Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Top choices for digital point and shoot camera -- Comment()
I'm once again thinking about a new digital camera. My Canon Digital Ixus 400 is still ok, but has occasional mechanical problems. And it has noise issues even at ISO 100. I don't like to get a SLR, because I very much prefer the pocketable format (point and shoot type concept). Of the current cameras, my top three choices are Canon Digital Ixus 860 IS, Fuji Finepix F100fd, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. All of these have potential problems, and are not quite attractive enough.

But there are rumours of F120fd, Canon certainly will offer soon something new, and Panasonic hopefully improves the noise issue in the next models. My big wish is a 1/1.6 inch or bigger sensor, 5x or better optical zoom, and a real wide angle lense (at least 28 mm).

Much writing (to do) -- Comment()
I have been writing quite a lot lately, scratch writings as well as drafts for columns etc. to be published later. Some days ago I counted that I have 19 published writings so far this year, mostly columns but also articles. And some are still waiting to be published. Of course, this is nothing exceptional, a quite normal year that is.

Two-three weeks ago (May 24th) I also had an opinion piece published in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest Finnish newspaper. I haven't submitted opinion pieces to HS for years, but now there was an interesting discussion going on in the newpaper (and also on other forums in Finland) about the role of science in society. I have much more to say on the subject, and there are a lot of forums where to discuss this further, but I have to see when there is enough time to polish the ideas into clear enough shape.

In addition to these published pieces I have been writing a bit for myself only, all kinds of free-flow thinking and scratch pieces. I haven't done much of this type of writing for years, but now there has been a demand for this as well. I think this type of writing is a nice way of cleaning up the rubbish from between the ears. Just letting the words come without minding what they are helps a lot in finding the right words later when there is real writing to be done.

What will happen with OOXML? -- Comment()
ISO put OOXML document formats on hold. This was expected, and not only because of the complaints from the member countries. Now the ISO organization has a possibility to fix its reputation. This was a sordid mess. No wonder Micrsoft announced support for ODF, the competing format, in MS Office.

OS X will be even more stable (and faster) -- Comment()
I started using Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in February 2008, although I bought a copy several months earlier. Based on the experiences, I should have made the move much earlier. I very much liked the earlier version of OS X, and version 10.4.11 has been extremely stable, but all in all 10.5 easily surpasses the old one. And for me there haven't been stability problems in 10.5. The newest version, 10.5.3, has now been in use for two weeks on my iMac and iBook without restarts or other interruptions. And I have now been able to make fast enough backups of the iBook over the wireless network at home to my external Time Machine backup disk.

The news about Apple focusing on stability and speed in the next version of OS X seem just right. I totally agree that parallelism is the next great step, and software vendors should really look into their software to scale it to 8, 16, 32 etc. processors. This is the only way to benefit from the next steps in processor technology.

In terms of user experience, version 10.5 is great. There are some details to finetune, bugs to correct (and Apple has made hundreds of corrections already), but otherwise this operating system is great as it is.

In any case, I think the value for the future arises from the applications and from the cloud. Perhaps Apple has quite a lot in store on this front.