RSS is one of the most common abbreviations on the web today. Yet, not too many people fully understand what it is, how it can be used, and why would someone want to use it. There is an excellent document here which tells the story of RSS from a non-technical point of view. I would really suggest everyone, who is not already deep into RSS, to read the article.
Anyone who has been even once in McDonald’s during the last few years probably noticed that McDonald’s is a very multilingual company. McDonald’s franchises appear in many countries of the world and a lot of products and marketing materials target more than one country.
Theres is an interesting study of McDonald’s languages here. It is in a form of a quiz, which gives you a couple of phrases in some language and a choice of languages and asks you to guess which the correct language. It also provides some information about the language, such as the geography of the language and identifying characteristics. It can help you understand the differences between as many as 34 languages much better.
At least something good comes out of all those visits to McDonald’s…
Olga and I went for a sunset walk in Molos promenade today. I was surprised to find a lot of people there. Some were running, others walking, yet another others – sitting on the benches.
There were a few photo opportunities. The best two were the girl with an ice-cream and a couple of kittens. The girl was the best ever, but she was almost running trying to catch up with her parents, so I had only one shot. I guess with better cropping the image can get better. Kittens, though were very atmospheric and would have been much better on the video. They were very synchronized. They were sitting and moving their heads in exactly same directions at exactly same time. Very cool. But they were wild and were scared away when I tried to get closer.
Album location: /photos/2004/2004-09-28_POTD
I am using dump_photos.pl script to copy (or move) images from my Canon EOS 300D to my computer. Canon’s in-camera filesystem is not very convenient to copy files manually, because images are distributed across a number of folders (100 images per folder thing). Canon original software is for Windows only and is way too complicated and slow for such an easy task.
My script uses standard Perl modules (Getopt::Long, File::Copy, and POSIX) to copy or move files to specified or default (date-based) directory. It also mounts the Compact Flash before processing images, and umounts it after everything is done. It also uses jhead to optionally rotate images based on the information in EXIF header.
Run “dump_photos.pl –help” for a list of options. Although it was tested only with my Digital Rebel, I think it should work fine with most of Canon cameras.
PhotographyBlog has quoted press release from Canon which shows why exactly Canon rules and owns. For those, who is not going to click through, here is an executive summary: Canon is announcing 90 new products in 2004, which roughly one product every four days. 19 out of these are new digital cameras. Canon is the only company in the world who is not only developing, but manufacturing itself all of it’s cameras, sensors, and lenses. It pushes a whole tonne of money into Research and Development. This year it will be 8.2% of its all global revenues, which is almost 2 billion Euro. And blah blah blah…
Not only they do a lot, but they do it well too. Same site has a link to one week with Canon EOS 20D review. Faster power-on cycle, more settings and effects (like black and white photography with colored filtering), better focusing system, better battery, and less noise in low light conditions. In the review, there is an image shot in candle light with ISO 1600 setting, which has alsmost no noise. They boast that ISO 1600 with 20D is roughly the same as ISO 400 with 10D. Now, that’s an improvement!
Anyway, the point is – Canon rules and owns all the way!