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The last 5 years or so I was rather happy with my Canon Powershot S100. It was however time to replace it with something more modern. I was getting tired of the S100 blueish white balance, the 2x zoom and the expensive batteries that keep dying on me like flies in vinegar.
After a lot of thoughts, I finally replaced it by the latest Panasonic DMC-FZ7.
Note that this is not a review of this camera. If you want good reviews, have a look at the reviews on dpreview.com and dcresource.com.
I agree with these two reviews, both the pros and the cons.
Compared with this review of the Powershot S100:
The ergonomic is good and after quickly reviewing the user manual online (8 MB PDF, available on the support page) I was able to use most of the features.
The black version looks good too (actually I never saw a silver version in a retail store, only black ones.)
Before settling on the FZ7 I had a look at other cameras. To name a few:
That's more or less right on spot. I can (almost) relate.
From my experience, very few companies' managements would agree with this -- OK maybe on the paper, yet making it happen is another story. I can foresee the typical comment: "these new software engineers they expect a red carpet to be laid in front of them. In my time it was not like this."
Obviously it requires some forward thinking, a larger organization, a commitment and a lot of support/investment. I don't think than an organization can move from one scheme to the other either -- can't scale up, nor scale down.
And it's not something you can change in an existing environment. Not as long as the idea will survive that work should be hard, not fun.
Obviemente toto serea plus facile por leger si lo scriba toto como este.
Magis ulteriormente.
That's decided, we're moving to France. Education is much better, life is cheaper, quality of life is definitely a big improvement and most important there are lots of nice jobs in southern France.
First let's blast off with an H&R Block rant. The reality is that H&R Block sucks, I'm not the only one realizing it and we won't go there again. H&R Block is like Mc Donalds: mass-consumer driven franchises with low standards, low quality, consumer-unfriendly yet expensive.
Luckily the day was saved by having a good fun evening with Tg, I meant nothing less than a good pillow fight. That's the kind of little moment that makes everything worth it.
2 AM... 4 AM... 6 AM... Apparently I won't sleep this night. Time to feed babies.
Then the next big thing is the window manager. Originally my desktop was running KDE which is hmm OK but not terribly exciting. Especially on remote, it takes too long to load and is a bit overkill. Quite frankly I like screen and this is what I'd like in a GUI. So I started looking into tiling window managers. The culmination of this kind is probably ratpoison. I tried and unfortunately it's a bit too plain for me. Eventually I currently settled down on wmii which proves to be quite nice and very usable. I like the fact it can act as a tiling manager or a floating manager, the keyboard layout is relatively easy to configure and the default is pretty good anyway (with the exception of Alt-D that conflicts with XEmacs. On the desktop at work, it works pretty much OK with Xinerama except it considers it has one big screen and doesn't split it in two. However since it's a tiled window manager, it's easy to deal with yet the floating mode works better than tiling in this case.
Links:
It just so happens that I was finally only recently able to get NX working. This took a lot longer than expected. For some reason I never managed to install version 1.4 correctly, the first time I couldn't connect to the server and after that the client failed to exchange the correct keys. Also installing the client screwed up my Cygwin install. Finally I got tired of it, removed everything and started from scratch with 1.5 and this time I got it right.
And the result is indeed impressive. NX on a remote DSL link is really really good. It is on par with MS' Remote Desktop I think. Some people claim it performs better but I wouldn't go that far since I don't have any benchmark. It feels as fast. The thing is I rely on lot on remote for work and I did use Remote Desktop very intensively with things like Visual Studio .Net and it always behaved very nicely for me. NX feels about the same. Xterm or XEmacs feel like they are running natively and even graphic-intensive apps like Firefox feel really responsive.
For reference my network link here is a compressed SSH tunnel over a 256-384kbps DSL with a couple of extra hops on the other side. I've seen RDP work just fine over a transatlantic connection with a 64 kbps endpoint -- you won't be playing Flash animations over that and the lag time is appreciable but at least it's usable and it's cheaper than having to fly.
The one thing I haven't got to try yet is nesting. I used to run RDC within RDC itself. If the nested Remote Desktop Client is set in full screen, the performance becomes more than acceptable. In windowed mode there's a lot more lag going on however. I haven't tried this trick with NX yet.
The only default thing with NX Client is that the default Windows install will
completely ruin your previous Cygwin install. The problem arises because NX
actually uses Cygwin itself and installs a couple of Cygwin DLLs in its bin
directory. The way the Cygwin DLL works, it gets confused with its search path
and whichever version you run first wins. The solution is two folds: First,
make sure your Cygwin install is up-to-date, and second open the
C:\Program Files\NX Client for Windows\bin with the explorer and look for the
cyg*.dll files there. All of them except cygXcomp.dll should be part of
your default cywing install (make sure you have same or newer DLLs!) and can
safely be stored at the bottom of the trash (I actually move them to an old
directory.) If you did run NX before trying to remove the DLLs you
will probably need to log out and log back in (a reboot is not necessary.)
Links:
Or maybe yes, who knows.
Let's totally ignore the fact this site has not been updated for a month and a half. Let's say I was pretty busy, first with Wow for some time, her parents being here (which was a good experience as always) and that faded away to be replaced by work-related stuff. Now all this false emergency is starting to fade away and I should be getting my week-ends free again. It's too easy to loose perspective of what really matters.
The only things that really matter are the smile of two charming babies and a cute lady.
Did I mention that I also ordered the custom plate for the family car? :-)
Other than that I've been fighting with spam (pretty much successfully, tips are here), spam stats. On the side, I've seen what Rails can really bring and I'm even more convinced that Ruby is really what Python is trying to achieve, only better and most important already there.
Of course those who don't want to understand can't. It's not just the author, pardon him for floating on his own dream cloud, it's the crowd support him that I don't get. No tool is ever perfect and a programming language is just that -- a tool. Sometimes it's just good enough to select the tool that makes it work without really having to rewrite a new one from scratch. Interestingly, and I had a clear example of that just a couple days ago, it's easy to be afraid and dismiss stuff that you don't know. However I think this has no reason to be. Although I personally think lex, yacc, bison & flex all share a lousy syntax and a crappy output I won't openly dismiss those who use them if it just helps them get the job done. OTOH I won't select them for my own projects as there are many powerful and more modern alternatives. Similarly I won't take "language X is bad because I don't know X and I prefer Y because I'm used to Y" as a valid argument.
It's amusing to see that open-source wannabes will cite these as typical open-source wars that hinder the movement when they are stereotypical of what happens in corporations behind closed doors. Except it's not a public fact and nobody's going to argue about it. The clever ones abstract these flame wars as mere details and the other ones can't legally complain about it.
For a day off, it was quite productive. Since it was taken under PFL, the original goal of waiting hand and foot on Tg and taking care of the babies was right on target and the goal was totally achieved.
So let's see a run down:
181.. 182.. 183.. 184.. 185.. 181.. 182..
Infinite loop. No control. ASOT 182.
I might as well jump the next train.
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