It's Wild Kingdom over here! 

Ah the wide open vistas of Koolina beach resort 

Camera returns from the land of Canon

So I'm happy to report that my EOS 30D is back and nice and fixed. The viewfinder issues were corrected, the system was restored to factory spec and I'm hopefully going to get a chance to shoot more in the upcoming summer months.

Good thing too, because I'm packing on some weight and getting out of the house more would do me some good. While the repair was done free of charge I do wish that it had been slightly quicker. You'd think considering they only repaired maybe 3-4 parts near the viewfinder that the turn around time would be slightly faster but hey 7 business days is still pretty darn quick.

Linux: The State of the Kernel -- Buggier?

I've been using Open Source software for quite a while, and I'll admit I enjoy the challenges. I also enjoy how quickly the community of programmers and system administrators can tackle problems. One thing I can't stand though are the zealots in the community.

Recently several high profile OSS personalities have made light of the fact that bugs are being introduced into the 2.6.x kernel at a much higher rate than previous. I don't find this at all surprising. When you consider that there aren't that many gatekeepers to the final kernel and that most of them do this in additional to other work duties, I'm almost amazed the rate of bugs isn't a lot higher than it once was.

Zealots in the community would decry this as heresy, but really this is the result of the rapid changes that have taken place in the Linux world and just how much larger the community has gotten. Like anything which involves growth however, there's manageable limits. I think Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds are on the right track. A bug-fix cycle is probably right. Knowing when to put the breaks on something to fix things NOW rather than later is not an easy choice to make but it sure as hell makes it easier to correct the problem before it gets worse.

Forget the 360, check out the Mac 180!

OK this has nothing to do with the XBox but I do have a few things to say about Apple's recent choice to make the entire x86 Kernel for MacOS X closed source. I find this to be something of a slap in the face to the hardcore OSS pundits that lauded Apple's adoption of a BSD kernel as the underlying structure for OS X.

I can understand why they want to lock things down more with the switch to Intel architecture over PowerPC but it wasn't even a slow trickle, it was an abrupt cut. There's a few trends at Apple that have me turned off slightly, and while as a business person I know where they are coming from, as a consumer and technology buff I find them pretty distasteful.

Besides the shift away from an Open Source model, Apple's track record with their manufacturing process appears to be taking a lot of PR hits as well. Sites such as Arstechnica have noted how the newer MacBook Pro's have had a bad time with heat due to, of all things, poorly applied conductant. Now if this were just someone building their own rig for the first time I'd say sure, its to be expected but this is Apple we're talking about. Where's the QA? Add onto that early fire hazards with the Mac Books' power cable and the slew of security vulnerabilities that have made headlines and you have a pretty hefty PR nightmare on your hands.

Will I still use Mac software? Sure, will I be taking the immediate plunge into the new architecture? Maybe not, I've got some tread left on my G4 PowerBook. Give it another year as the bugs get worked out and I'll probably follow suit. My only hope is that Apple hasn't alienated so much of its strong user base that they won't be able to keep their existing customers and grow their new ones.

Sadness thy name is RMA

So unfortunately after close inspection I discovered some flaws in my EOS 30D camera. The issue wasn't the sensor or the visual quality (both of which are great) its the viewfinder, or rather the plastic overlay that shields the LED panel.

Sent my camera to Canon to be repaired and hopefully will have the unit back in the next week and a half or so. Cross your fingers!

Hardware: Palm LifeDrive

Well in returning to my field analyst position and since I'll need to be a little tighter with my daily organizing, I opted to say goodbye to my defunct PocketPC and picked up a handy little Palm LifeDrive. Granted this thing is overpriced, but with 4Gigs (ok ok 3.7Gigs) of storage and SD expansion, the device fit _my_ needs very well.

Priced at $399.99 the LifeDrive doesn't come cheap. A step up from Palm's Tungsten TX, the LD offers more storage, slightly more robust screen and in my view, a slightly better wireless integration. Software wise they look very similar.

For myself I mostly make use of 4 key features of the LifeDrive, 1) synching with Outlook and still being able to get my attachments, 2) DocsumentsToGo conversion for Word, Excel, and the Adobe reader, 3) extra emergency storage for reference documents like technical papers and manuals (Drive Mode) and 4) WiFi hotspot access to my gmail :P

The LifeDrive wouldn't suit _everybody_ for most of the synch functionality you can get by with a $200 PDA from HP or Palm, or a BlackBerry, but for some of the storage options, additional viewer support and media capabilities, the LifeDrive can serve as a good accessory for the busybody IT person.

From the logbook of Captain Obvious

Slashdot Post

Now I'm a pragmatist when it comes to technology. While I enjoy it, and feel it can enable us to do great things, I don't think of it as some holy grail. The idea has been around for a long while that Unix/Linux/MacOS were immune to viruses. Let's get real folks. It's all software which means it all has flaws, ergo it can all be subject to virus activity. Whether you're running Windows, Linux, MacOS, or all of the above, the simple fact of the matter is that antivirus requirements are out there, and either through total isolation and containment or through extreme due diligence are you going to be safe.

So remember the Vraxx moto, go out there, play around in the net, but always practice safe hex.