June 7, 2004

Digital Photography Composition Tips

Another Photography-related link found via /. points to a recent post on the Digital Photography Blog where they have assembled a collection of Photography Composition Tips found on the net.

Most of these are obvious to the professional photographer, but being that I’m not, I found many of the tips helpful.

Like for example, these tips on taking night or low-light digital photographs. (which, BTW makes me want to apply the Firmware Hack to my D300 so I can “enable” ISO 3200 ;-)

June 3, 2004

Canon EOS-300D Firmware Hack

UPDATE: June, 16 2004: New beta version B7.1: download here

Yesterday the news of the Russian Canon EOS-300D Firmware Hack hit /.

Spurred largely due to the 300D’s similarities with the 10D, rumors of the potential for hacks have been widely discussed in the forums on DPreview.

I’ve been passively following the 300D firmware hacks for weeks to get the skinny.

Yet I’m still on-the-fence with regard to installing a hacked firmeware upgrade due to the fact that it will void my warranty.

June 1, 2004

Comment Spamming: Pointless Practice

I couldn’t take it anymore! Last night I took Burningbird’s suggestion and turned-off commenting on any post older than 30 days. I may turn commenting off entirely if this weekend is any indication of the logarithmic growth in comment spamming.

Comment Spammers… why do you bother? You’re not getting any extra PageRank points from your messages due to the external URL redirects MT 2.661 has in place. Plus, thanks to MT-Blacklist, your polution is trashed almsot as quickly as it’s posted.

May 27, 2004

Building Your First Business Process

Scott Woodgate over at MSDN TV demos “how easy it is to build a business process using Visual Studio .NET and BizTalk Server 2004, expose that business process as a Web service, and then consume the business process inside InfoPath Â– all within 20 minutes.”

After spending a week learning how to do something similar with the Integration Tools found in PeopleSoft 8.44 I can honestly say that VS.Net + BizTalk Server 2004 is wicked cool.

May 26, 2004

Pop Goes the GMail

At this point, PGtGM looks to only be a proof-of-concept, but essentially it is destine to be a POP3 proxy for Google’s GMail.

This is/will be a cool hack, but probably be a moot point once some of the rumored features of GMail start to roll out (namely POP3 and RSS/Atom).

May 20, 2004

Gmail in the Enterprise

I’ve been disconnected all week in PeopleSoft training, but during lunch today I caught Steve Gillmor’s eWeek column from last week about Gmail where he cites a potential example of the “Google Platform” in the enterprise.

“By the time the Gmail beta period ends in three to six months, Brin and his team have promised to enable forwarding and POP3 access. However, more is required of a corporate mail service. Those capabilities must be extended to allow Gmail to provide disconnected operation and IDE for packaged applications.”

May 18, 2004

Frontier goes Open Source (soon)

After dabbling with Frontier over the last five years, I often miss the outlining features of Frontier’s built-in IDE when working in other environments. I’m intrigued however with
Dave Winer’s latest announcement regarding the eminent release of the Frontier kernel as OSS.

It will be interesting to see what OSS license UserLand chooses and if they intend on releasing any of the non-kernelized code such as part of the CMS framework, Manila and/or Radio.

May 14, 2004

Google Groups Beta 2

Google opened beta 2 of Google Groups. They’ve integrated it with Gmail, which gives you the ability to post to Usenet newsgroups as well as create new groups.

All these “new” features are strangely reminiscent of what
My Deja News offered back in 1998…

Hey wait a second! Google purchased Deja back in 2001. What took them so long to integrate services?

I’m not sure, but there is progress however…

For example, you can now get an Atom Feed of your favorite newsgroups.

May 12, 2004

Open Source Search Results Clustering Framework

My smart search buddies over at BA-Insight (who need to get their blog online!) pointed me to Carrot2, which is described as “ a system for clustering textual data“. (the site is a bit slow)

Generally speaking, Carrot2 is an Open Source alternative to Vivisimo. (Nice!)

Carrot2 has some other interesting features too. Like for example, it can be used as a meta-search component. In addition, it can be integrated with full-featured text search engines such as the Open Source Egothor and some other lesser known engines.

May 11, 2004

IBM’s Web-Based Desktop Apps

Based on a news.com story and /. thread, it seems like we’re “gonna party like it’s 1999” Again! (remember myWebOS)

However this time IBM may possibly be able to pull this off. I don’t think IBM’s effort will significantly deplete MSFT’s 90% market share of the desktop software market, but perhaps they will carve out enough to make it a viable and cheaper alternative.

From the news.com story: “The new software, part of IBM’s Lotus Workplace strategy, is a bundle that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and database applications aimed at business users. The package also includes server-based management software, as well as software to run productivity applications on handheld devices.”