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            <p>My home network is supposed to carry all kinds of stuff including data, video and voice. The <a href="1320.html">voice bit is causing trouble</a>. There aren't any licensed VOIP providers in Sri Lanka (yes , our politicians are dragging us into the dark ages). So if you buy a phone it's a POTS terminal or a mobile. And the only kind of connection you can get is a POTS connection or a mobile connection.</p>
            <p>The simplest solution then is to wire up your home with plain old twisted pair telephone cables, but that is consenting to live in the same dark ages as the politicians. A solution from Graham Bell's or Queen Victoria's time, would be to use cat 6 cable instead of phone wire but that like the Victorian moral values that Sri Lankans have embraced as our own would be extremely stupid.</p>
            <p>So the proper solution is to use a combination of FXS to Ethernet and FXO or Ethernet adapaters. The wall socket would be connected to the FXS to Ethernet port (or is the other way round I always mix up FXS and FXO). That would allow the voice data to travel over TCP/IP with in the house. You will need an antique phone to answer the call. Thats where the FXO to Ethernet (or is it the FXS to Ethernet) adapter comes into the picture.</p>
            <p>Of course it would be much simpler if you could use an IP phone and much better if you can use a WiFi phone. Unfortunately wired IP telephones are not easy to come by either. Same goes for WiFi phones. If you rule out the high end N Series phones by Nokia, or equally expensive imates and pocket PCs, you cannot find any WiFi phone at all. Obviously it's stupid to use an expensive PDA as a substitute for a cheap cordless telephone.</p>
            <p>So what's the solution? Stay tuned, I will let you know.</p>
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IP Telephony at home.

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            <p>Been looking for a good inverter for more than an year now. My search began well before I even the blueprints for <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/001122.html">my house</a> was drawn up, yet after tracking many difficult routes I am back to square one.</p>
            <p>Initially I was looking at Grid Tie Xantrex or Sunny Boy inverters. Unfortunately neither company has a local agent in Sri Lanka. Well sunny boy does have an agent but it's staffed by a bunch of idiots who probably cannot tell the difference between AC and DC.</p>
            <p>The second problem with these grid interactives inverters is that they are very expensive. In other countries governments are very keen to adapt renewable energy but here in Sri Lanka they are very keen on Solar power. So while Australia provides subsidies for inverters and solar panels, the Sri Lankan government is borrowing heavily to build a coal power plant. So grid tie inverters are out.</p>
            <p>I was then looking at inverter chargers that can switch between two or three sources depending on consumption and availability. The sources of energy of course being the PV panels, the grid and the battery bank (which you really cannot call a source in it's own right). Again Xantrex and Sunny Boy are not affordable. There are few cheap chinese versions avaiable but most of them aren't pure sine wave.</p>
            <p>Then I came across a local company (Vence) that offers a range of inverters and Online UPSes. One of their product has a feature they called 'Solar Power Server' and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I inquired about it and their sales rep told me that it can draw power from solar panels, I thought my search has ended.</p>
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Inverters for solar power (part 1)

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            <p>My <a href="1263.html">quadruple play at home scenario</a> was seriously stuck in a rut until a couple of weeks ago but finally things have started to move forward.</p>
            <p>One of the biggest stumbling blocks of course was the broadband connection but fortunately <a href="1313.html">Dialog Broadband stepped up</a> and connected me up with a 2Mbps WiMax connection. that's much more than the 512Kbps SLT ADSL I have in this house. Connecting up with ADSL is like pulling teeth without anesthesia and once you get your connection you get lousy service. I am relieved that I do not need to use their services.</p>
            <p>The second stumbling block was the fixed line itself. Fortunately Dialog Broadband does not need a fixed line. You do need one for an SLT ADSL connection and you need to wait months before the wire you up. Again it was dialog broadband that came to the rescue. I apealed to them to provide me with a CDMA connection. And they listened. I am their first customer in Colombo (where they have not started commercial operations yet)</p>
            <p>Getting the CDMA line doesn't solve all my problems though. I still need WiFi phones for use as terminals. Much to my chargrin I have not been able to find a single supplier for them here in Sri Lanka. This is rediculous. Apparently you need a license to import anything with a radio transmitter in it (Sri Lanka is a failed state after all). No one seems to have bothered to obtain a license for WiFi phones because hardly anyone is likely to buy one. Some importers haven't even heard of them.</p>
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Two steps closer Quadruple Play

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            <p>After returning from an overnight stay at the Club Palm Bay in Marawila I was extremely disappointed to find that the Compact Flash Card (Transcend 1GB) on my Nikon D70S was corrupt. I have lost about 25-30 photos because of this.</p>
            <p>I had a sniff of trouble while taking some night photos close to the pool. All of a sudden the shutter could not be activated. In plain old terms, no matter how hard you press the button, it would't click. Of course if the subject is not in focus, the D70S will not click (unless you are in Manual Mode (I wasn't)). You can override that by holding down the AE-L button. Even with the AE-L button pressed, the shutter refused to activate itself.</p>
            <p>Thinking that the CF card had become unsettled due to movements, I switched off the camera, took out the card and put it back in place. Now I could click. I went on my merry way taking many more photos and thought no more about it till I got home. That's when I found a lot of file names with wierd characters in them.</p>
            <p>These filenames were plain old illegal (according to filenaming rules for FAT (the card has a FAT file system). Worse still of the 211 files with valid names, only about 200 could be copied. Then I decided to run <em>fsck</em> on it. In order to avoid further possible data loss, I first created a mirror of the flash card on my hard drive ( <em>dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=flashcard</em> ) then it recovered 220 files but out of those 220 nine could not be read by any image editor. So I am back to 211 images.</p>
            <p>On closer inspection I found that the loss is even worse than it appeared at first. Looking at the original files list, all the images from DSC_0563.JPG to DSC_083.JPG are missing. And as usually happens in photography the missing ones are the best ones.</p>
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A Corrupt Compact Flash card

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            <p>Finally I have got my Dialog Telekom WiMax connection and I am very happy dialog customer once again. As I understand it this is the first connection given out from the Battaramulla base station. There were several issues in setting up the connection and the installation crew had to labour for two days in succession. Most of the problems were caused by foliage but some of it probably had to do with teething problems at their tower.</p>
            <p>The connection was setup on Wednesday but I didn't get to try it out till today. I did visit the location yesterday but the dialog crew had forgotten to leave a patch cable behind. No worries I have plenty of my own but didn't have one in my notebook bag. Took one with me today when I visited the site and to my great pleasure the connection was up and running.</p>
            <p>I have torn up my Sri Lanka Telecom application. Hope Dialog's CDMA coverage extends to Colombo soon.</p>
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Faith Restored in Dialog

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            <p>My mother's birthday present on her sixtieth birthday last week was a Toshiba A100 786. It happens to be her first computer. I wanted to get her a Macbook but because of the trouble my father recently had with his Macbook he wasn't too keen on it.</p>
            <p>There are lots of cheaper notebooks available in the market but this is the only reasonably priced model that has both a core 2 duo and Windows Vista. I am no fan of Vista but I am no fan of XP either so Vista it is. Vista needs a lot of memory but the machine only ships with 1GB so I negotiated with the supplier to throw in an extra 1GB into the machine. He agreed. He also provided a free mouse but the mouse was dead on arrival.</p>
            <p>I have a very low opinion of hardware vendors at Unity Plaza but this supplier (Techno CIty) and their sales exective Supun proved to be an exception to the rule. He happily replaced the mouse no questions asked. The extra memory wasn't available on the day of the purchase but he promised to have it ready by monday. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the shipment was not delayed! (that's the usual excuse).</p>
            <p>Not only that. The day I collected the machine, I had left the manuals and the recovery CD behind. He called me upto tell me about it. I didn't even know that the recovery CD was part of the package. So hats off to Supun at Technocity for great customer service.</p>
            <p>More about the dead macbook and the toshiba A100 user experience later.</p>
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Toshiba A100 - 786

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            <p>Yesterday for the first time in a very long long time, I have had to restart my desktop because of a software failure.</p>
            <p>This machine does get rebooted once in a while. Most often it's because of a power cut. Sometimes I even switch it off alltogether but that doesn't happen too often. I have had many restarts over the last few years because of hardware failures. But i really cannot remember the lastime I had to reboot because the OS itself crashed. Even today the OS didn't crash - the keyboard did. That is all active software refused to recieve keyboard input.</p>
            <p>The keyboard was promptly unplugged and plugged back in but that didn't solve the problem - when not fully. If you put your weight on certain keys and kept it there for a second or two a character might show up on screen but that's about it. the Usual way to close X - (ctrl backspace) didn't work either. So in the end, I did the unthinkable - did a reboot.</p>
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First reboot.

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            <p>After my initial disappointment with dialog, things took a dramatic turn for the better. The email I sent to Dr Hans had been acted up. My faith in Dr Hans Wijayasuriya has been restored and I would once again assert that he is indeed the best CEO in the country.</p>
            <p>Dr Hans had forwarded my mail to Kavan Ratnayake, CEO of Dialog Broadband. He sent me a mail and eventually called me up to discuss the issues I had. He promised swift action and he kept his promise.</p>
            <p>With in 24 hours their senior sales manager and then their operations manager called me up and arranged to provide me with a WiMax connection (I haven't even sent my application yet!) They were ready to connect me up by 4 PM yesterday but I asked them to differ it till this morning and the crew visited my new house at 9:58 which is a good two minutes before the time they promised to come at (10:00 am).</p>
            <p>Being prompt is something that many people in Sri Lanka (and sadly even a few at dialog have forgotten). Fortunately their installation crew hadn't. Unfortunately this is where the fairy tale ends. They tried really hard but they couldn't raise a sufficiently strong signal to connect me up.</p>
            <p>Sadly it seems that Battaramulla isn't still on their coverage map. Talangama (which is further away) and Kottikawatta (a place less likely to have WiMax subsribers) are both covered. Yet battaramulla a place where most people are already connected to SLT ADSL (and would happily switch to WiMax) isn't covered. The crew tried to connect to both the Kotikawatte tower as well as the Talangama tower but the SNR never went beyond 15 .which is too low to sustain a connection.</p>
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Faith (Partially) Restored in Dialog.

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            <p>My father's macbook which is just three months old is a goner. It refused to boot Tuesday last week. You get nothing but a black screen when you press the power button (even though the power LED is lit). Apparently this is a known issue. There are some variations of it as well. Some users have reported that the screen goes gray, others have reported flickering lines as well.</p>
            <p>The usually suggested remedies like pressing certain key combinations on boot (Command+alt+P+R) doesn't do anything. Booting from a DVD does not work either. Taking out the battery and keeping the power button pressed for 5 seconds for a hard reset doesn't resolve the issue either. You still get nothing more than a blank scree and now the DVD is stuck in the drive and will not come out.</p>
            <p>More drastic suggestions include replacing the RAM. Since I have a nearly identical Macbook, i I tried that as well. Still no dice. The battery was also replaced, but the black screen just refuses to go away. So finally took the darned thing to the agents for repairs. That's a week ago. They are still dragging their feet.</p>
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Here Lies a Dead Macbook.

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            <p><em>Update 15-11-2007: please see <a href="1307.html">Faith (Partialy) Restored in Dialog</a> and <a href="1313.html">Faith Restored in Dialog</a></em></p>
            <p>Dialog Telekom once Sri Lanka's primier Telco is now in slow and stead decline. I have commented about this before but even I didn't realise how bad things have become until I had opportunity to use their WiMax services.</p>
            <p>It all started in early August when a salesman at Dialog Broadband contacted one of the companies that I provide consulting for. They offered WiMax connectivity. The client happens to be an important corporate customer of Dialog Telekom so you might expect good service but as I soon found out it wasn't to be.</p>
            <p>Their letter said they are using <a href="http://www.alvarion.com/">Alvarian</a> products for last mile access. So naturally I asked them what the product was. Getting an answer to that question was like pulling teeth. I finally got an answer about a month later. But the model they referred to wasn't listed on the Alvarian site. After further clarifications I finally found the correct information and told them to provide us with a connection. That took nearly another six weeks!</p>
            <p>They wanted copies of the company registration, Form 48 (certified directories list), letter of authorizaion the only thing they didn't ask was how many fillings I have in my teeth. Even the notorious bureaucrats in Sri Lankan government departments will not ask you for so much of paper work.</p>
            <p>Even then the connection they provided was the wrong package. One of the packages on the offer letter was named <em>Pro +</em> which boasted of a 2Mbps speed and a static IP. It costs Rs 10,000 per month. There was another package named <em>Pro</em> that was Rs 5,000 cheaper but came with out the static IP.</p>
            <p>But these were not the packages that we got. They connected us with another package with had only 1Mbps of download bandwidth. They fixed it exactly one week later (after numerous mails and a phone call).</p>
            <p>So now we have a static IP and supposedly can download at 2Mbps but they still haven't created a reverse DNS entry for us. In frustration I sent an email to Dr Hans Wijayasuriya their CEO. Dr Hans is known to be a man of action and many consider him to be the best of the Sri Lankan CEO. He sent me a prompt reply thanking me for my candid feedback. But it doesn't look like he has taken any action yet.</p>

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WiMax and the decline of Dialog

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            <p>'Target "profile" does not exist in the project' I kept getting that message when attempting a profile a project of mine using netbeans settings. I juggled around with the settings but nothing would make the IDE profile this project. In frustration I deleted all the project files and created a fresh project from the sources. (File -&gt; New Project -&gt; Java -&gt; New project with existing sources). Finally I was able to run a profile on it. That was two days ago. I am in trouble once again.</p>
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Using Netbeans 6

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            <p>There is a local company for whom I do an occasional bit of (free) consulting. They have obtained a Dialog WiMax connection (based on my suggestion) and now I need to set it up for them. If you call the existing network ad hoc that would be painting a too rosy picture. Some of the computers are ancient and should be trashed. They are connected by network cables that run inside conduits which at times contain power cables as well!</p>
            <p>The company has a locally hosted mail server (which I setup). This was installed before broadband became available in the area. So the 64kbps leased line that connected the server to the rest of the world provided connectivity for everyone else as well. Later on when Sri Lanka Telecom expanded their ADSL service to cover this area, an ADSL connection was also added.</p>
            <p>Since then hardly anyone uses the old mailserver as their gateway. Only a couple of employees abusing their connectMany are using DCHP with the ADSL router itself acting as the DHCP server. There is a hard wired route on the ADSL router so that people can access the mail server through the LAN instead of using external links. Now WiMax is being added to this Pot Purri</p>
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WiMax, ADSL and a Leased Line

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            <p>Visited <a href="http://www.eastlink.lk">Eastlink</a> and bought some of the requirement for the network at my new house (which is still under construction).</p>
            <p>The network is to be part wired and part wireless. The wired bits will be gigabit Ethernet. Obviously Cat 6 cabling is needed. The other option fiber optic cabling is out of the question. Primarily because it's so costly. The tools needed are pretty expensive too. Beside I have no prior experience in fiber optic networking.</p>
            <p>The cat 6 cable isn't cheap either. That's because Eastlink does not sell it by the meter but by the box. The box contains 305 meters (1000 feet). That's quite a lot more than what I need. Still I was happy to buy the box for Rs 19,000.00 because it's a Canadian product and heaps better than the junk that many of the other vendors offer.</p>
            <p>Walking into Eastlink itself was a novel experience. I have a dim opinion of Sri Lankan hardware vendors but at first glance they are different. They are helpful and knowledgeable. Other places are staffed by idiots who think they know it all but cannot tell the difference between a bit and a byte.</p>
            <p>The reason that I chose eastlink is because their website is also different. Other hardware dealer's sites look like they were built by a 3 year old with Frontpage and a pirate copy of Flash.</p>
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Home Network.

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            <p>Been using <a href="https://netbeans.org">Netbeans 6</a> for a couple of days and I am beginning to like it quite a lot. When moving from Netbeans 5 to 5.5, the projects had to be upgraded but you don't need to do that when moving from 5.5 to 6. It will use the existing project as it is.</p>
            <p>The most exciting feature about the new version is it's built in support for UML modeling. Not that i will use it often but it's a nice tool to have in case someone asks you for a diagram!</p>
            <p>Another exciting feature is built in support for <a href="http://subversion.tigris.org">subversion</a>. Even with previous versions you could add subversion support using additional modules but this time it is built in, making life a lot easier if you prefer subversion over CVS.</p>
            <p>With each new version of Netbeans (or any other IDE for that matter) memory usage jumps up in a big way. This new version isn't so bad. I am not saying memory usage hasn't gone up but the percentage increase isn't so bad. What's bad though is the startup time. It takes a really really long time for this version to startup.</p>
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            <p>A couple of days ago, I was appalled when I noticed a spot of fungus on <a href="1251.html">my sigma 50-500</a>. This lens is still very new and I cannot afford to lose it. Fortunately the growth isn't heavy enough to effect the image quality. The spots only appear on the outermost lens which is probably around 80 mm in diameter (the filter size is 86mm).</p>
            <p>Here in the tropics fungi on the lens is a very very serious problem. The temperatures is always between 25-35'C. That in itself isn't very harmfull. But combine that with humidity in excess of 85% and you have a recipe for a lens killer. Dry boxes (desiccators) are nearly useless. I used to have one and kept forgetting to change (or microwave) the silica gel. Besides Silica gel is toxic.</p>
            <p>The only practical solution is to buy an air tight electronic camera cabinet. It will provide you with low humidity so that the cameras can be stored safely. It set me back 16,000 Ruppees (USD 155) but it's worth it because the lens is USD 1250. Even with a spot of fungus on it, I can probably get Rs 175,000.00 for it. Phototechnica's list price is Rs 185,000.00 (about USD 1800)</p>
            <p>Even my Nikon D70S can probably be sold for about 100,000. Heck the <a href="1273.html">L11</a> that my father bought for my daughter on her birthday is listed at Rs 34,000 (it cost my father USD 150.00). What about my old beloved FM10? that's a whopping Rs 39,000!</p>
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Lens Fungi

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            Just downloaded <a href="https://www.netbeans.org">Netbeans</a> 6 beta. The slick new UI is just love at first sight (even though it's tarnished by an ugly error message).
            <p align="center"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/netbeans6.jpg"><img src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/netbeans6-t.jpg" border="0" alt=""></a></p>

            The default browser setting for netbeans appears to be '/usr/bin/firefox' I don't have a browser there. My firefox is at /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4/firefox. It's easy to change. It's the first thing that comes up when you goto Tools -&gt; Options

            This is gonna be fun.

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Netbeans 6 Beta.

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            <p>The National Engineering Research and Development Center (NERD as it's called) supposedly does research into renewable energy. What it actually does is just waste tax payer money.</p>
            <p>I went there today to speak to them about solar power. Didn't see any nerds but did see a lot of impractical devices they had supposedly invented. Well that's not quite fair, they do have a few usefull inventions but they have done nothing with them. They don't have any licensees of the technology willing to take it to the market.</p>
            <p>One of the useless devices seen was a solar cooker. It was a huge parabola like a satellite dish. It's surface had been covered with mirrors. At the focal point you can suspend a pot or a kettle. The only trouble is the cooker would cost more than a high end oven with four burner cooker on top. I have heard of such parabolic reflecters being using with PV cells but for solar thermal applications it's absurd. What you don't think it's absurd? then check out the <a href="http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Cookit">$3 Cookit</a>. Which is a solar cooker.</p>
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Renewable Energy Research.

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            <p>Solar power, Specially Grid Interactive solar power is very expensive. My new house with Quadruple play is to be powered by solar power. But because PV panels and inverters are so costly it's not practical to install enough panels to meet the full power demand. The solution then would be to draw the shortfall from the grid.</p>
            <p>Grid interactive inverters are the perfect solution, they use delta conversion to draw the shortfall from the power lines or to supply the excess back to the grid. Unfortunately these inverters are darned expensive here. The next solution would be to use a simple sine wave invertor and a transfer switch. That way when the solar panels cannot supply the requirement current the system would switch over to the utility company.</p>
            <p>The trouble with auto transfer switches is that there is a small time period (usually about 200 milliseconds) when there is no power at all. That's the time it takes for the switch to disconnect one source and switch to the other. But there is a solution for that too. It's known as the closed circuit transfer switch. There the new connection is made before the old one is disconnected. Trouble is they are also expensive.</p>
            <p>There is a third alternative that I am considering. To buy a delta conversion online UPS and to hack it. If I can somehow couple the batteries that are being charged from the solar power system with the battery bank of the online UPS , I have a near perfect solution.</p>
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Solar Power

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            <p>When you buy a Nikon you get a free copy of Nikon Picture Project. Of course nothing really is free, the cost of the software is included in the price that you pay for the camera. I wish they would give an option to buy the camera with out the software because it would be pretty hard to create a worse gallery management system than Picture Project.</p>
            <p>It's incredibly slow to start with and they have gone out of their way to make a none intuitive user interface. Art of good photography is to delete the bad ones. With picture project when you delete an image the next on does not automatically get highlighted. So if you want to click two images in a row, you need to delete the first one then click the next one and then hit the delete key (on the mac it's the backspace) again.</p>
            <p>There is nothing to write home about the image enhancements features either. it's amazing that such great cameras are bundled with such lousy software. I am heading back to iPhoto.</p>
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            <div><a href="https://www.raditha.com/raditha/blog/images/l11/l11.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/l11/l11-t.jpg"></a></div>
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            <p></p>
            <div style="float:right; clear:left; background:#fafafa; padding:2px; margin-left:5px"><a href="https://www.raditha.com/raditha/blog/images/l11/kelani.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/l11/kelani-t.jpg"></a>
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                <p></p>
                <div>At the Kelani Temple</div>
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            <p>Nikon L11 isn't the most upto date compact digital camera on the market. But it's ideal as a first camera for a kid. So that's what my father bought as a present for my five year old daughter on her 5th birthday.</p>
            <p>The L11 a great camera that is small and light. Fortunately Nikon hasn't thought of entering this camera in the Mega Pixel race. Only a fool buys a camera simply because it has a high mega pixel value. Thankfully the L11 has only 6 MP. That's just about right for the kind of sensor that compact digital cameras are equipped with. At the highest resolution the images are 2816x2112 pixels. That a ratio of 1.33</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="float:right; clear:left; background:#fafafa; padding:2px; margin-left:5px"><a href="https://www.raditha.com/raditha/blog/images/l11/mosaic.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/l11/mosaic-t.jpg"></a>
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                <p></p>
                <div>Mosaic Tiles</div>
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            <p>The images produced are of a decent quality. I can produce much better quality images with my D70s but it cause about ten times as much as the L11 when I bought it and of course it takes more effort to use and to carry around.</p>
            <p>The camera can be used for Video as well but at the highest resolution and quality, you can only get about 10 minutes of continuous recording on the 2GB card that was part of the deal. The high res gives you video at 640x480. The only negative comment I care to make about the L11 is about it's flash. When you use the flash indoors or at close quarters it seems to blow out the ligher shades.</p>

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Nikon L11

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            <p>Quadruple play at home took a backseat the last couple of weeks because of a lots of other things including the Literary Festival. But I did get an opportunity to download and install asterisk. Installation was straight forward but afterwards I found myself asking what now?</p>
            <p>Finding answers to that question turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Matters were not made any easier by the <a href="http://asteriskdocs.org">asteriskdocs.org</a> being unavailable. That was two weeks ago. They haven't brought it back up yet.</p>
            <p>Then I ran into another site; <a href="http://www.asteriskguru.com/">Asterisk Guru</a> that seemed to answer quite a few questions. There, i learnt of the <a href="http://www.zoiper.com/">Zoiper</a> softphone and installed it on the mac and for good measure I installed a copy on my sister's macbook as well. So now I can talk to her PC to PC (heck i can do that with skype too but this is different). But that's only possible when we are both in the same Lan. I haven't quite figured out how to bring the POTS into the picture.</p>
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Asterisk

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            <p>Quadruple play is a favorite telco buzzword to describe the integration of Mobile and Fixed telephony with broadband internet plus television and their delivery through one network. It seems an appropriate term to describe the setup I have planned for my new home.</p>
            <p>Perhaps it's better to use the term quintuple play because Radio will also be over the network. This home network will be a mix of wired and wireless elements. The wired bits will use Cat 6 cabling and wireless of course will be Wi Fi. A security camera and intercom at the gate, several phones and of the macbook will be served through a wireless access point.</p>
            <p>An FXS to Ethernet adapter (also known as a VoIP interface to Analog Telephone) will be needed to connect the POTS to the network. The handsets will all be VoIP phones. I don't know a great deal about PBX systems, so I am going to set one up with software. Asterix is the most likely choice at the moment.</p>
            <p>The POTS will not be really pots either. It will be a Dialog CDMA phone, which is a 3G system. I haven't quite decided wheather to use Dialog WiMax or SLT ADSL for broadband. Wimax is faster and more expensive while ADSL is slower and cheaper. The drawback with ADSL is the long waiting list and SLT's lack of reliability. It's tough decision because my mobile phone (and the phones belonging to evey member of my family) happens to be a Dialog. The satellite television system will be through a Dialog subsidiary. It doesn't pay to have an over dependence on one provider.</p>
            <p>Television itself will be through a Tivo like system powered by MythTV or something similar. Heck MythTV is much better than Tivo. You don't have to pay anything. The fact that I don't watch TV except for the odd cricket match is totally immaterial. As a geek i have to do this.</p>
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Quadruple Play at Home

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            <p>he previous weekend I took my <a href="1251.html">Bigma</a> to Seru Kele. I had a little bit of fun managed to shoot a few good ones. before I bought this lens, I was told by several experts that 500 mm isn't really long enough for birding. I readily agreed with them, but then I get a 1.5x multiplication because of the Nikon D crop factor. That means the lense is a 75-750 lens rather than a 50-500mm</p>
            <p>Even so 750mm isn't really good enough if the bird small and is a fair distance away. It's pretty good for Comorants, Egrets, Pelicans and darters. Not so good for King Fishers, Pipits and Lapwings.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000955.html">Seru Kele</a> is a place in the dry zone with a few small lakes, lots of birds and few people. They are all interrelated. Obviously the dry zone is not as comfortable to live in as the wet zone and it doesn't have enough water to sustain a large population.</p>
            <p>There are thousands of small man made lakes scattered around the dry zone to help these people whose primary source of income is cultivation. Rice cultivation in particular needs a lot of water, followed by a dry spell before the harvesting season.</p>
            <p>Birds find paddy fields and lakes, specially ones that are just about to dry up, specially attractive.</p>
            <p>Also see : <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">http://photos.raditha.com/</a></p>
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Bigma for Birding.

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            <div style="float:right; clear:left; padding:4px; background-color:#FAFAFA; margin:8px"><a><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/fm10-sigma-t.jpg"></a></div>
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            <p>For a long time, I have been looking to get hold of a Sigma 50-500 Telephoto lens. Finally after a long waiting period I got hold of one last Friday. I immediately went with it to Sigiriya. You can look forward to seeing some photos at my <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">photoblog</a></p>
            <p>I had a long wait for this lens because it's pricing in Sri Lanka is <a href="1240.html">outrageous</a>. So I asked my sister to pick one up from the US. Unfortunately it was back ordered at many Lens and Camera but fortunately it wasn't back ordered at Amazon.</p>
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            <div style="float:left; clear:right; padding:4px; background-color:#FAFAFA; margin:8px"><a href="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/sigma-flower.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/sigma-flower-t.jpg"></a></div>
            <p></p>
            <p>If you attach the lens to my old faithful <a href="905.html">FM 10</a> it looks rather strange. Well, using a zoom lense like this with an old camera like the FM 10 is rather pointless anyway. The auto focus for one will not work on it and manual focus isn't all that easy.</p>
            <p>So why did i attach the lens to my old camera in the first place? because I wanted to find out if the Sigma DG lens still has the 1.5x multiplication like <a href="1242.html">the old Bigma</a>. And the good news is that it does. So ladies and gentlemen, the Sigma APO 50-500mm F4-6.3 EX DG HSM does indeed act as 75-750 mm lens when attached to a Nikon DSL.</p>
            <p></p>
            <div style="float:right; clear:left; padding:4px; background-color:#FAFAFA; margin:8px"><a><img alt="" src="http://images.raditha.com/blog/images/moon-t.jpg"></a></div>
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            <p>I am very happy that I bought this lens. In many forums it's said that 'in good light you will love it'. I certainly do. It's not so bad in bad light either. This half moon was captured without a tripod while at Sigiriya. The flower was also shot without a tripod look at the bokeh.</p>
            <p>The tripod certainly needs to be replaced cause it doesn't feel strong enough to hold this monster and I am still very nervous about using it. I wanted to buy a UV filter for it but that's a whopping 10,000 Rupees at Phototechnica. The filter for the D70S kit lens was only about 1500</p>

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The Bigma

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            <p>I belatedly updated to Firefox 2.0.0.4 and lost all my saved passwords without a pause. The password file (signon2.txt (curious; it should be signon.txt)), the key3.db file and the cert8.db file were all there but the password were not being filled in and the show password dialog was completely blank. In spite of this the bookmarks were showing up correctly.</p>
            <p>The first thing to do in a situation like this is to take a bakup. Then I typed in 'about:config' into the browser and changed the signon.SignOnFileName to signon2.txt still no dice.</p>
            <p>The next thing to do is to create new profile and copy the files from your old profile into the new folder. In case you have never had to create a new profile before; you need to start firefox from the command line using the -ProfileManager parameter. So did it work? not exactly but we are on the right track.</p>
            <p>Immidiately after starting with the new profile, this error was generated:</p>
            <p></p>
            <p></p>

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Firefox update.

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            <p>My sister has good news for me. She has managed to get hold of a <a href="http://raditha.com/blog/archives240.html">Sigma 50-500 mm</a> lens for my Nikon in spite of the shortage. It's back ordered at many camera shops and wasn't available anywhere in New York. She ordered through Amazon and it was delivered yesterday to her address in the US.</p>
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The Bigma aka Sigma 50-500

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            <p>So what's the difference between the new Bigma (or rather the current Sigma 50-500 mm lens) and the old? No one seems to know for sure. The guy at Phototechnica did tell me that the new one focuses better. He says with the older lens, auto focus went haywire close to the 500 mm end. That apparently has been addressed with the new bigma but you don't find any mention on it on their site.</p>
            <p>It's darn hard to find information on the old Bigma. There is no mention of the older '50-500mm F4-6.3 EX RF HSM' lens on the sigma site. It's at times like this that the <a href="https://web.archive.org">way back machine</a> comes in very handy. It had a cached page from 2005 with information on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050305050710/www.sigmaphoto.com/lenses/lenses_all_details.asp?id=3237&amp;navigator=3">older model.</a></p>
            <p>Comparision with the new model (<a href="http://www.sigmaphoto.com/lenses/lenses_all_details.asp?id=3307&amp;navigator=3"> APO 50-500mm F4-6.3 EX DG HSM</a>) doesn't reveal much. This is all that the sigma website site is willing to say:</p>
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            <p></p>

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Old Bigma Vs New Bigma.

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            <p>The only thing that I asked my sister to get for me from the US is a Bigma. Unfortunately the Bigma , or to use it's proper name the Sigma 50-500 mm telephoto lens seems to be out of stock at almost every camera shop in the US.</p>
            <p>Surprisingly or unsurprisingly <a href="http://phototechnicasl.com/">Phototechnica</a> in Sri Lanka does have it in stock. The only catch is that it costs about twice as much as it would cost in the US. So that makes it nearly impossible for me to buy it from them.</p>
            <p>The next option is of course the Nikon 80-400 VR. Hang on a sec, this is the first choice lens but unfortunately it costs a bit more than the bigma (Rs 215,000 vs 194,000 to be excat). And it's range is narrower. That is comphensated for by the superior mechanism and the optics of the Nikon. This is not just Nikon marketing, I know this for a fact. The reason I am looking for a new lense is because my old telephoto - <a href="905.html">a sigma is busted</a>.</p>
            <p></p>

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The Bigma.

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            <p><a href="https://fedoraproject.org">Fedora 7</a> is here. Are you ready for it? I am not! why not? my old desktop needs replacing. The casing has seen quite a few <a href="916.html">hard drive changes</a>, a couple of <a href="562.html">mother board stews</a> and one <a href="52.html">toasted CPU</a>.</p>
            <p>if I must go through the hassle of installing a new OS, I want it to be on new hardware. Else it's inevitable that the old hardware will develop a fault and force a re-installation. Heck the torture of installing a DVD load of software might cause the hard drives to give up and die.</p>
            <p>So why not get some new hardware? well I am nearly penniless thanks to the <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/001122.html">new house</a> that I am building. It's already over budget. And then there is the 50-500 sigma lense that I have been craving for. My sister is in the US right now and I want her to get one for me.&nbsp; Cameras and lenses cost about 40% less in the US than in Sri Lanka. Unfortunately 'the bigma' is out of stock so it seems that I might be forced to buy a Nikon 80-400 instead. Not that I don't like the 80-400 - it's just a lot more expensive. That means no new hardware till next year. Heck that might mean I might even miss Fedora 7 all together and move straight on to Fedora 8.</p>

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Fedora 7 anyone?

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            <p>I gave up on windows many many years ago. Last year i persuaded my sister to do the same. She is my exact opposite when it comes to technology, never the less the switch wasn't difficult. That's because she was using Firefox as the browser and Thunderbird as the mail client. The only piece of evil software that she was addicted to was M$ Office. On Linux (Fedora Core 6) I installed Open Office for her and migrated all her mails to the new Thunderbird installation.</p>
            <p>I must also confess that this wasn't a voluntary move from windows to linux. The hard drive on her toshiba crashed and she needed to have a new os put in. These toshiba notebooks don't shop with the OS installation CD. And persuaded her that paying lots of $ for a usefull point of software is an utter waste and damned if I will install it for her. So she agreed and now she is quite happy with it. So then why the move to a macbook now?</p>
            <p>Well the old notebook is showing it's age, and she is in the states right now. A Macbook purchased in the US costs a good Rs 40,000 less than the same thing bought from <a href="1065.html">Sri Lankan dealers</a>. So I suggested that she buy one and yesterday she did.</p>
            <p>Less than 24 hours after she bought her Macbook, my father also made the switch. He was using a <a href="000957.html">Acer Aspire</a> for a long time. It's a pretty good computer but has a serious cooling problem, and like my sisters computer was beginning to show it's age. So my father asked someone visiting Singapore to get one for him and he did. It's not as cheap as it is in the US but still a lot cheaper than what it costs in Sri Lanka.</p>
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Three Macbooks in the family.

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            <p>We released a new version of Rad Upload a couple of days ago. This is primarily a bug fix release and I think this will be the last version in the 3x branch. We have already completed the work on version 4.0 and will be making the beta release in a few days time.</p>
            <p>Version 4.0 is going to be exciting. It's a resumable HTTP uploader. You can use it to upload very very large files regardless of the server configurations. Usually webserver have an arbitrary limit on the size of an HTTP post or even a specific setting for the multipart/form-data content type. You see this very often with PHP. PHP has a very low value for maximum upload size (2MB) and for the maximum post size (8MB). No wonder our <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/config.php">web server configuration guide</a> is so popular.</p>
            <p>Let's get back to the current version (3.12). What are the bug fixes? there are three of them but none of them are serious. It has to do with client side filtering by file type and the embeddable progress monitor. You can read the details <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/file.php">here....</a></p>
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Rad Upload

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            <p>At <a href="http://www.radinks.com/">Rad Inks</a> we, have just announced version 2.01 of the Rad SFTP Applet. It is a replacement for desktop FTP and Secure FTP clients. All you need is just one copy of the applet to replace any number of copies of your current desktop FTP or SFTP client.</p>
            <p>The Rad Inks Secure FTP client makes use of the SSH FTP protocol, which despite the similarity in name with the File Transfer Protocol is a much more secure system. <a href="../../php/ftp/security.php">FTP is totally insecure</a>. If you use it, all the data and commands will be transferred between the client and the server in plain text. Therefore with each FTP connection the user name and password will be transmitted without any encryption. If you care about the security of your web server you wouldn't be using FTP. It's as simple as that.</p>
            <p>Because the Rad SFTP applet runs in the context of the web browser, anyone using the system does not need to install any software on his own computer. Since the applet is light weight it starts up almost instantly and can rival the start up speed of a desktop client.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/secure.php">So what's new in this release</a>? it's has a couple of small bug fixes and a minor feature enhancement.</p>
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How secure is your file transfer?

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            <p>Which programming language to use is often a matter of religious choice. But for certain tasks certain languages are much better than others. For example when it comes to creating web applications PHP can claim to be much superior to most yet when it comes to number crunching PHP lags far behind.</p>
            <p>In the past, the perception was that Java isn't suited for number crunching tasks either. Those days are long gone. My <a href="../../java/primes.php">java implementation of the Sieve of Eratosthenes</a> to find prime numbers runs much much faster than the <a href="../../php/primes.php">PHP counter part</a>. The java version can find primes smaller than 1,000,000 in about 3 seconds while the PHP version takes more than a minute. That's a difference of 20X.</p>
            <p>The same algorithm was implemented as a <a href="../../mysql/primes.php">MySQl stored procedure</a> so that the numbers are available in a form that can be easily searched. That code takes around 4 minutes to find the same set of primes. So clearly for this particular purpose Java is far superior to others. However if you compared against Fortran you will find that java is inferior.</p>
            <p>See also : <a href="000476.html">Object Oriented PHP vs java</a></p>
            <p><a href="000412.html">Religion: JSP vs PHP</a></p>
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Relgion: PHP vs Java.

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            <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler">Euler</a> is my favourite mathematician so I sat up and took notice when I stumbled across a site named <a href="https://projecteuler.net/index.html?section=about">project euler</a></p>
            <p>On that site they have listed series of problem that calls for a combination of programming and mathematical skills to solve. I immediately went to work and with in a few hours managed to solve 10 of the problems. But argubly they are not the most difficult ones on show.</p>
            <p>These 10 problems were solved using PHP that would surprise many and offend purists that insists that fortran is the best language to solve numerical problems. That maybe so but I don't have a Fortran development environment set up on my computer and besides it's more than 6 years since I last coded in Fortran. But a time will come for that.</p>
            <p>PHP was chosen because it's so easy to work with and well it's the language of choice for me for most things. However some of the problems obviously cannot be solved easily with PHP and for that I will be forced to use other languages so I might end up coding in Fortran during the next few days.</p>

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Project Euler

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            <p>I am working again on my on again off again log analysis tool. The last release was about an year ago. Way too long. But this project is a lot of hard work and it's got a massive of a database component which I loath to tackle. But despite my lethargy, involvement in other projects and constant side tracking (all my own faults), I have made some progress and plan to make a new release with in the next few days.</p>
            <p>Interestingly enough, when I first <a href="000759.html">applied for the logmine name on sourceforge</a> it was taken by a squatter. That was about two years ago. Upto this date they have not released anything or even made a single commit.</p>
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Log Mine.

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            <p>After switching from Adsense to Adbrite and even putting up an adbrite button on my site, I was rather disappointed. But things seem to be changing.</p>
            <p>In recent weeks I have started getting a few cents a day from adbite. That's right a few cents a day. It's nothing to write home about, but you would write anyway if your adsense earnings were even lower. And the trend with adbrite seem to be upwards where as adsense was stuck in the same rut for years. Even though the amount of traffic to this site continues to grow (albeit slowly) the revenue from adsense never grew.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/landing_both.php?spid=45610&amp;afb=120x60-1-blue"></a></p>
            <p><a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/landing_both.php?spid=45610&amp;afb=120x60-1-blue"><img align="right" alt="" border="0" src="http://files.adbrite.com/mb/images/120x60-1-blue.gif" style="margin-left:10px"></a> Some of the shortcomings of adbrite (the lousy directory for example) remain but they have attended to one of my gripes. The referral links didn't seem to be working properly. That is I was not getting the dues from an advertiser that I referred. But after about three weeks and two emails (which were not answered) they have put that right. So the adbrite button goes back up.</p>
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Adbrite Revisited.

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            <p>It's about time that this site had a new look. The <a href="000542.html">last face lift</a> was more than two years ago.</p>
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Time for change.

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            <p>I download and tested adobe lightroom on my macbook and was wowed by it. I was pretty certain that I would obtain a license for it when the product was commercially released. But the commercial release had a few change notes and I decided to try the full release (version 1.0) to see what those changes really are.</p>
            <p>Version 1.0 is a real disappointment. The UI no longer looks as attractive as the UI in the beta. They have made it really really hard to delete a file (though not as hard as on Vista). Always being prompted to create a backup is most annoying and the Lightroom library takes up far too much space already.</p>
            <p>The 'All photos' item on the library doesn't seem to work at all. Click on it, nothing happens. I am sure this is a bug but the beta didn't seem to have any obvious ones. Exporting photos could have been improved over the beta but it hasn't happened. Starting the slide show from the middle of the film strip has been made difficult. Clicking on an item in the film roll adds it to the quick collections instead of displaying it in the loop.</p>
            <p>So what's the verdict? Am I going to buy a copy? hell no! I am going back to linux for photo editing and I am going to stick to Gimp, Kuickshow , Nautilus, Dcraw and Ufraw. It's better than dishing out $200 for a lousy software. And I am going to stick to <a href="1123.html">Jpegs</a> as much as possible. Jpegs will long outlast camera raw.</p>
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Adobe LightRoom a Disapointment.

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            <p>Jaded. Already. It has taken me less than 24 hours to be thoroughly disappointed with Adbrite. My website does not show up on the adbrite directory yet. Good thing too. I'd rather not be lumped with the junk that's listed on it. Now don't you go thinking that it's a story of sour grapes.; you can <a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/site_directory.php">check it for yourself</a>. See what kind of sites are listed. Sure there are a few good ones but the vast majority, well, they are just same old same old.</p>
            <p>They don't appear to have any 'run of the network ads'. That is any ads that are displayed across the network or sites that belong into a certain category. So adbrite at the moment are showing ads from adsense. How does that happen? you can specify an alternative ad source which will be used when the ad company doesn't have any ads of their own. In this case they don't seem to have any ads at all.</p>
            <p>The reason that no ads are displayed could well be because my site is not listed in the directory. If the directory listing is not automated, they should have a manual activation phase (If I remember correctly adsense had such a system).</p>
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Adbrite Jaded.

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            <p>I have been <a href="1136.html">disapointed with Adsense</a> for a long time but like most other people on the same boat persisted with them for lack of anything better. But not anymore.</p>
            <p>A couple of days ago, I was browsing through the amazon web services site when I came across what they billed as a success story; <a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/landing_both.php?spid=45610">Adbrite</a>. I didn't pay too much attention to it at the time but today, when I visited <a href="https://www.alexa.com/">Alexa</a>, I came across the same thing again and signed up even with out bothering to read up all the nitty gritty details.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/landing_both.php?spid=45610&amp;afb=125x125-1"></a></p>
            <p><a href="http://www.adbrite.com/mb/landing_both.php?spid=45610&amp;afb=125x125-1"><img align="right" alt="" border="0" src="http://files.adbrite.com/mb/images/125x125-1.gif"></a> Whether Adbrite turns out to be better or worse than <a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/">Adsense</a> only time can tell but hope springs eternal in the heart of geeks. One thing for sure, their referral program is a heaps better than the adsense program. You will get better profit share. The other advantage is that everyone knows of Adsense already so no one will follow your referal link, but adbrite is not as widely known yet, so there is a good chance that someone might. So my friend, if you are thinking of signing up for adbrite. Just click on the button on the right right :-)</p>
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Bye Adsense, Hello Adbrite.

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            <p>After downloading and burning the <a href="http://www.puppylinux.org/">pupply linux</a> ISO on a disk, I tried to boot my macbook with it. It was a roaring success and started up with out any glitches even though forcing the macbook to boot from the CD was another matter all together.</p>
            <p>I had read a lot of cock and bull about pressing various keys at startup to force the macbook to change the way it boots. None of those key combinations worked for me. The macbook always tried to boot from the CD then I booted back into puppy and ejected the disk. Afterwards the system refused to start up at all. Or rather the boot loader second stage grinds to a halt saying there isn't a bootable disk.</p>
            <p>In the end I found a boot camp FAQ that said you can press the option key to bring up a boot device selection dialog. That saved the day.</p>
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Puppy Linux on a Macbook.

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            <p>It's been a long time since we at Rad Inks last made a release of the <a href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/" mce_href="http://www.radinks.com/sftp/">Rad SFTP Applet</a>. When it was first released it was a ground breaking applet and was even featured on the official java website. Since then it was overshadowed by <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/" mce_href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/">Rad Upload</a> and we have been putting more effort on the latter and not enough on the former. Finally we pulled up our socks and made a new release.</p>
            <p>The Rad Inks Secure FTP client makes use of the SSH FTP protocol, which despite the similarity in name with the File Transfer Protocol is a much more secure system. FTP is totally insecure. With FTP all the data and commands are transferred between the client and the server in plain text. Thus with FTP user names and passwords are transmitted without encryption. Surprisingly many people don't realise this. Security conscious webmasters and organizations are moving away from FTP and embracing the more secure SFTP where all the commands and data are transferred with encryption.</p>
            <p>Because the Rad SFTP applet runs with in the web browser an end user of the system does not need to install any software on his own computer. Because the applet is light weight it starts up almost instantly. It can rival the start up speed of a desktop client.</p>
            <p>In this new version we have added a new menu bar which can be switched on or off. It kinds of looks like an javascript/css menu but it isn't it's part of the applet itself. Resuming an interrupted transfer is a lot easier and we now provide an option to disable the host key check. The host key check is an essential part of an security conscious software but some end users are confused by it so at times it may be better not to display the host key confrmation dialog.</p>

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Secure FTP

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            <p>Rad Inks, has released a new improved version of Rad Upload; a drop in replacement for HTML file upload forms. If you are a regular visitor here, you will know that Rad Upload is the best way to upload a file to a website. If you want to read more about it, please take a look at the <a href="http://radinks/press/upload-feb2007.php">press release</a> or the <a href="http://www.radinks.com/upload/file.php">change notes</a></p>
            <p>With Rad Upload you can have multiple concurrent uploads going. That's something that many users liked but a few webmasters didn't appreciate it. They only wanted single thread. We heard them and it's now possible to restrict the user to one upload at a time. That's done by embedding the progress monitor inside the applet area. With the progress monitor occupying the drop area the applet will be unable to respond to any more drop events. When the ongoing upload is completed the applet will revert to the previous state and you can start another upload.</p>
            <p>What else have we changed? well we have made it a lot easier to configure, and we have added to entirely new progress monitors to keep the old ones company. Until now, the free version was equipped with only one monitor, but all four have been made available in the free version as well.</p>
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Get rid of your file upload form.

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            <p>Much has been said about Adsense relevancy. Here is an example:</p>
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Adsense Relevency.

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            <p>Google loves Safari and Safari loves google. But google changes lovers too often for comfort. On the other hand, Safari is head over heals. So she is going to end up heartbroken. The big brother is the default search engine for the Safari browser on OS X. Safari is so loyal that the search box in the tool bar has just the one search engine. It cannot be changed without resorting to hexedit.</p>
            <p>Yahoo on the other hand hates Safari. It's more accurate to say yahoo hates OS X all together. Yahoo chat for example is not available for OS X, Hey wait a second gtalk isn't available either but ichat supports jabber, so that means you can use it with GTalk.</p>
            <p>The new Yahoo mail sounds very exicting, it probably is exciting too but not if you are a Safari (or even a Camino) fan. So what's the solution? set your default search engine in OS X to be firefox.</p>
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Safari - Google loves it Yahoo hates it.

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            <p><a href="1128.html">The other day</a>, I was scratching around trying to install the iterative refocus plugin for <a href="https://gimp.org">GIMP</a>. The errors were many. After fixing many of them, I came across what looked like an insurmountable error related to a missing library. Well the libraries are there, they were installed using <a href="http://fink.sourceforge.net/">fink</a> and can be found in the /sw/lib folder. Unfortunately the linker only looks for them in the /usr/local/lib/ folder.</p>
            <p>A partial solution was found on the fink FAQ. They suggest moving /usr/local/ out of the way. That's only a partial solution. gcc continues to ignore the -L directive. So I made symbolic links in /usr/local to the /sw/lib and /sw/include directories. The installation then progressed a few steps further before screeching to a halt again. This time the sand in the grease was provided by some pango packages.</p>
            <p>I installed all the pango packages along with freetype and libintl but the make system still insisted on looking for libintl.3.dylib instead of libintl.dylib. I made another symbolic link (clutching at straws now). Predictably it fails.</p>
            <p></p>
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                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <pre>gcc  -g -O2 -Wall   -o refocus-it  main-cmd.o getopt.o getopt1.o ../src/librefocus-it.a -lm -lm<p></p><p>/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:</p><p>_bindtextdomain</p><p>_gettext</p><p>_textdomain</p></pre>
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            <p></p>
            <p>locate told me that libintl.3.dylib file is a part of the gimp libraries. So I created a symbolic link (still don't know why the linker doesn't look for the libraries in the right place)</p>
            <p></p>
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                <p></p>
                <p></p>
                <pre>sudo ln -s /Applications/Imaging/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/lib/libintl.3.dylib libintl.3.dylib</pre>
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            <p></p>
            <p>That didn't make the problem go away. In the end I decided to edit config.h and removed the #define ENABLE_NLS and #define HAVE_SETLOCALE lines. That cleared up the compilation problems!</p>
            <p>Hopefully make install will not produce any errors. It didn't. But why did it place the plug in /plug-in/ folder instead of in the /Applications/Imaging/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins as it should? After all I have been through, it's a simple matter to push it there. Now comes the million beer question: does the iterative refocus plug in actually on my macbook? yes.</p>

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Refocus it.

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            <p>The RAW versus Jpeg religious debate continues to rage. I don't believe in any religion and I have had a chance to see both sides of the coin since getting my D70S. I started off shooting nothing but jpegs. Even experimented with the various bracket settings. <a href="959.html">Then someone threatened to hit me with a stick</a>, if I continued to shoot jpegs so I decided to try my hand at raw photography.</p>
            <p>After shooting a few hundred NEFs I gave up on it because <a href="971.html">processing raw photos on linux is such a pain</a>. Heck, Konqueror cannot even show you thumbnails of these pictures. Then in December, <a href="1097.html">I got a macbook</a> and tried processing RAW photographs on it. It's a sight easier than on linux but that's only becaus I have been using Lightroom. Lightroom is still in beta and it's not available for linux. To make matters worse, it's not open source! But I have a feeling that I will end up buying a copy when the start selling it.</p>
            <p>Even though working with camera raw is a lot easier on the macbook than on linux, In the end I decided not to take any sides in this debate. Both formats have their pros and cons. It's a just a matter of choosing the right horse for the right course or choosing the right format for the right light conditions.</p>
            <p>When the light is very bright so there is no light to speak of, I switch to raw. If I am shooting indoors, or when the light is just right I always capturing JPGs. When starting off with an empty CF card, I will more often than not capture NEFs because space is not a worry. When running out of space, I switch to Jpeg no matter what the light conditons are. I have never been good at flash photography so if I have to use the flash, I shoot raw.</p>
            <p>Sometime I forget to switch and capture Jpegs when I wanted NEFs and vice verce. But it doesn't really matter. Camera raw allows you to make big changes to white balance, exposure and some other settings without obvious distortion, Jpeg allows you to make small changes without artifacts or distortion showing up. But the key is that you shouldn't have to make drastic changes to any of the settings because it simpy means you haven't shot a good photograph in the first place. The best way to adjust such photos is with the delete button.</p>
            <p>If you want to see some of my photos please visit <a href="http://photos.raditha.com">photos.raditha.com</a></p>
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Raw vs JPeg.

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            <p>.tbss mismatches? what on earth is that? Well I just tried to compile qmailanalog and ran into this error:</p>
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Qmailanalog and .tbss mismatches

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            <p><a href="http://refocus-it.sourceforge.net/">RefocusIT</a> is a gimp plugin that allows you to make corrections to images effected by camera shake or focus errors. A Mac OS X specific download isn't avaialble so I tried compiling from the sources. That turns out to be a long and tedious process.</p>
            <p></p>
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                <pre>checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no<p></p><p>checking for perl... /usr/bin/perl</p><p>configure: error: XML::Parser perl module is required for intltool</p></pre>
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            <p>The first complaint is about a missing XML::Parser module. In order to install that you have to first install expat and the best way to install expat is using Fink. Installating Fink is a breeze because a dmg is available. Then using the fink commander to installer expat isn't difficult either. From then on you have to return to the commad line something that OS X users hate to do. But I am not an OS X user.</p>
            <p><em>perl -MCPAN -e shell</em> prompts you for a series of configuration options, I just used the defaults for all of then. Unfortunately that will made the system unusable because a mirror list was not made. To make matters worse, LWP , lynx and wget are all missing on my macbook. That makes it impossible for the CPAN installer to download files. Let's go back to fink and install wget</p>
            <p>There is more than one way skin a cat. I came up against this link which mentioned two of them: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061101085045782</p>
            <p>The painless way is to install the module using fink. Once you pass that hurdle, the next error is about pckconfig.</p>
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                <pre>*** The pkg-config script could not be found. Make sure it is<p></p><p>*** in your path, or set the PKG_CONFIG environment variable</p><p>*** to the full path to pkg-config.</p><p>*** Or see http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig to get pkg-config.</p><p>configure: error: Library requirements (gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.</p></pre>
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            <p>that too can be installed with fink but don't think you are out of the woods yet.</p>
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                <pre>checking for gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0... Package gimp-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.<p></p><p>Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gimp-2.0.pc'</p><p>to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable</p><p>No package 'gimp-2.0' found</p><p>configure: error: Library requirements (gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.</p></pre>
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            <p>It's tough but the gimp-2.0.pc file is not present on my macbook even though gimp itself is installed. Gimp 2x is not available if you use fink.</p>
            <p>I manually created the .pc files and now, the error is:</p>
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                <pre>checking for gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0... Package glib-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.<p></p><p>Perhaps you should add the directory containing `glib-2.0.pc'</p><p>to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable</p><p>Package 'glib-2.0', required by 'GIMP', not found</p></pre>
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            <p>to overcome that you need to install, glib2 and glib2-devel, then you get another complaint.</p>
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                <pre>checking for gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0... Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.<p></p><p>Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc'</p><p>to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable</p><p>Package 'gtk+-2.0', required by 'GIMP UI', not found</p></pre>
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            <p>gtk2 and gtk2-devel have quite a few dependencies. On my macbook it resulted in a total of nine packages being installed. In spite of that the compilation continues to resut in errors.</p>
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                <pre>checking for gimp-2.0 gimpui-2.0... Package pangoxft was not found in the pkg-config search path.<p></p><p>Perhaps you should add the directory containing `pangoxft.pc'</p><p>to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable</p><p>Package 'pangoxft', required by 'GDK', not found</p></pre>
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            <p>The final complaint produced by the configure step is about missing atk. That too was installed. And now for make.</p>
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                <pre>main-gimp.c: In function 'query':<p></p><p>main-gimp.c:365: warning: implicit declaration of function 'setlocale'</p><p>main-gimp.c:365: error: 'LC_ALL' undeclared (first use in this function)</p><p>main-gimp.c:365: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once</p><p>main-gimp.c:365: error: for each function it appears in.)</p><p>main-gimp.c: In function 'dialog_parameters_create':</p><p>main-gimp.c:489: warning: assignment discards qualifiers from pointer target type</p><p>main-gimp.c:490: warning: assignment discards qualifiers from pointer target type</p><p>make[2]: *** [main-gimp.o] Error</p><p>make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error</p><p>make: *** [all] Error 2</p></pre>
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            <p>Fix that by adding #include to the main-gimp.c file, that of course leads to another error further download the line.</p>
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                <pre>_libintl_bind_textdomain_codeset referenced from libglib-2 expected to be defined in /usr/local/lib/libintl.3.dylib<p></p><p>_libintl_bindtextdomain referenced from libglib-2 expected to be defined in /usr/local/lib/libintl.3.dylib</p><p>_libintl_dgettext referenced from libglib-2 expected to be defined in /usr/local/lib/libintl.3.dylib</p></pre>
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            <p>This is way too much trouble. For some reason the linker is not looking for the libraries in the /sw/lib path, even though the -L option as used in the Makefile clearly says that the linker should look for those libraries there. Now it's finally time to give up</p>

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Gimp Iterative Refocus Plugin for OS X

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            <p>The CRT on my desktop died. I am now working exclusively on my <a href="1098.html">macbook</a>, well not really. I am working on my old desktop using vnc.</p>
            <p>In fact the monitor itself didn't die but it's control panel did. Or hang on a sceond, it's a ghost! That's right. The monitor setting's dialog keeps popping up on it's own. It even changes some of it's settings on it's own. It will refuse to respond when you press any of the contorl panel keys.</p>
            <p>Have you read Christine by Stephen King?</p>
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Dead Monitor.

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            <p>Just started a new blog at <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">photos.raditha.com</a>, the link says it all. it's for photos that I have shot at various times. Of course I am not a pro photographer, I am a geek. So I have the geek camera (D70s) and most of the photos that will appear on that site are photos taken with that camera.</p>
            <p>The blog is powered by <a href="https://wordpress.org">wordpress</a>, I started out with wordpress 2.07 but the very next day 2.10 was released. Upgrading a wordpress blog is redicolously easy. Others should learn from them.</p>
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Photo Blog.

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            <p>Getting more tired of OS X. It's man pages are unreadable. If you type 'man foobar' at the terminal you can't use the page up / page down keys to scroll through the man page. Terminal chooses to scroll itself instead!</p>
            <p><strong>Three button mice</strong></p>
            <p>The middle mouse button has been made obsolete by apple, sure you can use it to scroll, but the middle mouse button can be used for copy paste as well. It's ridiculous that the terminal on OS X allows middle button paste but other applications do not.</p>
            <p><strong>Slow!</strong></p>
            <p>The macbook is very fast when you start it up, it will run pretty past for a day or two but then there is a detoriation of performance, it sometimes takes more than a couple of seconds to switch between different applications. Now core 2 duo is supposed to really speed up this sort of thing, unfortunately that does not happen. The macbook behave very windows like. Compare that against my Desktop, which is fedora core 6. The amount of time that a linux computer has been running without a reboot has absolutely no effect on it's speed. Sadly the same cannot be said about Mac OS X.</p>
            <p><strong>rt.jar</strong></p>
            <p>rt.jar? where the hell is rt.jar? they call it classes.jar</p>
            <p><strong>Expose.</strong></p>
            <p>F8 is supposed to be the key for step over. and F7 is supposed to be the key for step into. Most IDEs obey that. Unfortunately F8 has been taken over by Expose and F7 by the 'fn' key.</p>
            <p>Fortunately, Expose keys can be changed.</p>
            <p><strong>CD burning.</strong></p>
            <p>After burning CDs and DVDs with OS X disk utility, I have come to appreciate k3b. Maybe there is a way to stop finder/disk utility from closing the cd/dvd but they forget to tell you about it.</p>
            <p><strong>Printers, Scanners, Webcams.</strong></p>
            <p>Most of them are unsupported on Mac OS X. Sure they are unsupported on Linux too, but I don't pay anything to use linux. I paid for OS X so I expect something better.</p>
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More Mac Gripes.

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            <p>Now that <a href="1097.html">my Macbook</a> is more than a month old and the novelty has worn of there are quite a few things which I find less than attractive.</p>
            <p><strong></strong></p>
            <p><strong>FileMerge.</strong></p>
            <p>I used to hate kompare but now I really appreciate it after having to work with FileMerge. FileMerge just sucks.</p>
            <p><strong>X</strong></p>
            <p>There are some linux applications that you just can't live without, GIMP is one of them. Fortunately there is a port for OS X. Unfortunately X11 for OS X behaves differently from other X11 installations and X11 applications behave differently from aqua stuff. It's almost impossible to figure out when to use that half eaten apple button and when to use the control key.</p>
            <p><strong>The fn key.</strong></p>
            <p>Because notebooks have a smaller number of keys, they are equipped with an fn key. On most PC notebooks the fn key is off by default. On the macbook the fn key is on by default, and if there is a way to switch it off I haven't found it yet. Then again you cannot switch it off, because then the left,right, up and down keys would become, home, end, page up and page down.</p>
            <p><strong>No vnc. </strong></p>
            <p>There doesn't appear to be a vnc viewer installed by default. Fortunatley there are plenty of free downloads.</p>
            <p><strong>TextEdit.</strong></p>
            <p>Just sucks. Fortunately I came across TextWrangler.</p>
            <p><strong>Finder.</strong></p>
            <p>Words fail me. Even explorer is better than this piece of junk.</p>
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