Thursday, July 31, 2008

My Firefox plugins

I use Firefox for all my web work and I've come across a number of add-ins that I have found to be very useful.

Here is the list of each one of them, including links to the add-in's home page.

Enjoy!

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

Latest batch of DSLRs...choices choices!

(Last updated: 2aug2008)



Somehow or other, it always ends up taking me far too long to choose a new phone or a new camera.

After reading endless reviews and a lot of toing and froing, I end up back to square one!

Still, it must be fun (?) so I thought I'd share my findings with everybody.



I currently have an FZ20 (12x optical zoom, 5MP, non-DSLR) with a 2.2x teleconverter, a 0.50x wide angle and a macro lens.

It has served me well and still does, however for some of the more demanding shots, the tiny sensor hits its limits.

Being tiny meant that the size of the lens was correspondingly small; this is a bonus when lugging around a camera.

Using ISO above 200 (the camera only goes to 400) is not an option, as it introduces too much noise.



Also, given the nature of the shots (bird shots and other distance shots), i.e. at the extreme end of the zoom, all the lens's weakness are highlighted. Purple fringing and other chromatic aberrations start showing up.



The camera has some great features, such as an inbuilt stabiliser, however for my purposes, the current combo of camera and add-on lenses is starting to suffer.



So, I hope I have made a pretty good case for going out and spending money! :-)



(btw, I have absolutely no association with any of the companies linked to in this article!)



Here are the 3 DSLRs I am currently looking at:





Nikon D60





















  • AU$999 RRP (expect to pay a lot less) body-only.

  • CCD 10MP

  • Lens-based stabiliser

  • Dust-removal

  • Shutter range: 1/4000sec - 30sec

  • Exposure metering: 420 segment sensor

  • Focusing: 3-point focus with AF-assist light. Single-, continuous- and auto-servo AF. Manual focus too.

  • ISO: 100-1600 (can go to 3200). Has Auto-ISO

  • Flash: inbuilt, GN12

  • LCD: 2.5" with 230,000 pixels

  • weight: 495g approx

UPDATE 2aug2008:

I have just come across this site which is selling the D60, body-only for AU$629 inc. GST

http://www.shoppingsafari.com.au/product.php?id=1369







Canon EOS450D (aka Rebel XSi)























  • AU$1,149 RRP (expect to pay a lot less) body-only.

  • CMOS 12MP

  • Lens-based stabiliser

  • Dust-removal

  • Shutter range: 1/4000sec - 30sec

  • Exposure metering: 35 segment sensor

  • Focusing: 9-point focus with AF-assist light. Single- and continuous-servo AF. Manual focus too.

  • ISO: 100-800 (can go to 1600). Has Auto-ISO (100-400 only)


  • Flash: inbuilt, GN13

  • LCD: 3" with 230,000 pixels

  • weight: 475g approx

UPDATE 2aug2008:

I have also come across this site which is selling the 450D, body-only for AU$889 inc. GST

http://www.shoppingsafari.com.au/product.php?id=1361





SONY A350























  • AU$1,399 RRP (expect to pay a lot less) body-only

  • CCD 14MP

  • Body-based, CCD-shift stabiliser

  • Dust-removal

  • Shutter range: 1/4000sec - 30sec

  • Exposure metering: 35 segment sensor

  • Focusing: 9-point focus with AF-assist light. Single and continuous AF. Manual focus too.

  • ISO: 100-3200


  • Flash: inbuilt, GN12

  • LCD: 2.7" with 230,000 pixels

  • weight: 582g approx

UPDATE 2aug2008:

I have also come across this site which is selling the A350, body-only for AU$799 inc. GST

http://www.shoppingsafari.com.au/product.php?id=1409







All of them are very nice but I need to choose just one!

I'll be taking a break from this for a while. Well, a day or so anyway :-)



As soon as I have more info on what camera I will (probably) be heading for, I'll post it all here.



(

psst! I've also been looking at the marvelous Nikon D300 but at AU$2,389 (http://www.digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au/category624_1.htm) or so just for the body, I am not sure it's going to make it into my shopping list :-(

)



btw, for in-depth reviews of cameras, visit:

http://www.dpreview.com or

http://www.dcresource.com or

http://www.steves-digicams.com





stay tuned...



UPDATE 2aug2008:

Added links to sites offering cheapest deals, as of today and as found via a search on http://www.myshopping.com.au



for a more extensive comparison of the latest DSLRs, visit http://www.popphoto.com/cameras/5429/dslr-shootout-five-top-cameras-compared.html



ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

Friday, July 25, 2008

See what your web pages look like in different browsers

If you need to produce a web site that needs to cater for IE, especially IE6 and earlier, you need to test it for each version of IE, since each one of the blasted things behaves differently (and none of them correctly!).

This site, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage, provides a tool that allows you to see what your web site will look like in each of the following versions of IE: 5.5, 6, 7 and 8b1


Some other sites that achieve a similar result are:


1) http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/


2) http://browsershots.org This site offers a very large range of browsers (not just IE) to test against. Great site!


Update: 23aug2009
3) I've also seen http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com/ which does something similar to browsershots. They do charge but it is quite affordable!




pps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome!

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Sketching and GUI prototyping, right from within Firefox!

After quite a few years of using Firefox, I should no longer be surprised by all the clever new uses people find for it, thanks to the FF plugins.

The latest one is the 'Pencil project', a plugin that allows you to, among others, draft the GUI of your new, all singing, all dancing app, right from within your web browser!

And you can export the result to PNG too!

And all this in 400KB of plugin!

Please visit the author's site for more info.

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Cool gmail skin!

I've just come across this fantastic gmail skin: http://www.globexdesigns.com/gmail/


This only works with FireFox3 and needs the Stylish extension.
Installation instructions are provided in the above link.


ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

Monday, July 21, 2008

Multithreaded javascript!

I just came across this article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/js_multithread

It is very informative and explains quite a number of the issues raised by callback-based async calls (used to simulate multiple execution streams) and how to achieve equivalent functionality via this new js library.

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome!  
 

Application sandbox

During the last few months, I have been researching various virtualisation technologies.
This revolved around full-PC virtualisation, such as that offered by VMWare, VirtualBox, XEN etc.
However, I have also been looking at app-virtualisation, specifically at ThinApp by VMWare.

A free (for personal use) app that does something similar is Sandboxie.

Thanks Alex for bringing this to my attention!

In subsequent articles, I will be looking more closely at the commercial offerings that offer application virtualisation.

Enjoy!

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

proxy-based, automation and testing tool for web apps

Here is another proxy-based, automation and testing tool for web apps.

It is Sahi and is described as:
Sahi is an automation and testing tool for web applications, with the facility to record and playback scripts. Developed in java and javascript, this tool uses simple javascript to execute events on the browser.
Visit the above link for more info.
If you know of any other such tools, please leave a comment here.

Enjoy!

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome! 

HTTP debugger/monitor

I came across Fiddler, a tool today that will be useful to anyone doing web development.

Firebug can do most of this too, however Fiddler is more browser-neutral and also allows the user to modify the incoming/outgoing data.
As a Firefox user, I use Firebug most of the time. Fiddler is a nice addition to my collection of tools.

Enjoy!

ps: Comments and/or links to this article are most welcome!