Not so long ago I decided that I was going to sell my camera equipment because I felt very limited by Tamron 28-75mm/2,8 and Canon 70-200mm/2,8 IS. Especially because I really enjoy street photography so my lenses was simply not good enough.

Besides my Canon 10D is starting to feel a bit old now from having it as my companion for the last 5 years. Now, I’m selling it all and upgrading to Canon 5D with 35mm, 50mm and 100mm fixed focal lenses. A super-wide angle lens would be nice but haven’t found one that has the high quality I demand. However the Canon 14mm/2,8 II and 16-35mm/2,8 II are definitely interesting.

As of today I will be without a camera for some time and as a photographer you are a bit lost without your camera. Hopefully I will get myself some new camera equipment before the summer is over.

To be continued…

As a photographer and choosing your equipment can be a real pain. It’s a huge jungle out there with too many options and way too pricey at times as well. I have listed a couple questions you should ask yourself before you go hunting for new camera equipment.

What kind of photographer am I?

If you don’t know the answer to this question then I highly recommend you borrow or rent some camera equipment to try different lenses in different situations and see what interest you the most. You may also want to look at photos from other photographers that you like. Often they will provide information on the equipment used which can be a great help.

Should I use a zoom or fixed focal lens?

Most people prefer zoom lenses because it gives you a wide range and you can capture the object quickly without moving too much. This is ideal for photographing wild life and pets because you don’t want to disturb them and scare them away.

For landscapes, macro, portrait and street photography then you generally don’t need a zoom. In these situations I would recommend a fixed focal lens because they often offer better image quality and can handle lowlight situations better.

Differences between lenses?

Normal lenses are about 50mm and are great lens for regular photos, portraits and street photography. Macro lenses are intended for flowers, insects, products and produces very sharp images. They can sometimes be used for portraits as well.

Wide-angle lenses are great for lanscapes, artitecture and street photography. They are 35mm and below while 35mm is a very common length for people and street photography.

Telephoto lenses are also good for lanscapes but its main purpose is for wild life and sports. Shorter telephoto lenses 100-135mm are good for face closeups such as portraits.

Do I need a tripod or a flash?

Most people don’t need a tripod but it really depends on what kind of photos you take. Tripods are mainly used for telephoto lenses that can be quite heavy but they can also be useful for portraits, macro and product photography.

Flashes are useful for most type of photography but they are best indoors. I would recommend them for macro, portrait, landscape and product photography. I believe every photographer should have one at least.

Should I buy new or used?

I would say this mainly depends on your economy and what you feel most comfortable with. Buying used camera equipment is rather safe and very common. New lenses are not produced very often so even if you have had it a few years you can still sell it for about 30% of the price you bought it new, as long as the quality is good of course.

If you buy used make sure you are able to check out the equipment before paying. Do this by either meeting up or use an online service for the payment and shipment. Do not pay the seller directly before you have it in your hands.

Further reading

Here are a few links that might help you find what you’re looking for.

http://www.16-9.net/lens_tests/
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/
http://www.pixel-peeper.com/

Some time ago my home and development server crashed or more likely got fried. It survived with a crappy PSU and without a single upgrade for 10 years until one day in April - RIP. I have now put together a new machine and I’m quite pleased with it, quite sexy if you ask me!

Slackware has been my choice for the UNIX enviorment for a couple years now, simply because all other Linux distributions are unstable and lacks performance and simplicity. Slackware was my first real experience with Linux and the reason it became my choice was to learn about system and be able to solve my own problems.

Slackware was however a pain to keep updated so I decided to look around to see what was available. There is a huge number of Linux distributions to choose from and I have came to the conclusion that if you are going for Linux get either Slackware or Debian as these are the most stable and well known distributions.

I also gave FreeBSD a try because it’s one of the most stable and secure operative systems you can find, besides it’s been around over 30 years so it can’t be that bad :) FreeBSD has an excellent guide of the operative system and it’s simply a joy to read - The FreeBSD Handbook.

A new era

The Linux community is chaotic compared to BSD because BSD feel like a complete organization and operative system whereas Linux feels like there’s a bunch of developers that has no real goal other than not to use Micosoft Windows ;) The BSD community appears to have a lot more friendly attitude and I would say since BSD is a mature system so are the people that use it.

I have completely fallen in love with FreeBSD. It’s extremly easy to setup compared to any other UNIX-related system I have used. One of the nicest things is that you only need one thing and that’s the FreeBSD Handbook.

Everything is logical on FreeBSD and easy to configure which makes me wonder why it isn’t more popular other than as a server OS. You do need some basic knowledge of UNIX which the reason there is a FreeBSD Handbook and it will help you get started.

If you are going to run FreeBSD as a desktop user then you should be aware that it does not have the best hardware support so it can be a bit tricky to get the hardware detected at times. My only issue was that it could not detect my monitor, however this doesn’t matter if you just run the CLI (Command-line Interface).

I have now left all my Linux problems behind me and have completely moved over to FreeBSD with great joy and excitement :) My home server now works better than ever, more stable and secure, and easy to maintain. I simply can’t ask for more than that.

After a few months my photoblog, Dreamz Photo, has finally been approved by VFXY syndication service. VFXY is one of the largest syndication services for photobloggers to share their work with other artists and photography lovers. They are manually approved by volunteers to ensure high quality of the thousands of photoblogs submitted.

This is a quick guide how to setup VFXY on a WordPress photoblog that is hosted on your own domain such as configure your htaccess file, VFXY and WordPress configurations.

Control your photos

Once your photoblog has been approved you should setup the htaccess file to prevent hotlinking of your photos. This is a good way to give you a better control where your photos will be published. It will also save you bandwidth which may result in saving you money if your photoblog is popular and bandwidth is limited.

For more information on how to use and write a htaccess file, see AskApache htaccess Tutorial.

You should add the following to your htaccess file. Keep in mind that mod_rewrite must be enabled on your server, however in most cases it’s enabled by default.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?feedburner\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feedproxy\.google\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://photos\.vfxy\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [NC,F]

Change the domain name to your own on this line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]

If you are using a feed redirection plugin like FeedBurner FeedSmith or FD Feedburner then you must have the following in your htaccess file. If not, you can comment them out or remove them:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?feedburner\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://feedproxy\.google\.com/ [NC]

WordPress, FeedBurner and VFXY

First time users should import all their photos to VFXY by changing the number of syndication feeds in WordPress by going to Settings > Reading in the administration panel. Set the number of shown feeds equal or higher than the number of posts, e.g: if you have 50 posts, set it to 50 or 100.

Otherwise you should keep the syndication feed number to no more than 10 as this will save you bandwidth and a bunch of other things :)

If you are using the FeedBurner service and if you don’t want to wait the hour it takes for them to update your feed. Login to FeedBurner, go to Troubleshootize tab and click on Resync the feed.

Once this is done, login to VFXY and goto your Photoblog settings. Since we are using the FeedBurner redirection service you must set the address to your Photoblog RSS using the URL specified by FeedBurner. If you don’t do this VFXY will ignore your feed.

Add the following in the field for Photoblog RSS and change the your_feedburner_name to your own.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/your_feedburner_name

Now save the Photoblog settings and then reset your gallery. Resetting the gallery will take on average about 20 minutes and if everything is setup correctly your photos should be showing up in your VFXY photoblog gallery.

Once the gallery has been reset you should go back to the WordPress administration panel and set syndication feed value to 10.

Yesterday I had this amazing idea to create a easter eggs hunt for some friends. It resulted in the EasterEggs script written in Javascript with MooTools framework and it works quite well but will be improved very soon.

EasterEggs works on the following browsers: Opera 9+, Mozilla Firefox 3+, Safari 3+ and Internet Explorer 8+. It’s buggy on Internet Explorer 8 and sometimes it works on Internet Explorer 7 which should be fixed in the near future.

Anyway, head over to the Easter Eggs Hunt and have fun! :)

Update: Added support for Internet Explorer 6, fixed minor issues in Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

On April 7, 2009 it was 40 years ago since the first RFC (Request For Comments) was published in 1969 by Steve Crocker at University of California, Los Angeles. The RFC is the reason why the internet works as it does today and to many internet seem chaotic and dangerously out of control. But in reality it’s exactly the opposite and without the RFCs internet would have been very different than it is today, may not have existed at all. We will never know.

I find it fascinating with people like Steve Crooker and many others that have worked on this subject that they do this because they believe in it and not how to get something out of it as it is of many parts of corners of today’s internet.  However, we should not forget the great things people like Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds have done for operative system side which have brought many people together, for good and bad, to bring the internet and computer life forward.

RFC bring forward and create our standards that as a web developer and web designer is a must if we don’t want a chaotic internet life in the future. Unfortunately, when it comes to web browsers it’s been chaotic for a few years now because of the dominating role Internet Explorer have had and lack of interest from Microsoft to follow open standards. This is of course another discussion but it’s definitely going in a positive direction with Internet Explorer 8, plus that many other browsers like Opera, Mozilla that value open standards.

Steve Crocker writes the following on IMP Software, you can read the complete RFC here.

The software for the ARPA Network exists partly in the IMPs and partly in the respective HOSTs. BB&N has specified the software of the IMPs and it is the responsibility of the HOST groups to agree on HOST software.

During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to discuss the HOST software and initial experiments on the network. There emerged from these meetings a working group of three, Steve Carr from Utah, Jeff Rulifson from SRI, and Steve Crocker of UCLA, who met during the fall and winter. The
most recent meeting was in the last week of March in Utah. Also present was Bill Duvall of SRI who has recently started working with Jeff Rulifson.

Somewhat independently, Gerard DeLoche of UCLA has been working on the HOST-IMP interface.

I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected.

For further reading, New York Times wrote a nice article about the first RFC.

For a few years I have been using UltraEdit which is a very good editor for any web development work with one exception that it has some limitations when it comes to team based projects. An IDE editor is ideal when working with team projects or when you need to manage a large potion of code.

Generally speaking an IDE consists of syntax highlighting, code completion, debugging tools, version control, project management and FTP uploading. Finding a editor with these requirements aren’t as easy as it should be. There are a large number of editors out there and most of them are on the simple side, in other words no IDE editor.

I have tried out 12 different editors, both commercial and free products, and have to say that the commercial editors have very little to offer compared to the freeware. The editors I have tested are as follows Eclipse, Aptana, NetBeans, PHPDesigner, PhpEdit, PHPEd, E-TextEditor, UEStudio, Geany, Zend Studio, Codelobster and Komodo Edit.

Many of these editors are good and if your demands aren’t too high you would most likely be more than happy any of them. If you need a pure IDE then the options are limited to Eclipse, Aptana, NetBeans and Zend Studio. And NetBeans is the only one that sticks out here because Aptana and Zend Studio are both based on Eclipse.

The Editors

PHPEdit and PHPEd feels pretty much the same thing to me when I tested them. They were both a bit slow and far from a clean and user-friendly interface. However these editors are heavily focused on PHP just like PHPDesigner. Out of these I would defintely choose PHPDesigner. It’s an advanced PHP editor with a decent interface and good customization options just like UltraEdit.

UEStudio is the advanced version of UltraEdit and have to say it was a big disappointment. It feels like all they did was added more features to the UltraEdit version and made it bloatware. They really should rethink what they really want UEStudio to be aimed for, especially since it’s not very cheap to buy.

E-TextEditor, Geany and Codelobster I barely remember which can’t be a good sign. They are very simple editors and personally I would pick UltraEdit or Notepad++ if I wanted a more simple editor. I haven’t tried Notepad++ recently but I believe it’s only for Windows which is out of the question. Cross-platform software is always best, if you have that option :)

Now back to the IDE editors I mentioned earlier. Eclipse has been the leading IDE editor for quite some time and has a big community if that’s important to you. I really have hard to see what got it so popular, unless you’re an Java developer then it’s possibly one of the best editors you can get and for free.

Eclipse is known to be slow and for me there was no exception, sadly. It’s complicated to get it installed and running compared to the alternatives. Zend Studio which uses Eclipse is even worse, I could barely use it because it was so slow. It does however have some powerful features that is hard to find elsewhere when it comes to PHP development and also appears to be the most expensive editor I have seen.

Aptana is based on Eclipse and I found it very easy to use and setup. But it was a bit buggy, Subversion had some strange behaviour and sometimes the application wasn’t responding. It’s as slow as Eclipse since it uses the same snail code.

Last but not least we have NetBeans and this IDE is very nice, great interface and very responsive. Also easy to install and remove plugins apart from Eclipse. I see it as the most promising editor for PHP development right now but it feels like it’s still in early stage. There are several features that I’m missing and find it complicated to upload to FTP. It also lacks customization options that many other editors has.

So what do I choose?

It’s definitely not easy to choose an editor that fits you and that you can use in all situations. I will most likely stick with UltraEdit for a bit longer and use a non-integrated Subversion control until I can find an editor that can fulfill my dreams :)

I will keep NetBeans and continue to play with it for now, besides a new version (v6.7) is coming out in a few months. I did try the beta but it was too buggy so I went back to v6.5 and it’s been very stable so far. I will also watch the progress of the Aptana development but I have a feeling NetBeans will be better unless a new editor comes out and beats them all.

After about 3 years break I have started remixing music again. It’s a nice way to relax for sure! As of today I published some of my new remixes at Dreamz.com. Also re-encoded my old tracks in 320kbps as well as the new ones. Share them as you like :)

Enjoy!

I was looking around for an internet connection throttler to run some tests on client-side web applications. Doing this can be very useful to ensure the application works as intended regardless of the user’s internet connection.

Appearently using throttlers are not too common because if you look up throttling you will most likely come up with people’s complaints about ISP throttling for P2P networks and the alike. However, I found Nimbus developed by Shunra which is a freeware. It’s very simple to use, you just select the throttling speed you want.

Shunra no longer updates or provides a download link for this software but you can download Nimbus here.

There is also NetLimiter which is more well known, more advanced and if you feel like paying 30 USD it probably works just fine as well. Personally I’m quite happy with Nimbus. It does what it suppose to do.

Today I discovered a new artist and her name is Natalie Merchant. She is very similar to Sophie Zelmani. Natalie Merchant was previously in the group 10,000 Maniacs from 1981 to 1993 when she started her solo career. Natalie’s style is soul, rock, jazz and folk.

Natalie Merchant’s latest album came out in 2003 called The House Carpenter’s Daughter. You can check her out on Last.fm or visit Natalie’s official website.