Technology Tales

Canon PowerShot G11 first impressions and initial thoughts

Back in the early days of this blog, I mulled over the idea of having a high-end digital compact camera to complement a DSLR that then was delivering very dusty images; that Canon EOS 10D was cleaned since then and comes in for occasional use to this day. That was nearly three years ago, and a first generation Ricoh GR Digital was the item that then was catching my eye. At the time, I failed to justify spending that much money on such a thing and ended up acquiring a new Pentax K10D DSLR instead. The question that rattled about my head was this: what was the point of spending DSLR money on a compact camera? It is one that never really went away and comes to mind when you see the prices of interchangeable lens compacts like Olympus' Pen and equivalent offerings from Panasonic and Ricoh (there, it's interchangeable lens units rather than actual lenses).

The strongest counterpoint to the cost conundrum is the little matter of size. SLR (film or digital) cameras are sizeable things, and there is a place for having something that drops into a pocket. It is that which has propelled me into taking delivery of a Canon PowerShot G11. It may need a good-sized pocket but, unless you are going out with no jacket, it shouldn't be a problem most of the time. For those shorter sorties when I don't fancy bringing an SLR out, it is well-built and looks the business, though some acclimatisation is to make the best of the knobs, buttons and menus. Nevertheless, the included manual will help with this process (there's a paper quick start guide and more detailed documentation on CD).

The camera hasn't seen extensive use just yet, so here are a few early impressions. Firstly, there's the matter of size: it's even smaller than the first camera that I ever bought (more than fifteen years ago) and that was a Ricoh 35 mm compact film camera. That comparison is even more striking when you consider the feature sets. The Ricoh was a fixed 35 mm lens affair with things like date and time stamping, ISO choice and a nod towards scenic mode selection. In contrast, the much newer Canon is loaded with the sorts of things that normally are found almost exclusively on SLR's, starting with its effective 28-140 mm focal length range.

Exposure modes such as manual, aperture priority and shutter priority complement scene-based modes and another for movies (not a concern of mine, it has to be said). As if that weren't enough, there's exposure compensation too. It came as a surprise to me to find a form of manual focussing included, though it is not as convenient as turning a focussing ring on a lens. While you can see the inbuilt flash above, there's also a hot shoe and a place to attach a tripod too. Settings like white balance and file format are accessed using the Function/Set button, with the lever underneath the shutter release button controlling the focal length of the lens. In addition, there's also image stabilisation, and that's important when you're using live view to compose a photo. Spot metering and focal point selection are other things that find their way into the package. Some may be excited by other things, but exposure and focussing are essential for any photographic efforts.

An optical viewfinder is included, and it has diopter settings too, but my first impressions are that live view through the rear screen trumps it and I see no need for such things on SLR's. That also flips out from the camera body and can be rotated either for self-portraiture or for folding back in on the camera body for use like a non-articulated screen. Another use is with those occasions when the subject means holding the camera in positions that would be impossible with a conventional screen; holding the camera over your head or down low on the ground are the sorts of situations that come to mind.

Of course, there's more there than those features that I have listed, and the specifications on the Canon website are as good a place to start as any. So far, my only testing has taken the form of cursory checks and to make sure that the thing works properly. Still, this has given me more of a feel for the camera and how it operates. As you'd expect, high ISO settings are noisy, only for a bigger surprise to be that the smallest aperture setting is f/8. Being used to SLR's, I was expecting to get the likes of f/16 on there, but a spot of internet investigation indicated that I should have been taking the size of the sensor into account with my expectations. Any trials so far have been in dull weather, so I'd need to use it in a wider variety of conditions before giving it the sort of wider appraisal that you'd find in the likes of Outdoor Photography (who liked it, it has to be said). For what it's worth, I have found no major criticism so far, though I cannot see it usurping my SLR's not as if that ever was the intention anyway.

Understanding Outlook's 32 KB rule limit: What happens when you upgrade from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2007

A move from Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2007 at work before Christmas resulted in deactivated Outlook rules and messages like the following when I tried reactivating them:

One or more rules could not be uploaded to Exchange server and have been deactivated. This could be because some of the parameters are not supported or there is insufficient space to store all your rules.

The cause is a 32 KB size limitation for all rules associated with your Exchange server account before Exchange 2007. With the latter, the default size increases to 64 KB and can be increased further to 256 KB by manual intervention. Though this wouldn't be a big issue if you had the option to store rules locally on your own PC, but that was removed after Outlook 2000, therefore explaining why I first encountered it when I did.

Microsoft has a useful article on their support website containing suggested remedies which aren't all as extreme as deleting some rules either. Consolidation and shortening of rule names are other suggestions, and you should never discount how much space the "run on this machine only" parameter takes up either. Still, Microsoft made an odd design decision that caused this issue, not that it is their first or even last such choice.

Further securing MySQL in Fedora

Ubuntu users must be spoilt because any MySQL installation asks you for a root password, an excellent thing in my opinion. With Fedora, it just pops the thing on there with you needing to set up a service and setting the root password yourself; if I recall correctly, I think that openSUSE does the same thing. For the service management, I needed to grab system-config-services from the repositories because my Live CD installation left off a lot of stuff, OpenOffice and GIMP even. The following command line recipe addressed the service manager omission:

su - # Change to root, entering password when asked
yum -y install system-config-services # Installs the thing without a yes/no prompt
exit # Return to normal user shell

Thereafter, the Services item from the menus at System > Administration was pressed into service and the MySQL service enabled and started. The next step was to lock down the root user, so the following sequence was used:

mysql # Enter MySQL prompt; no need for user or password because it still is unsecured!
UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('MyNewPass') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit # Exit the mysql prompt, leaving the bare mysql command unusable

For those occasions when password problems keep you out of the MySQL shell, you'll find password resetting advice on the MySQL website, though I didn't need to go the whole hog here. MySQL Administrator might be another option for this type of thing. That thought never struck me while I was using it to set up less privileged users and allowing them access to the system. For a while, I was well stymied in my attempts to access the MySQL using any of those extra accounts until I got the idea of associating them with a host, another thing that is not needed on Ubuntu if my experience is any guide. All in all, Fedora may make you work a little extra to get things like thing done, yet I am not complaining if it makes you understand a little more about what is going on in the background, something that is never a disadvantage.

Command Line Software Management

One of the nice things about a Debian-based Linux distribution is that it is easy to pull a piece of software onto your system from a repository using either apt-get or aptitude. While some may prefer a GUI, but I find that the command line offers a certain extra transparency that stops the "what's it doing?" type of question. That's never to say that the GUI-based approach hasn't a place, and I only go using it when seeking out a piece of software without knowing its aptitude-ready name. Interestingly, there are signs that Canonical may be playing with the idea of making Ubuntu's Software Centre a full application management tool with updates and upgrades getting added to the current searching, installation and removal facilities. That well may be, but it's going to take a lot of effort to get me away from the command line altogether.

Fedora and openSUSE have their software management commands too in the shape of yum and zypper, respectively. The recent flurry of new operating system releases has had me experimenting with both of those distros on a real test machine. As might be expected, the usual battery of installation, removal and update activities are well served, and I have been playing with software searching using yum too.

One thing that has yet to mature is in-situ distribution upgrading, à la Ubuntu. In principle, it is possible, but I got a black screen when I tried moving from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 within VirtualBox using instructions on the openSUSE website. Not wanting to wait, I reached for a Live CD instead, and that worked a treat on both virtual and real machines.

Being in an experimental turn of mind, I attempted the same to get from Fedora 11 to the beta release of its version 12. A spot of repository trouble got me using a Live CD in its place. You can perform an in-situ upgrade from a full Fedora DVD, but the only option is system replacement when you have a Live CD.

Once installation is out of the way, YAST can be ignored in favour of zypper and yum is good enough that Fedora's GUI-using alternative can be ignored. It's nice to see good transparent ideas taking hold elsewhere and may make migration between distros much easier too.

You always can install things yourself...

With Linux distributions offering you everything on a plate, there is a temptation to stick with what they offer rather than taking things into your own hands. For example, Debian's infrequent stable releases and the fact that they don't seem to change software versions throughout the lifetime of such a release means that things such as browser versions are fixed for the purposes of stability; Lenny has stuck with Firefox 3.06 and called it IceWeasel for some unknown reason. However, I soon got to grab a tarball for 3.5 and popped its contents into /opt where the self-contained package worked without a hitch. The same modus operandi was used to add Eclipse PDT and that applied to Ubuntu too until buttons stopped working, forcing a jumping of ship to NetBeans.

Of course, you could make a mess when veering away from what is in a distribution, but that should be good enough reason not to get carried away with software additions. With the availability of DEB packages for things like Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, VirtualBox, Google Chrome and Opera, keeping things clean isn't so hard. While your mileage may vary when it comes to how well things work out for you, I have only ever had the occasional problem anyway.

What reminded me of this was a recent irritation with the OpenOffice package included in Ubuntu 9.10 whereby spell checking wasn't working. While there were thoughts about in situ fixes like additional dictionary installations, I ended up plumping for what could be called the lazy option: grabbing a tarball full of DEB packages from the OpenOffice website and extracting its contents into /tmp and, once the URE package was in place, installing from there using the command:

dpkg -i o*

To get application shortcuts added to the main menu, it was a matter of diving into the appropriate subfolder and installing from the GNOME desktop extension package. Of course, Ubuntu's OpenOffice variant was removed as part of all this but, if you wanted to live a little more dangerously, the external installation goes into /opt which means that there shouldn't be too much of a conflict anyway. In any case, the DIY route got me the spell checking in OpenOffice Writer that I needed, so all was well and another Ubuntu rough edge eradicated from my life, for now anyway.

Converting from CGM to Postscript

One thing that I recently had to investigate was the possibility of converting CGM vector graphics files into Postscript and from there into PDF. Having used ImageMagick for converting images before, that was an obvious option. However, that cannot process CGM files on its own and needs a delegate or helper application as well. This is the case with raw digital camera files too, with UFRaw being the program chosen. For CGM images, the more obscure RALCGM is what's needed, and tracking it down is a bit of an art. Though the history is that it was developed at the U.K.'s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, it appears that it was left to go off into the wilderness rather than someone keeping an eye on things. With that in mind, here are the installation packages for Windows and Linux (RPM):

Windows Installer

Linux RPM

RALCGM is a handy command line tool that can covert from CGM to Postscript on its own without any need for ImageMagick at all. From what I have seen, fonts on graphical output may look greyer than black, but it otherwise does its job well. However, considering that it is a freely available tool, one cannot complain too much. There are other packages for doing vector to raster conversion and the ones that I have seen do have GUI's but the freedom to look at for cost software wasn't mine to have. The required command looks something like the following:

ralcgm -d PS -oL test.cgm test.ps

The switch -d PS uses the software's Postscript driver and -oL specifies landscape orientation. If you like to find out more, here's a PDF rendition of the help file that comes with the thing:

RALCGM Documentation

So you just need a web browser?

When Google announced that it was working on an operating system, it was bound to result in a frisson of excitement. However, a peek at the preview edition that has been doing the rounds confirms that Chrome OS is a very different beast from those operating systems to which we are accustomed. The first thing that you notice is that it only starts up the Chrome web browser. In this, it is like a Windows terminal server session that opens just one application. Of course, in Google's case, that one piece of software is the gateway to its usual collection of productivity software like Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and more. Then, there are offerings from others too, with Microsoft just beginning to come into the fray to join Adobe and many more. As far as I can tell, all files are stored remotely, so I reckon that adding the possibility of local storage and management of those local files would be a useful enhancement.

With Chrome OS, Google's general strategy starts to make sense. First create a raft of web applications, follow them up with a browser and then knock up an operating system. It just goes to show that Google Labs doesn't simply churn out stuff for fun, but that there is a serious point to their endeavours. In fact, you could say that they sucked us in to a point along the way. Speaking for myself, I may not entrust all of my files to storage in the cloud, yet I am perfectly happy to entrust all of my personal email activity to Gmail. It's the widespread availability and platform independence that has done it for me. For others spread between one place and another, the attractions of Google's other web apps cannot be understated. Maybe, that's why they are not the only players in the field either.

With the rise of mobile computing, that kine of portability is the opportunity that Google is trying to use to its advantage. For example, mobile phones are being used for things now that would have been unthinkable a few years back. Then, there's the netbook revolution started by Asus with its Eee PC. All of this is creating an ever internet connected bunch of people, so having devices that connect straight to the web like they would with Chrome OS has to be a smart move. Some may decry the idea that Chrome OS will be available on a device only basis, but I suppose they have to make money from this too; search can only pay for so much, and they have experience with Android too.

There have been some who wondered about Google's activities killing off Linux and giving Windows a good run for its money; Chrome OS seems to be a very different animal to either of these. It looks as if it is a tool for those on the move, an appliance, rather than the pure multipurpose tools that operating systems usually are. If there is a symbol of what an operating system usually means for me, it's the ability to start with a bare desktop and decide what to do next. Transparency is another plus point, with the Linux command line having that in spades. For those who view PC's purely as means to get things done, such interests are peripheral, and it is for these that the likes of Chrome OS has been created. In other words, the Linux community need to keep an eye on what Google is doing but should not take fright because there are other things that Linux always will have as unique selling points. Even though the same sort of thing applies to Windows too, Microsoft's near stranglehold on the enterprise market will take a lot of loosening, perhaps keeping Chrome OS in the consumer arena. Counterpoints to that include the use GMail for enterprise email by some companies and the increasing footprint of web-based applications, even bespoke ones, in business computing. In fact, it's the latter that can be blamed for any tardiness in Internet Explorer development. In summary, Chrome OS is a new type of thing rather than a replacement for what's already there. We may find that co-existence is how things turn out, but what it means for Linux in the netbook market is another matter. Only time will tell on that one.

Consolidation

For a while, the Windows computing side of my life has been spread across far too many versions of the pervasive operating systems with the list including 2000 (desktop and server), XP, 2003 Server, Vista and 7; 9x hasn't been part of my life for what feels like an age. At home, XP has been the mainstay for my Windows computing needs, with Vista Home Premium loaded on my Toshiba laptop. The latter variant came in for more use during that period of home computing "homelessness" and, despite a cacophony of complaints from some, it seemed to work well enough. Since the start of the year, 7 has also been in my sights with beta and release candidate instances in virtual machines, leaving me impressed enough to go popping the final version onto both the laptop and in a VM on my main PC. Microsoft finally has got around to checking product keys over the net, so that meant a licence purchase for each installation using the same downloaded 32-bit ISO image. 7 is still doing well for me, so I am beginning to wonder whether having an XP VM is becoming pointless. The reason for that train of thought is that 7 is becoming the only version that I really need for anything that takes me into the world of Windows.

Work is a different matter, with a recent move away from Windows 2000 to Vista heavily reducing my exposure to the venerable old stager (businesses usually take longer to migrate, and any good IT manager usually delays any migration by a year anyway). 2000 is sufficiently outmoded by now that even my brother was considering a move to 7 for his work because of all the Office 2007 files that have been coming his way. While he may be no technical user, the bad press gained by Vista hasn't passed him by, so a certain wariness is understandable. Saying that, my experiences with Vista haven't been unpleasant, and it always worked well on the laptop, while the same also can be said for its corporate desktop counterpart. Much of the noise centred around issues of hardware and software compatibility, and that certainly is apparent at work with my having some creases left to straighten.

With all of this general forward heaving, you might think that IE6 would be shuffling its mortal coil by now, but a recent check on visitor statistics for this website places it at about 13% share, tantalisingly close to oblivion but still too large to ignore it completely. All in all, it is lingering like that earlier blight of web design, Netscape 4.x. If I was planning a big change to the site design, setting up a Win2K VM would be in order, not to completely put off those labouring with the old curmudgeon. For smaller changes, the temptation is not to bother checking, but that is questionable when XP is set to live on for a while yet. That came with IE6 and there must be users labouring with the old curmudgeon, and that's ironic with IE8 being available for SP2 since its original launch a while back. Where all this is leading me is towards the idea of waiting for IE6 share to decrease further before tackling any major site changes. After all, I can wait with the general downward trend in market share; there has to be a point when its awkwardness makes it no longer viable to support the thing. That would be a happy day.

When buttons stop working...

One of the things that stopped working as it should after my recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade was the Eclipse PDT installation that I had in place. Editing files went a bit haywire and creating projects had me pushing buttons with nothing happening. Whether this was a Java or GNOME issue, I don't know, but I found it happening too on openSUSE 11.2 (there should be more on that distro in a later entry). That was enough to get me looking again at NetBeans.

In both openSUSE (NB version 6.5) and Ubuntu (NB version 6.7.1), I plucked the default offering of NetBeans from the respective software repositories and added the PHP plugin in both cases. Unlike when I last gave the platform a go, things seemed to go smoothly, and it looks to have replaced Eclipse for PHP development duties. While project scanning may take a little while, it's far from annoying, a departure from my earlier dalliance with using NetBeans as a PHP editor was stymied by performance that was so sluggish as to make the thing a pain to use. Up to now, NetBeans' footprint when it comes to its use of PC power never was light, so I am wondering if dual-core and quad-core CPU's help along with a copious supply of RAM. Only time will tell if these initial positive impressions stay the course; for now, I'll be keeping an open mind.

Rough?

Was it because Canonical and friends kept Ubuntu in such a decent state from 8.04 through to 9.04 that things went a little quiet in the blogosphere on the subject of the well-known Linux distribution? If so, 9.10 might be proving more of a talking point, and you have to wonder if this is such a good thing with the appearance of Windows 7 on the scene. Looking on the bright side, 10.04 will be an LTS release, so there is some chance that any rough edges that are on display now could be resolved by next April. Even so, it might have been better not to see anything so obvious at all.

In truth, Ubuntu always has had its gaps, and I have seen a few of their ilk over the last two years. Of these, a few have triggered postings on here. In fact, issues with accessing the BBC iPlayer still bring a goodly number of folk to this website. That may just be a matter of grabbing RealPlayer, now helpfully available as a DEB package, from the requisite place on the web and ensuring that Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras is in place too, but you have to know that in the first place.

Even so, unexpected behaviours like Palimpsest seeing every partition on a disk as a different drive and SIL Raid mappings being seen for hard drives that used to live on the main home PC that bit the dust earlier this year; it only happens on one of the machines that I have running Ubuntu so it may be hardware thing and newly added hard drive uses none of the SIL mapping either.

Perhaps more seriously (is it something that a new user should be encountering?), a misfiring variant of Brasero had me moving to K3b. Then, UFRaw was sluggish in batch mode, yet that's nothing that having a Debian VM won't overcome. Rough edges like these do get you asking if 9.10 was ready for the big time, while making you reluctant to recommend it to mainstream users like my brother.

The counterpoint to the above is that 9.10 includes a host of under the bonnet changes like the introduction of Ext4 hard drive formatting, Xsplash to allow the faster system loading to occur unseen and GNOME 2.28. To someone looking in from outside like me, that looks like a lot of work and might explain the ingress of the annoyances that I have seen. Add to that the fact that we are between Debian releases, so things like the optimised packaging of ImageMagick or UFRaw may not be so high up the list of the things to do, especially with the more general speed optimisations that were put in place for 9.10.

With 10.04 set to be an LTS release, I'd be hoping that consolidation is the order of the day over the next five or six months, but it seems to be the inclusion of new features and other such progress that get magazine reviewers giving higher ratings (Linux Format has given it a mark of 9 out of 10). With the mooted inclusion of GNOME 3 and its dramatically different interface in 10.10, they should get their fill of that. However, I'd like to see some restraint for the take of a smooth transition from the familiar GNOME 2.x to the new. If GNOME 3 stays very like its alpha builds, then the question of how users will take to it arises. Of course, there's still some time before we see GNOME 3 and, having seen how the Ubuntu developers transformed GNOME 2.28, I wouldn't be surprised if the impact of any change could be dulled.

In summary, my few weeks with Ubuntu 9.10 as my main OS have thrown up no major roadblocks that would cause me to look at moving elsewhere; Fedora would be tempting if that situation were to arise. The irritations that I have seen are more like signs of a lack of polish and remain peripheral to day-to-day working if you discount CD/DVD burning. To be honest, there always have been some element of roughness on Ubuntu, but has the lack of sizeable change spoilt us? Whatever about how things feel afterwards, significant changes can mean new problems to resolve and inspire blog posts describing any solutions, so it's not all bad. If that's what Canonical wants to see, they might get it, and the year ahead looks as if it will be an interesting one after a recent quieter period.