Tech impact

Nikon NIkkor 24-70mm -- great lens or great waste ?

$1,600 for a few pieces of glass to attach to the front of my camera, and I feel extremely torn. I sit here late Friday night ( after the kids have finally drifted off to sleep ), considering the good, the bad, and whether this purchase was ugly..

While I waited for the lens to arrive from BH Photo, I re-read some of my favorite reviews so I could be perfectly ready for what the mailman would be delivering. Needless to say, the purchase of this new gadget had me rather excited until I noted a comment in Ken Rockwell's blog : "For DX cameras, I'd get something else, since 24-70mm is a silly zoom range on DX." Of course, mine is a D5000. While it is an excellent camera, with a lot of great features, it is sadly still only a DX format (if you don't know, look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikon_DX_format).

DRIVERS me crazy

To save someone the annoyance, I will give the simple answer up front, with a story to follow.

If you have a Mac running any version of OSX, and own a Dell 2130cn color laser printer, there is no driver available. However, you can easily use the driver ( Dell Color Laser 1320c ) and get perfect results.

The sad part about such a simple explanation is this: it appears at the bottom of a 6 page thread regarding the 2130cn and OSX, that has hundreds of varying solutions offered, including installing the Foomatic system for OSX just to use the open source drivers. Needless to say...

A Porting experience

I just ported several of our applications from iPhone to Android. Today's blog entry is about the harrowing adventure of accomplishing such a task. Before I delve into the details, here is a summary of my experience:

Old School Tech

Most of my time is spent at the keyboard. Be it on my laptop (both Apple and PC), or one of the many "smart" phones I have collected over the years. My life is about what's new. But sometimes, forward is backwards. On that premise, today's post has nothing to do with modern technology.

For years, I fought through shaving. Experimenting with everything from electric razors, to the latest 2, 5 and 100 blade gizmo I could get my hands on. Each and every one did a job, but none of them did the right job. Every new gadget left behind rough skin, tiny annoying cuts, or just didn't shave at all. It was too much aggravation for the result.

At least I did until a small store in our local mall taught me how to to look back. Stainless steel, double edged razor, and as my wife describes it -- her great-grandpa's razor. The up-swing of such an old piece of grooming tech: it took 1 week of retraining myself how to shave, an extra 60 seconds a day because with an open blade you just wanna be careful, and my skin has never looked better. I shave every day, and never a stubble left behind. The old is new, and never worked better. Now if we could just go back to DOS and get such positive results.

Double-edged safety razors

"Until the early 1970s, most safety razors were manufactured to accept a single, disposable razor blade. These blades were manufactured with either one or two sharpened edges, depending upon the design of the razor. This style of razor is no longer manufactured in the United States and is instead made by a number of companies such as Merkur of Germany, Treet of Pakistan, Weishi of China, and Parker of India. The blades are still being made today in a wide variety of countries including the USA, Israel, Russia, Korea, Japan, and Egypt. Some of the brand names include Merkur, Feather, Racer, Bigben, Lord, Treet and Bic."

More Patent Sense

Not that anyone cares, since progress in technology and economics is a square second to fighting over who thought of what first (or at least who made it to the patent office first), but here is an interesting article about how the patent mess called America is killing the next wave of cell phone innovation. You should note that America is already years behind of other coutries in mobile technology because our rule set lets content providers and carriers essentially shut the consumer out of -- basically everything.

Business week says

iPad hardly a revolution

Lets face it, I doubt even Apple believes that line. The iPad is a very simple design : take the success that two other locked in devices were having (Nook and Kindle), and through the miracle of science through in a few OS features that let's you do something when not reading.

Multi-tasking, yea..

Just finished watching the live broadcast of Apple's coming 4.0. Here's the situation in my mind:

Adobe Goes Monster Style

Almost forgot to put up my images of web awards at SXSW.. Didn't bother staying for the show because, well this year it was lame.

CRG @ SXSW 2010

Amazing party at Frog Design. Everything was well designed, though there were many technical difficulties. From unplugged RFID readers to video players crashing. Still, good party.

Patents! Seriously

Microsoft lost again today, with a $240 million dollar judgment against them for using a certain technique to write out XML documents. It's a word processor writing text to a file, but somehow unique enough of an idea to net somone $240 million, and several lawyers millions more to boot.