Van Donsel's First Law of Connector Orientation: When connecting a USB plug, the correct orientation is always backwards from the one you try.
Corollary I: No, the first orienation was correct after all.
Jim on 10.23.05 @ 08:49 PM ET [link]
I borrowed a Canon 17-40 f/4L lens from a colleague at work to test out this weekend. I was hoping to go out and shoot some leafy landscapes, but the weather isn't cooperating. Instead I shot inside, mostly to try out the lens. Some shots are here.
It's a pretty good lens. The autofocus on my 10D isn't up to snuff and at f/4 the focal plane is a bit off from where I would expect it to be, but all in all it's pretty good. Colors and contrast are great. I love the fact that the lens doesn't change length when zooming. It feels very solid, as you would expect for a Canon "L" lens, which is their high-end professional gear. And not too large or heavy. I just wish it were a little less expensive.
Jim on 10.22.05 @ 09:01 PM ET [link]
Since my home server Hades doesn't have a real DNS name (like www.jimandbarb.net does), I looked around for a free service that would provide a dynamic DNS name that I could change fairly easily when my server IP address changes. I found a free service at changeip.com. Even though this server is only use for email fetching and for photo backups, etc, it was nice to have a real name. So now my backup server can be found at http://jimandbarb.changeip.net.
The terms of service were a little vague on their website. One place implied that they might put popup windows up. I tried it from an outside machine and didn't find that, but we'll see. If they get too nasty I'll just drop 'em. After all, it's free.
Jim on 10.08.05 @ 08:17 PM ET [link]
After having some Xwindows stability issues on my Mandrake 10.2 Linux system at work when using dual-head displays, I decided to start over with a nice clean hard drive. I installed Kubuntu Linux, which is a KDE-based version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Kubuntu is rather nice. It's based on Debian, so you get to use the 'apt-get' package installation system. After messing around with the RPM system for a couple of years, the apt packages are a breath of fresh air.
The only drawback, if you can call it that, of Kubuntu is that the default installation is very basic. You need to 'apt-get' nearly everything, including a the C compiler. The standard installation also comes with the root account disabled. This is Ubuntu's security policy, aimed mainly at casual users. They recommend you 'sudo' everything. I found it annoying and enabled the root account again.
I'm still waiting for working window transparencies/shadowing under Xorg and Kde. Didn't work with my video card.
Jim on 10.04.05 @ 09:02 PM ET [link]
Ruby is an object-oriented language that's starting to pick up a following in the US. It's very big in Japan, partly I'm sure, becuase it was designed by a Japanese man. It can be described as a combination of Perl, Python, and a little Smalltalk thrown in. It's much more elegant than Perl, less verbose than Python, and more useful than Smalltalk. I've started learning it in preparation for a talk I'm planning on giving at work next month. I'll post some interested code snippets as I get more into it.
Jim on 10.02.05 @ 11:58 AM ET [link]
This weekend I removed all the php on my sites and replaced it all with Perl. I've got nothing against PHP, it's just that I know Perl better and so I can manage the site better. Thumbnails and web-sized images are now generated dynamically, as are image comments and exposure (EXIF) data.
In the process of doing this, I discovered something about HTTP servers that I probably should have known a long time ago. At least with Apache, you can request a page called, for example, "mypage" with no extension, and the server will find a file with an appropriate extension, such as mypage.html or mypage.cgi. So I can link within my pages with things like http://www.jimandbarb.net/puzzles/anagram instead of http://www.jimandbarb.net/puzzles/anagram.cgi. This opens things up considerably, as I can change between static and cgi-generated pages without breaking links.
Jim on 10.02.05 @ 11:53 AM ET [link]
Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
(please remove the DELETETHISPART before sending me mail!)