, accessories, and operator skill what kind of results you see.
For pricing and availability, you can check the price search engines on my side bar. One word of caution when buying photographic equipment online; try and deal with a reputable company and avoid the headaches. Also be mindful of grey market items and understand what you’re buying. NOTE: There’s no real issue with buying a grey market item (item that was not intended for US sale), but you should be aware of what you’re getting before you get it.
A couple weeks ago my avast! anti-virus popped up a Window that wanted to reboot the machine, then indicated to me I had NO protection.
Apparently my one year (actually fourteen month) free subscription was up, and it wanted to enter a new registration code. The software takes you to a screen where you can purchase a subscription, or you can navigate to the free avast! site and request a new registration code (that’s good for another fourteen months).
Now I think a great deal of avast!, it seems to find more mal-ware than most of it’s competitors, is clean and easy to use, doesn’t try to take over your computer, and you can’t argue with the price. But I think it’s a HORRIBLE thing for a anti-virus program to just stop working. I don’t have any problem with it prohibiting updates of the program or signature file until you update; and I certainly don’t have a problem with it popping up a warning every time you boot (or even including a warning right above the systray like it does when it detects a potential virus) — but to stop providing the service that you depend on it for without any warning before hand… that’s just wrong.
I certainly hope the avast! people reconsider this draconian behavior; I can’t continue to recommend avast! as a good anti-virus solution if it’s just going to leave you high and dry without a reasonable warning.
And I have a bridge for sale…
I’m sure you’ve heard your friend the Mac bigot tell you this and that about the Mac is better.
You know, the file system doesn’t fragment, it doesn’t crash, it’s easy to use, software uninstalls properly…
I’ve talked about fragmentation before; and there’s no reason to cover that ground again. As to it doesn’t crash, well… you don’t see the sad Mac or the bomb any more — but it crashes, sometimes you get a kernel panic, sometimes it just reboots (I’ve seen both)…
But the really amusing thing is the software uninstall myth.
That’s a load of CRAP. The real problem is most Mac user’s wouldn’t know if software uninstalled or not — as long as the entry disappears from the Applications folder they think it’s been uninstalled.
Open up a “Terminal” window and ‘sudo bash’ — then have a look around at all the garbage that gets left by uninstalls and upgrades (including Apple software).
Two that are great are VMware Fusion, and Parallels Desktop — but almost every piece of software I’ve uninstalled or upgraded seems to leave something behind.
Installing and un-installing software really isn’t as easy as it seems it should be; but a lot of the problems with the install and un-install are the operating systems really weren’t well engineered for that in the first place.
Both Microsoft and Apple attempted to come up with standards for software installation; and for the most part I think vendors follow those standards… at least where the standards are clear. But it’s just more complicated than it really needs to be, and the software developers are expected to track too many things. Like I said, Apple can’t seem to do it on OS-X, and Microsoft can’t seem to do it on Windows — so what chance has the mortal software developer got?
Maybe I’ve become spoiled, but I just expect desktop sharing (remote control) to be easy and fast.
Nothing, absolutely nothing compares to Microsoft’s RDP; and virtually any Windows machine (except home editions) can be accessed remotely via RDP; and all Windows machines and Macs can access a remote Windows machine.
Apple has their own Remote Desktop Client, and it works well — but it’s far from free (OUCH, far from free). And Apple does build in VNC into OS-X (can you say dismally slow)… but they don’t provide any Windows client.
Linux and other *nix operating system you can use an X session remotely; or VNC (zzzzzzzzzzzzz again, slow).
As a “universal” desktop sharing solution VNC isn’t horrible (and it’s certainly priced right, and there’s plenty of different ports and builds of it to choose from), but it’s old school and old technology.
I personally think it would be a great standard to have an efficient remote desktop sharing standard, that all computers (and PDAs) could use… one ring — eh, got carried away there; one client could talk to any server, and operating system vendors would only need optimize their server and their client, other operating system vendors would do the same…
Elemental Technologies, Inc in Portland Oregon showed a new type of video encoder at CES 2009 — they call it badaboom — it’s build on top of Vidia’s CUDA interface to their GPUs and largely uses GPU resources rather than CPU resources to encode (or re-encode actually) video.
You can download a free thirty use trial from their web site and test it for yourself.
Here are my impressions of it.
I did a few test encodes and played with the options quite a bit, and while I think it has a great deal of potential, it misses on quite a few points.
First, it’s fairly easy to use — and you’ll get something decent out of it even if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
It can read unencrypted DVD, the contents of a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard disk, any media file that you have a DirectShow decoder for.
I tried this on an nVideo 8600GT, 8800GTS, 9500GT, 9800GT, and 9800GTX. The 9500GT performed much slower than the other four cards (yeah, you could have guess that from just the Vista ratings)…
I saw about 54fps doing SD video and about 12fps doing HD… my Q9400 and Q9300 can do roughly that with a good encoder. In all fairness, using the GPUs to encode my PCs were extremely responsive, something I can’t say when using my CPUs to encode. Of course if you compare price of a CPU to a high end GPU — you would probably be better off spending your money on the CPU.
For $30 it wouldn’t be a bad option to have a GPU based encoder.
However (you knew it was coming)…
I can hardly call v1.1.1 a final product — and to their credit they offer free upgrades until they release v2, which they say will be about a year off.
Here’s what it doesn’t do.
Sound:
It doesn’t handle multi-channel sound, so you’re going to loose your 5.1 Dolby or DTS on your DVD movies; it does a stereo or mono mix-down of your sound. So until it allow you to encode your multi-channel sound in AAC or to preserve your AC3 or DTS sound without touching it I’d say it’s not a contender.
It also can’t handle multiple audio tracks. To this this it would really need to support MKV containers.
Video:
It doesn’t properly detect source video size nor does it handle letterbox crops. This isn’t that advanced of a feature — and why they think they need to upscale the video is beyond me. If the source was only 704×480 it’s not going to look any better scaling it up to 1920×1080… it should be encoded at the same size as the source and the playback and upscale it. Plus many DVD are letterbox, and there’s no reason to encode those black bars, they should be cropped out (either automatically or allow a user to set the crop regions).
Subtitles:
It doesn’t handle even a single subtitle stream.
Menus & Navigation:
Doesn’t preserve any of the menus and navigation from the DVD, but I didn’t really expect it to since there’s no MPEG4 player I know of that would be able to use the navigation stream.
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Personally I think at the moment Hand Brake and Fair Use Wizard are better products; but they don’t use your GPU, they use your CPU. I do think that over time badaboom will improve; and the upside is apparently you get thirty uses every time they change the version (though you’re going to have to live with their logo in the lower left hand corner).
In closing, I wasn’t compelled to pull my credit card out and buy it; I’ll certainly wait until at least the sound issue is corrected.
Below is a list of free web hosting sites; most of them don’t place any type of advertisements or links on your pages, some of them support scripting, and some of them have lenient policies as to content.
You’ll have to check each of these to see if they meet your needs. I have very little personal experience with any of them, and none of them have my endorsement.
Please keep in mind what I generally say:
You rarely get what you pay for!
That would be more precisely time to move my BLOG to another hosting service.
My contract will be up with 1and1 in April, and while I’m not at the limit of my monthly transfers, it’s conceivable in the next twelve months I will be fairly close.
And while I don’t need a great deal of customer service or technical service from a hosting company, I prefer to spend my money with companies who realize that customers can take their business where it’s appreciated, and where they actually get real value for it.
At the moment the two hosting companies that appear most interesting to me are:
The two companies are actually owned by the same individual… and seem to be highly focused on customer service. Their prices look fair (by no means the cheapest, you can after all get totally free hosting — with no advertisements as long as you’re will to follow all the rules). More important to me is they offer a set of features I want.
My timeline is that I’ll sign up for hosting around the end of the first week of March and then use the remaining month I have service with 1and1 to move content over. That might mean that you won’t see as many new posts next month, and of course there may be some slight instability as I move my BLOG. My expectation is that it will go smoothly and that content will be up and running at my new hosting facility almost immediately (probably before the domains are transferred, but I can override the DNS any time) In the long run this make it much easier for me to update and maintain my sites.
If anyone has personal experience with any of these companies; or has a strong recommendation they would like to share; or has an account at one of these and will get a referral fee please feel free to contact me.
Wikipedia is an incredible place to find information; if you’ve never used it, you should try it out.
That said, you should always question the accuracy of any information you get off the internet (really you should question the accuracy of any information you get period).
When you read something on the internet, it’s best to confirm the accuracy of that information by visiting a web site that should be authoritative one it.
For instance, if you’re gathering medical related information, check out the medical web sites provided by major medical schools and clinics; and the government. Compare what’s there with what you’re reading on another site, and don’t take anything as being factual if you can’t corroborate it.
I’m not trying to diminish the value of Wikipedia, I’m just pointing out that all the information there probably isn’t correct; and you should double check anything before using it.
