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.
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 31, 2004 | Front Page
I have had many conversations with people who believe that Apache 2.0 is a good server to run PHP under and never had enough ammunition to answer back at them. Well now thanks to Simon Willison I have it:
I finally found the answer today in this comment buried on Slashdot. It seems that one of the key features of Apache 2 is the new threaded worker module which uses threads to serve more requests more efficiently than 1.3’s multi-process based server. While the core Zend engine of PHP is thread-safe many of the critical libraries that PHP relies on for its advanced functionality (image processing, database connectivity and so forth) are not, and are unlikely to become so any time in the future. In a threaded environment PHP is likely to suffer from all kinds of unpredictable bugs. Apache 2 can be run in traditional 1.3-style prefork mode but doing so greatly reduces its advantages over 1.3. Combined with the lack of heavy duty testing on Apache 2 and the fact that the 1.3 series will continue to be supported for a long time to come it’s clear why PHP team are unwilling to recommend PHP and Apache 2 in a production environment.
This makes me wonder about all these so called enterprise ready Linux Distro’s that ship PHP in Apache 2.0 as a stable solution.
by R.I. Pienaar | Mar 26, 2004 | Front Page
Hooray for Microsoft, seems the much loved MS Word password protection is pretty lame (it’s not like anyone would trust this would they? The mind boggles)
Example 1
1) Open MS Word with a new/blank page
2) Now select “Insert” >> “File” >> browse for your password protected doc select “Insert” & “Insert” password protected doc into your new/blank doc
3) Now select “Tools” & Whey hey, voila, there’s no longer an “Unprotect document” … password vanished …
Read the full sad story here
