Month: June 2003

DPReview:

Leica has today announced the development of a Digital Module for the Leica R8 & R9. This new module has a ten megapixel Kodak sensor and has been developed in association with Imacon. The module is made up of two parts, a digital back which cliips onto the rear of the camera and a power unit which fits on the base. The digital back has a ten megapixel Kodak sensor which produces a FOV crop of 1.37x and has a sensitivity of ISO 100 to 800. Image formats will include RAW (Imacon 3F), storage by SD card.

Wow, that was unexpected.  I’m sure it’ll be expensive, but it’s almost guarunteed to be a durable high quality solution for those that can afford it.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

Kevin Burton continues to make improvements to his program NewsMonster, a Mozilla-based RSS reader that uses a Whuffie-like reputation system to rank and suggest items and feeds to his readers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for OS X yet (weird, considering that it’s all Mozilla-based), but Kevin promises that by end-of-week (apparently, he’s going to patch some longstanding Moz bugs and submit the changes to the Mozilla codebase).

More information can be found at the NewsMoster download page.

 OSNews:

Terra Soft said today that its Yellow Dog Linux will soon include support for 64-bit processing on the Power Mac G5. As an Apple Authorized Reseller, TerraSoft is receiving pre-orders for the new Macs.

Very cool.  I haven’t used YDL for some time now, but linux on Mac is a good thing.

I has arrived.  My new Nokia 3650 is here, charging beside me.  I’ve already been SMS’d by Russ and Jim.  Now begins the phone learning curve (round keypad!) as I familiarize myself with the Symbian OS.  The next step is to find a Bluetooth card for local connectivity.  I did pick up the $9.99/mo 10MB T-Zones (GPRS) plan, and I’ve only used a few kb so far.

This is going to be fun.

The Washington Post Business section today had a very interesting article on the doorstep delivery of the latest Harry Potter book.  Here’s a taste:

Early last week, Scholastic Corp., which holds the U.S. printing rights for the Harry Potter series, sent piles of books to Amazon’s five distribution centers — one in Nevada, Kansas and Delaware, and two in Kentucky. A special, secure “Harry Potter Zone” was set up in each of the fulfillment centers, which processed more than 2.2 million pounds of the books. The areas were encircled by an eight-foot-tall barrier, and only people with a special identification on their badges could enter. Guards patrolled the perimeters.

Juha noticed that the latest Top 500 Supercomputers list is out.

DPReview:

0700 CET: Olympus has today officially announced the Olympus E-1 digital SLR. The E-1 is the first Olympus removable lens digital SLR, it’s also the first digital SLR with an entirely new lens mount. Instead the E-1 conforms to the ‘4/3 System’ standard with a standard 4/3″ type CCD (18 x 13.5 mm) from Kodak (five megapixel) and the 4/3 System lens mount. Olympus has also confirmed five ZUIKO DIGITAL lenses and three flash units.

I’m personally not thrilled with the Olympys 4/3 digital SLR.  It seems like a duct-tape quick fix rather than a real solution.  I hope it does well, I just don’t have a lot of faith in it.

Update:

Embargo lifted, check out their preview.

Yesterday was a fairly busy day, with lots of announcements from Apple.  My new Nokia 3650 also shipped, should be here by 10:30am.  Without further delay, here’s the roundup:

• Safari 1.0 was released.  Dave Hyatt as always has coverage in his blog: Fonts in Safari and Safari Download Size.  With 1.0, developers will now be able to embed Safari in their applications.
• MacNN has a roundup of the major announcements.  They also have more information on the new Powermac G5’s.  64-bit OSX, baby!
• I spent part of the afternoon yesterday chatting with the guys in #mobitopia as well as hearing coverage from #openmac.
• I’m a little dissapointed at the proprietary lock-in going on with iChat AV.  You can use AIM or .Mac, but if you use any of the new whizzbang videoconferencing options, you’ve got to have a Mac on the other end.
• See also Scott Johnson’s rant entitled Apple, Panther and Paying Again for an OS Upgrade.
• See also Matthew “Silent Penguin” Langham’s post on the subject.
• MacCentral points to the Xcode environment, based on GCC3.3, sounds interesting.  More info about Xcode can be found at Apple’s Panther website.  It looks promising to me.
• The new G5’s are just plain SEXY.  They start at $1999, so I doubt there will ever be one on my desk, but that shouldn’t stop me from dreaming about it, should it?

Lots of happenings at WWDC today.

Matt Raible notes the release of Tomcat 5.3.0 Alpha, with the following cautionary note:

I’ve found that this release is not worth your time. It’s even worse than 5.0.2.

Well if Matt “bleeding edge” Raible doesn’t like it, it’s definately not worth your time.

Sify News:

Exactly 20 years ago, two computer scientists Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris at the University of Southern California invented a key component that was to become the backbone of the Internet. Reading this article has been made possible mainly due to their pioneering work.

The development of the automated domain name system, or DNS as it is popularly known, was the turning point which allowed computers to locate each other on the network and exchange information on their own.

Keep an eye on the WWDC Quicktime Keynote Stream page later this afternoon.

According to MSNBC, we’ll have to wait until 2006 for the next iteration of the Xbox.  Or was that 2005?  Who knows.

MacSlash has a good roundup of MacHack happenings.

Via Erik and Cedric, the XML Big Picture is sooo coool though if you look at it too long, you might go <insane/>.

Dave Winer:

Weird Al Yankovic interviews Chris Pirillo, video.

Via MacSlash, if you’re looking for a Web Publishing Manager position at Apple, it looks like there is an opening all of a sudden.

Coincidence?  🙂

The SquirrelMail QuickAndDirty tutorial made a SquirellMail installation go quicker than an install of Blosxom.  Now it’s time to poke around and harden the install.

CNet and others are noting weird things happening on the internet:

Worm? Trojan? Attack tool? Network administrators and security experts continue to search for the cause of an increasing amount of odd data that has been detected on the Internet.

Any ideas?

While listening to Prozzak this morning, I was reminded that I used to get my obscure Canadian music from HMV online.  Their web site rocked, it was easy to use, they had all of the Canadian stuff that you can’t get in the US (well you can, like a year after it’s released), and they were cheap.

It was great, they always did their pricing in Canadian dollars, so my order would always be several dollars less in USD.

It had been awhile since I had visited HMV’s website.  I used to get Much Music on cable/satellite and kept it on in the background all the time.  I really liked their programming (they actually played music, unlike MTV), their VJ’s, their attitude and their music.  It’s been awhile since I’ve had access to Much and so I’m not as in touch with the Canadian music scene as I used to be.

I was horrified when I went to HMV.com this morning.  It’s gone.  Do you know what’s there in it’s place?  I’ll give you one hint:

There goes one of my favorite online stores.