Archive for: February, 2007

Canon S3

Feb 26 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Cameras, Canon, Digital Imaging

This is a quick summary/review of my Canon Powershot S3 IS, pointing out the positive and negative sides of it. I bought this camera in August, and I’m very happy with it. The money value is very good, and at the moment the best compromise for a good camera without the cost (and volume) of digital SLR cameras and with huge and expensive objectives.

what is POSITIVE:
- picture quality: sharp pictures and good tonalities
- tilting monitor to take pictures from every angle
- 12x zoom opens new horizons to creativity
- amazing battery life
- uses normal AAA batteries
- many manual controls ans settings, but also superb "auto" mode
- strong enough flash light
- user friendly menu, easy to learn
- best camera in this price range
- very fast OFF<->ON time, fast continuos shots
- small enough to fit in a small bag
- silent during operation and zoom (very low noise)
- very good microphone sensitivity and sound recorder mode
- good plastic quality (shock resistant), black color
- 6 megapixels is enough for sharp A3 pictures… need more?

what is NEGATIVE:
- purple fringing at big zoom, can’t be better in such cameras
- some noise in dark pictures without flash
- MJPG video compression: takes a lot of memory space

CONCLUSION:
After using it extensively, I recommend it without dubts for amateur photographers. Other competitors with similar cameras deliver worse picture quality. Amazon delivered in a shock-proof packaging in two days. Very professional. I recommend a fast SD-card. I took a 2-gig Sandisk Extreme III card, and I’m satisfied to have such a fast response from my camera.

Canon S3 small

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52 proven stress reducers

Feb 26 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Antistress, Tips, Work

StressThis list has been copied from this web page, and discovered through Lifehacker (a site with the motto "geek to live") . I hope you can find one or two tips to better face everyday’s challenges.

Think positive, and have some relaxing and productive time!
Vincenzo

  1. Get up fifteen minutes earlier in the morning.  The inevitable morning mishaps will be less stressful.
  2. Prepare for the morning the evening before.  Set the breakfast table, make lunches, put out the clothes you plan to wear, etc.
  3. Don’t rely on your memory.  Write down appointment times, when to pick up the laundry, when library books are due, etc.
  4. Do nothing which, after being done, leads you to tell a lie.
  5. Make duplicates of all keys.  Bury a house key in a secret spot in the garden and carry a duplicate car key in your wallet, apart from your key ring.
  6. Practice preventive maintenance.  Your car, appliances, home, and relationships will be less likely to break down/fall apart "at the worst possible moment."
  7. Be prepared to wait.  A paperback can make a wait in a post office line almost pleasant.
  8. Procrastination is stressful.  Whatever you want to do tomorrow, do today; whatever you want to do today, do it now.
  9. Plan ahead.  Don’t let the gas tank get below one-quarter full; keep a well-stocked "emergency shelf" of home staples; don’t wait until you’re down to your last  bus token or postage stamp to buy more; etc.
  10. Don’t put up with something that doesn’t work right.  If your alarm clock, wallet, shoe laces, windshield wipers – whatever- are a constant aggravation, get them fixed or get new ones.
  11. Allow 15 minutes of extra time to get to appointments.  Plan to arrive at an airport one hour before domestic departures.
  12. Eliminate (or restrict) the amount of caffeine in your diet.
  13. Always set up contingency plans, "just in case." ("If for some reason either of us is delayed, here’s what we’ll do. . ." kind of thing.  Or, "If we get split up in the shopping center, here’s where we’ll meet.")
  14. Relax your standards.  The world will not end if the grass doesn’t get mowed this weekend.
  15. Pollyanna-Power!  For every one thing that goes wrong, there are probably 10 or 50 or 100 blessings.  Count ‘em!
  16. Ask questions.  Taking a few moments to repeat back directions, what someone expects of you, etc., can save hours.  (The old "the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get," idea.)
  17. Say "No!"  Saying "no" to extra projects, social activities, and invitations you know you don’t have the time or energy for takes practice, self-respect, and a belief that everyone, everyday, needs quiet time to relax and be alone.
  18. Unplug your phone.  Want to take a long bath, meditate, sleep, or read without interruption?  Drum up the courage to temporarily disconnect.  (The possibility of there being a terrible emergency in the next hour or so is almost nil.)  Or use an answering machine.
  19. Turn "needs" into preferences.  Our basic physical needs translate into food, water, and keeping warm.  Everything else is a preference. Don’t get attached to preferences.
  20. Simplify, simplify, simplify. . .
  21. Make friends with non-worriers.  Nothing can get you into the habit of worrying faster than associating with chronic worrywarts.
  22. Get up and stretch periodically if your job requires that you sit for extended periods.
  23. Wear earplugs.  If you need to find quiet at home, pop in some earplugs.
  24. Get enough sleep.  If necessary, use an alarm clock to remind you to go to bed.
  25. Create order out of chaos.  Organize your home and workspace so that you always know exactly where things are.  Put things away where they belong and you won’t have to go through the stress of losing things.
  26. When feeling stressed, most people tend to breathe short, shallow breaths.  When you breathe like this, stale air is not expelled, oxidation of the tissues is incomplete, and muscle tension frequently results.  Check your breathing throughout the day,  and before, during, and after high-pressure situations.  If you find your stomach muscles knotted and your breathing is shallow, relax all your muscles and take several deep, slow breaths. 
  27. Writing your thoughts and feelings down (in a journal, or on paper to  be thrown away) can help you clarify things and can give you a renewed perspective
  28. Try the following yoga technique whenever you feel the need to relax. Inhale deeply through your nose to the count of eight.  Then, with lips puckered, exhale very slowly through your mouth to the count of 16, or for as long as you can.  Concentrate on the long sighing sound and feel the tension dissolve.  Repeat 10 times.
  29. Inoculate yourself against a feared event.  Example:  before speaking in public, take time to go over every part of the experience in your mind.  Imagine what you’ll wear, what the audience will look like, how you will present your talk, what the questions will be and how you will answer them, etc.  Visualize the experience the way you would have it be.  You’ll likely find that when the time comes to make the actual presentation, it will be "old hat" and much of your anxiety will have fled.
  30. When the stress of having to get a job done gets in the way of getting the job done, diversion – a voluntary change in activity and/or environment – may be just what you need.
  31. Talk it out.  Discussing your problems with a trusted friend can help clear your mind of confusion so you can concentrate on problem solving.
  32. One of the most obvious ways to avoid unnecessary stress is to select an environment (work, home, leisure) which is in line with your personal needs and desires.  If you hate desk jobs, don’t accept a job which requires that you sit at a desk all day.  If you hate to talk politics, don’t associate with people who love to talk politics, etc.
  33. Learn to live one day at a time.
  34. Every day, do something you really enjoy.
  35. Add an ounce of love to everything you do.
  36. Take a hot bath or shower (or a cool one in summertime) to relieve tension.
  37. Do something for somebody else.
  38. Focus on understanding rather than on being understood; on loving rather than on being loved.
  39. Do something that will improve your appearance.  Looking better can help you feel better.
  40. Schedule a realistic day.  Avoid the tendency to schedule back-to-back appointments; allow time between appointments for a breathing spell.
  41. Become more flexible.  Some things are worth not doing perfectly and some issues are fine to compromise upon.
  42. Eliminate destructive self-talk:  "I’m too old to. . .,"  "I’m too fat to. . .," etc.
  43. Use your weekend time for a change of pace.  If your work week is slow and patterned, make sure there is action and time for spontaneity built into your weekends.  If your work week is fast-paced and full of people and deadlines, seek peace and solitude during your days off.  Feel as if you aren’t accomplishing anything at work?  Tackle a job on the weekend which you can finish to your satisfaction.
  44. "Worry about the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves."  That’s another way of saying:  take care of the todays as best you can and the yesterdays and the tomorrows will take care of themselves.
  45. Do one thing at a time.  When you are with someone, be with that person and with no one or nothing else.  When you are busy with a project, concentrate on doing that project and forget about everything else you have to do.
  46. Allow yourself time – everyday – for privacy, quiet, and introspection.
  47. If an especially unpleasant task faces you, do it early in the day and get it over with, then the rest of your day will be free of anxiety.
  48. Learn to delegate responsibility to capable others.
  49. Don’t forget to take a lunch break.  Try to get away from your desk or work area in body and mind, even if it’s just for 15 or 20 minutes.
  50. Forget about counting to 10.  Count to 1,000 before doing something or saying anything that could make matters worse.
  51. Have a forgiving view of events and people.  Accept the fact that we live in an imperfect world.
  52. Have an optimistic view of the world.  Believe that most people are doing the best they can.

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Influencing for business

Feb 22 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Books, Psychology

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

This book has been a real joy to read. Inside you won’t find any ground-breaking revealed truth, but the author (Robert B.Cialdini Ph.D.) will bring you into a journey around the human brain, and the brain paths that lead us to decisions. Let’s face it: our reality is terribly complex, and each second our brain is bombarded by an incredible quantity of information. How could we still make good choices? Easy: through shortcuts. Our experience and culture helps us to choose the right direction through clues that most of the times lead us to the best choice. Sometimes some people more skilled than us in the influence tactics (usually people trying to sell us something!), use those clues trying to bring us to the choice the want us to choose, typically “Yes, I buy it”. Sometimes those sellers can tell us that some offer is “for a limited time only!”, triggering our urge for a quick decision through the principle of scarcity, and trying to convince us that if we do not make a positive decision now, we won’t be able to profit of some special offer in the future; this clue will guide us to desire something that normally wouldn’t attract us.
From the epilogue at the end of the book:

<<Where we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted or fatigued, we tend to focus on less of the information available to us. [...] for the sake of efficiency we must sometimes retreat from the time-consuming, sophisticated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more automatic, primitive, single-feature type of responding. For instance, in deciding whether to say yes or no to a requester, it is clear that we frequently pay attention to but one piece of information that we use to prompt our compliance decisions. [...] That’s why we employ the factors of reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity so often and automatically in making our compliance decisions. Each, by itself, provides a highly reliable cue as to when we will be better off saying yes than no.>>

 Our instinct can also help us: sometimes we have to listen to our stomach! The stomach is one of our organs which is more strictly connected to ancestral areas of the brain which we cannot easily control and understand; most of the times the answer of some our questions are there, in the most ancient and uncontrolled part of our brain. Just giving an example, if we are conducting an interview, and we feel something like “an uncertainty feeling” in our stomach (no joke!), most probably our amygdala is aware of some negative signal of which we are not conscious. Learning to listen to our such clues can help us to use this kind of intelligence that is many times underused and underestimated. This kind of approach can save us sometimes to accept something we don’t really want.
The book explores systematically, one by one, the different principles that we usually tend to apply to shorten our decisions, and proposes also some mean to counter-attack to such principles once artificially triggered by people trying to make their own profit.
I recommend this book as a relaxing lecture; with lots and lots of real-life examples, the author will give the reader some consciousness of how people make decisions, which techniques usually people adopt to to convince us, and which weapons we can employ to contrast them.
You can google for some more information, finding out more about the “influence principles” by the author here.

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Blender 2.43 is out

Feb 21 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under 3D, Blender

Did you ever dream of being able to generate astonishing 3D worlds? Have you ever desired to simulate phisical objects, collisions, and particles in space? Well, it is time to start, and the cost of commercial quality software is will not stop you. Blender is a marvellous open source 3D content creation suite that you can have free of cost at Blender web site.
Don’t be scared by the interface, which takes some time to master; after a couple of days you will see how productive this kind of GUI can be. There is a big number of free video tutorials and guides that will help you creating your masterpieces. Just start with the links provided below:

blender.org (Blender 3D project home page)
blenderart magazine
BlenderNewbies – a beginner’s resource for learning Blender 3D
BlenderWiki
Blender Tutorials at BlenderNation
Blender Tutorials Collection

If you are one of the lucky owners of one of the newest multi-core processors, you will be happy to know that multi-threaded rendering is supported, even though it must be explicitely enabled in the rendering parameters.
Blender comes with native support for an additional powerful external render: Yafray. Give it a try to see the raytraced image quality. The newest version of Blender has just been released. There are many noteworthy updates to this software; the most notable this time (at least for the average user) are Sculpt Mode and Multires Meshes. Have a look to this Blender page to learn about those features through videos.

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The Code Book

Feb 19 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Books, Encryption

The Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It .The Code BookThe Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It

This book by Simon Singh presents the history of encryption since the ancient Egyptians up to the today’s Internet era. It is not a technical book, and can be read and enjoyed without any special mathemathica background, being able to introduce the basics of the encryption algorithms available today, and used also in protected internet transactions. I warlmly recommend this book to all the people willing to understand the enormous power of message encryption today and in the past.
A very juicy part regards the story of the Second World War, and how the “unbreakable” german Enigma machine has been in fact broken. Puzzles are present almost in every chapter, but it isn’t a must to solve them to proceed with the reading.
I really enjoyed this book, and expecially the focus on the ingenious and groundbreaking power of the human brain.

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Vista can wait

Feb 18 2007 Published by Vincenzo Carabillo' under Linux, OSs, Windows

Windows Vista LogoWithout dubts in the next few years Windows Vista will be present in the vast majority of dektop PCs in the world. Windows Vista is out already from some months, and as a technophile I have to say that the new Redmond creation is a big step forward. Now I am convinced that this step has been taken in the wrong direction. In a few words, the operating system must let the computer do what the owner wants, and not what the operating sysyem decides. Vista is the only program on a Windows PC that will have direct access to all the system resources, while all the other applications will have to work through the filters of Vista. This is increasing the level of security of the PC, but the operating system will choose what your computer will be able to do. This is unacceptable. Too may interests are there in this “security” game: the personal data contained in all the average PCs is worth too much money. From another perspective, do we really need such monster computers with 1 gig RAM and powerful CPUs and graphic cards just to give our desktop the newest Windows reincarnation with all those frills? Of course NOT!

Linux LogoThere are many alternatives to this. Starting with Apple Mac OS X (which is perfect for non-technical people), or Linux (you can try the latest Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is now much more user-friendly than the earliest Linux versions). There are plenty of programs, lots of games, and the experience working with those operating systems is even more rewarding than Vista. With Open Office you will get a compatible (and free) alternative to Microsoft Office. If you are in love with the new animated Windows features, you will get them all with Linux and Beryl you can check YouTube here, or search Beryl or Sabayon)

Classic Macosx Logo

Just do not be afraid experiment all you can do with a new Operating System. Go to a shop and give a try to Mac OS X if you want to experience pure style. Linux is powerful and free, and supported by a huge and responsive community. Virus? Trojans? With Linux you will forget them. With Apple Mac OS X it will very hard to get any.

You have the choice: choose Windows if you must, Linux if you can, Apple Mac OS if you want.

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