Wow, a title with words and not just some sound.

Today I got to play with the professional camera at work. We have a Nikon D80 with a really fancy lens and strobe. Really, really nice. It’s supposed to be the equivalent to my Canon RXTi, but the D80 is absolutely awesome. It does so much stuff my RXTi can’t do.

Heh, usually the reaction on being ordered to use the D80 is “Oh man! This thing is too complicated! So many buttons!” I took a look at it and said “Oh hey! That’s cool! Look at that! Ooooh! Nifty!” Needless to say, I’m now in charge of explaining it to everyone else… Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I really hope they will just let me be the staff photographer.

Update

Well I really haven’t been dead for the past few days. Really. Today I met Jason for brunch today at his favourite place, which didn’t end up going to well for me. They forgot my toast and never refilled my $2 coffee.

Anyways, on the way home, we stopped into the Crepe Store to talk to some peeps, and they gave us a free cone. Anyways, walking alone, we found an old sound equalizer, and Jason picked that up and took it home. Upon my return home, I wrote up a quick Perl script that converted my flacs to MP3s, a much needed process. My 3 cds in flacs are taking 1.6 gigs, and in mp3 form they’re taking 401 megs. Meh, it’s all good.

Tonight, a few of us from work are going to see the Wrens live, and possibly go to ribfest. Should prove to be a good time.

ZDLNet has been pretty much in neutral, as Bio’s really busy and hasn’t had time to do much. Other than that, I’ve just been plugging away.

EMRS?

A long long time ago, in a forum not too far away, I proposed an enhanced method of reporting posts. Current, posts get sent to the moderator’s e-mail address. This is cool, if you’re checking your mail regularly. What about when you’re busy? Sometimes, it’s better to get to the “scene” as quickly as possible. I invisioned a system which sends messages to my cellphone based on the urgency of the report, and other criteria (user reputation comes into play here, also a possible role as a “sub-moderator”). Enter EMR, or Emergency Moderator Reporting System. This system is a quad-tiered system that integrates into the forum (to provide categorization services), a mail server, a TCP server to facilitate a desktop client, and of course, the desktop client. The cellphone notification would come by way of an e-mail (most every phone has an e-mail address to it, usually in the form of 1112223333@foo.tld (where 111 = area goes, 222 = exchange, and 3333 is your number. Foo.tld is service provider dependant.).

In other news, I still feel like crap. I saw the doctor again today, and he says the antibiotics are working, just slowly. He advised me to turn down the A/C as it’s drying the air out too much, and told me to get some zinc lozenges. He also took a throat swap, so hopefully that comes back good.

Hi! Def.

I broke down and bought an HDDVD player. I bought the Xbox360 HDDVD drive for 199$ canadian which is a decadent price. It’s an external drive (which actually houses an internal drive), and it uses USB2 (although boo to Microsoft for NOT powering the drive over usb, instead you have another cord), and it acts as a mini usb hub as well, giving you two more usb ports on its back.

I do not own an Xbox 360. But I do own a computer. Lucky me. Plug in the drive to my MacBook Pro and the drive shows up in the System Profiler. Unfortunately Mac OS X currently does not support UDF 2.5 (the HDDVD filesystem) nor does it have any software players that will decode commercial HDDVDs (I may be wrong on the former, though). I already knew this before I bought the player, so I wasn’t too let down. That meant, however, that it was time to install Windows on my Mac ( a little bit of me died ).

The original plan was to instal Windows on an external drive, but apparently Windows doesn’t allow this (well, it does, but its a gross hack…that requires Windows in the first place :\ ). So now I have Windows on a 5gb partition on my MacBook Pro. Now, on to the actual movies.

It came with King Kong (which I’ve yet to watch) and I also bought Batman Begins. I have to say that even though I’m not running a full HD setup yet (my monitor is 1440×900) it still looks amazing. Check out the HD trailers in Quicktime and you’ll get the idea. It’s stunning. I know HDDVD might not “win” the format war, but at that price, you can’t go wrong!

Starting to Feel Better

Well, I’ve been on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with a throat infection. I got antibiotics friday evening, and I’m starting to feel better. A mix of ibuprofin, amoxicillin, and lots of water have helped a lot.

I should be back to my usual self pretty soon, and back to work on Monday (for sure). Lets hope that’s the first and last time I get sick in Ottawa. Only one of like 5 hospitals have outpatients, it’s messed. I had to wait for about 2 and a half hours, which I guess is ok, but longer than I’ve ever had to wait (which was 30 minutes, both times in Amherst).

iPhone Restrictions

This Slashdot Story is talking about the restrictions on the sale of iPhones, as well as the restrictions on WiFi access.

For WiFi, it appears you have to sign a contract that locks you into an EDGE data plan. Ouch! It may still be simpler to carry your laptop around.

The real question is, why is apple doing this? Are they getting a lot of money from wireless vendors? A phone, afterall, is just a phone. They could have sold it, you slip in your SIM CARD, and away you go. This alone would have made the iPhone a huge success, but it seems they’re trying to cripple it. A lot of people are complaining about custom iPhone apps being Safari “webpages”.

Safari vs Opera?

Not too long ago, Opera marketed itself as the fastest browser on the market. I did some looking up and found some independant (though possibly not reputable) tests. Here’s one such test. (Google Cache).

On pretty much every platform, Opera was the fastest. I invalidate Konquorer startup times on KDE, as it preloads it for extreme startup times. Check out this page as well. May I also suggest reading this review on IE Safari 3.0 Beta on Win32.

Although, as I’ve mentioned, I haven’t actually looked at Safari, I want to evaluate it for myself.

Safari and QuickTime

Alright. So Apple releases Safari about the time I switch back to Linux for a bit. That just means I have to be resourceful.

As I’m off sick today, I took the time to watch the Apple WWDC ‘07 keynote speech by Steve Jobs. So like any good user, I go to the Apple website to go watch the keynote, however, I find out that I need quicktime to watch it (and that Ubuntu’s QuickTime drivers don’t make the cut). So I install wine, and actually install QuickTime, and watch the entire keynote on a 99% functioning QuickTime (only lagging .2 secs off audio, but I could have fixed that by switching sound drivers).

Then I tried installing Safari. Come to find out, Safari will install, just crap out on execution. Some people have been able to get Safari to run under wine, but it hasn’t been very good. Here’s some screenshots of my experiment.

Installation of Safari

Safari Installed Errornously

The only problem, I couldn’t install Bonjour, or Apple Updates. Other than that, the installation was really fast.

Execution failed, and by some googling, those who actually got it to work, didn’t have that great of an experience. So I’ll save my future Safari Experience for when I’m back in XP.

On a Safari

As most of you no doubt know, Safari (Apple’s web browser) has just been released in Version 3 Beta. Good for OS X users, right? Well, good for Windows XP/Vista users too, actually. Apple has released the beta for Mac OS X and for the first time, a Windows client mirroring its features.

Safari is based off WebKit, which is based off KHTML. It’s got a solid opensource foundation, and as a Mac user, I can tell you it’s fast. It’s always been fast. It’s faster than a man using the bathroom during a micro-ad in a sports game. It’s that fast. Of course, Apple knows this, and is waving the benchmarks around like a kid who’s just won the Turnaround award in school. He’s got skills, and he wants the whole school to know. According to the benchmarks, Safari is over 2 times faster at rendering pages than is Internet Explorer 7, and also faster than Firefox and Opera. It really IS fast.

Logically, this means Safari 3 Beta on Mac or Windows is a good thing, correct? Er.. Well I swear if it weren’t for “beta”, it would be. But it’s very much a beta. My time with the Windows client has been limited (thank God I am a Mac user), but for me it was pretty good. Apparently others have not been so lucky. I would suggest you try it out on your own and see how your experience is. The browser is fast no matter how you slice it, and its features are great. It just needs some polish.

It just needs some a lot of polish, actually. The Mac version of the beta was excellent. It gave me all the features I have been wanting in Safari for some time. While maybe not groundbreaking, it’s nice to have them all in one nice browser. Again, stability was an issue. I should clarify, however, it was not Safari’s stability that was the issue, it was Microsoft Messenger. The app would not stay running so long as Safari 3 was installed. This was a bummer.

Two things you really need to know: Safari is fast on both platforms; Safari is in beta on both platforms. But you have to admit, even with everyone finding all these bugs already, the concept of “beta” is really working quickly for Apple.

Impressive

(From Slashdot)

“David Maynor, infamous for the Apple Wi-Fi hack, has discovered bugs in the Windows version of Safari mere hours after it was released. He notes in the blog that his company does not report vulnerabilities to Apple. His claimed catch for ‘an afternoon of idle futzing’: 4 DoS bugs and 2 remote execution vulnerabilities.”

Separately, within 2 hours Thor Larholm found a URL protocol handler command injection vulnerability that allows remote command execution.

That’s impressive! Now if I could only debug code that fast :\.