Monthly Archive for May, 2006

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Bouncing email

Published on May 14, 2006 in internet. 1 Comment

You've got mail
If you have sent me an email in the last two days, you will likely have gotten a bounce like “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender“. Please resend your message because your mail server is indeed right: my email addresses @forret.com were unavailable this Friday and Saturday.

The reason: I was too late for the renewal of my domain smoothouse.org so it expired, my Coditel broadband connection was down so I didn’t notice that my mails stopped coming in until Saturday. I did some emergency DNS adjustments, changed those, and then still did some other stuff, and so this is the situation 24 hours later:

  • my email addresses @forret.com are now served by Dreamhost and they should work. (when all DNS updates have propagated through this universe)
  • my DNS management for forret.com is now also at Dreamhost, which makes life a lot easier for me now (e.g. creating barcamp.forret.com was a piece of cake – with an external DNS that’s always a bit more tricky)
  • my web tools are now at web.forret.com/tools instead of at www.forret.com. In short: the domain www.forret.com can not be hosted by someone else than Dreamhost, but my web tools have to run on Windows (ASP), which my Dreamhost account does not have. Hence: web.forret.com, which is my Windows hosting account. However, since www.forret.com now runs on Apache, I can do automatic redirects with mod-rewrite, so that *should* be transparent to users.
  • I’ve lost my domain smoothouse.org – must check with Hostbasket if I can get it back during the DNS holding period.
  • my Smoothouse content can now be found on xampled.com/smoothouse (e.g. my collection of house podcasts)
  • my Smoothpod Mashup podcast has moved to www.xampled.com/smoothpod.
    UPDATE : and it has now moved to mashup.xampled.com
  • The Webjay wizard has moved to my web tools, where it belonged anyway.
  • my HTTP header analyzer has also moved to the web tools, together with it’s companion the Squid Cache policy checker. (I bet you don’t have one of those, right?)
  • I have at last been able to give my sister and father back their @forret.com address (long story). And I gave my mom a new one, for Mother’s Day!

So: please resend your messages, certainly if they were about Barcamp Brussels.

Beyond the megapixel

Published on May 11, 2006 in photography. 1 Comment

Clemence_Ballet 137
Wired just released an article on digital camera technology: why megapixels alone are not a good indicator of camera and photograph quality.

For years, resolution was considered the main measure of image quality in digital photos, but continual improvements have only shown up the fallacy: Grainy, blurry and underexposed photos look just as bad at 8 megapixels as they do at 5.

Camera vendors are concentrating on other fields to enhance camera quality:

Low-light shooting
While camera’s used to be limited to a sensitivity of 400 ISO (i.e. almost worthless in night situations), new image processing algorithms and larger sensors allow newer models to go up to 3200 ISO
Flash
Soft-flash (Casio) and i-Flash (Fujifilm) are ways to use a flash without ruining the natural lighting completely.
Zooming further in, or out
By using a right-angle construction within the body of the camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1K can get to a 10X optical zoom (35 mm to 350 mm). Kodak uses two 5X zoom lenses to get the same zoom capability
Keeping steady
Image-stabilization technologies, both optical and gyroscopic, avoid blurry photo’s.
Capturing bright and dark
enhancing the dynamic range of the sensors by using e.g. variable pixel size
Protecting shooters from themselves
Find the face in the picture and focus on it, or advise the photographer on how to improve his pictures.

And I would add to that: networking. Kodak, Canon and Nikon already have cameras with built-in Wifi, and for the ‘old’ ones that don’t have it, Eye-Fi might have a solution (via Scoble).

Read the article @ Wired, or dive even deeper in thetechlounge.com

Mission Impossible III: largest digital release ever

Published on May 11, 2006 in digital cinema and movie. Closed

Add one more superlative to Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible: III”: it is the largest digital release ever, playing on more than 170 digital cinema screens throughout North America. And all digital preparation and distribution to those screens was handled by Kodak Digital Cinema.
from http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr.aspx?newsID=487

Mission Impossible III
(Digital cinema is obviously of much better quality than this pixelized image – this just says “digital”, doesn’t it?)

Continue reading ‘Mission Impossible III: largest digital release ever’

Rails Conference in London – who’s coming?

Published on May 10, 2006 in Web2.0 and webdev. 3 Comments

RailsConf Europe
Who wants to join in for the September Rails Conference in London? Let’s set up a nice Belgian delegation!

We can get a group discount:

  • 5 or more delegates and get 10% discount
  • 10 or more delegates and get 15% discount

This is the reason why I’m asking this now:

  • May 15th and pay just £400/delegate
  • May 30th and pay just £425/delegate
  • June 30th and pay just £450/delegate
  • July 30th and pay £475/delegate
  • August 30th and pay £525/delegate
  • September 10th and pay £575/delegate

So: leave your details here if you want to join: if we get to 5 people by May 15, we take the 10% discount (£360 = 526 euro), if we don’t, but we get to 10 people by May 30th (Barcamp Brussels might help), we take the 15% discount (also £360), if not, it’s everyone to themselves.

Confirmed speakers:

The conference is already packed with exciting speakers, including the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Programmer Dave Thomas, best-selling author and passion maven Kathy Sierra, Rails core developers Jamis Buck, Marcel Molina, Jr., Thomas Fuchs, Rails authors and trainers David Alan Black, and Chad Fowler, Rake author Jim Weirich and many more to be announced.
(from europe.railsconf.org)