[caption id=“attachment_2161” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“xkcd - Can’t Sleep”] [/caption]

The funny thing is that if you’ve been burned by this in your programming, you’ll find it tragically funny.  All kinds of disasters from mundane to NASA-level have ocurred because people didn’t make their variables large enough.  Thanks for that reminder, xkcd.

My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it.  It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems.  I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform.  Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit.  It took 20 minutes to install.  Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!

If you read a lot of technology news on the interwebs, it appears as though we will soon all be using cloud computing.  No longer will people have hard drives or buy programs.  They will lease it all from the cloud.  (There are many, many things listed under “cloud computer” from Gmail to Twitter.  I am talking about the ultimate goal of those who advocate “cloud computing” where your “computer” is on the net and you just connect from home)  There are many reasons why cloud computing is not for everyone. Let me start with the reason closest to my life - high end photography.  I went to a baseball game on 10 April and shot over 4 GB of photos.  I then loaded these photos onto my computer for editing and sharing with others.  It seems to take longer that I can stand to get the photos off my camera and onto my hard drive.  I can’t imagine how annoying it would be to have to wait to upload them onto a cloud computing environment.  I shoot only in RAW files so I can do some serious editing on the photos and retain the best quality.  Sometimes I delete up to half of the photos from a shoot because it’s hard to tell from the back of the camera if it’s subtly out of focus.  So imagine waiting forever to upload photos only to ultimately end up deleting them!  Photoshop and Lightroom require pretty beefy computers to work correctly, I can’t imagine how slow it would be to have my screen refresh after each edit.  It already takes longer than instantaneous on my home computer.  This use case - high end photography - also lead me to another reason cloud computing will not be for everyone:  bandwidth limits.

So I’m looking over yesterday’s most viewed photos and I am seeing pictures that make sense - the baseball pictures I’ve been uploading for the past 3-4 days.

Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro.  I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro.  It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others.  And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro.  The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every one to two years and remain supported for a year after a new stable version means that it’s the darling distro where stability is needed.  As great as Ubuntu is, you just can’t keep updating every 6 months on a production machine.  Now, the flipside is that Debian tends to have older software all-around.  So it tends to be used more as a server distro than a desktop distro.  But more people than you would expect do run it on their desktops.  Afterall, what does the latest version of Gnome have that you REALLY, REALLY need?

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yeah, I’m reusing this image. Hey, it works!”] [/caption]

Wednesday I wrote about choosing the right camera.  Today I wanted to write about choosing lenses for your dSLR.  Just looking at the entire range of lenses available for a Canon EOS camera there are lenses from $89 all the way up to $8,000.  You might see two lenses that go from 28-105mm, but one is $200 and one is $1,200.  What’s the reason for the difference?  I hope to demystify all of this with some knowledge I wish I’d posessed when I first entered the world of dSLRs.

I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova.  Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.  As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out.  (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF).  According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo.  We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be.  So I launch it up in VirtualBox.

What should I buy?

I often see many people asking online how to choose the right camera.  They are bombarded with all the megapixels and various features on offer and they have no idea what to get.  And usually the retailers (Best Buy, Frys, etc) try and get you to buy more camera than you need.  So what should you buy?  I’ll try and guide you with this blog post.