The New York Times has an interesting video about a new CGI technic used at Hollywood.
A software is able to map any human facial expression to any 3D model. They are just filming somebody, are recognizing lips, eyes and map them to a 3D model. This is really impressive!
Apple has recently released the new iPod Nano 8GB.
Due to my recent “misadventures“, I had to buy a new iPod. I cannot be in a public transport for 40mn everyday without music.
I previously had a 60GB iPod Photo. It was great and I was able to load it with a lot of music. But it was heavy.
I choose to get a iPod Nano 8GB because it is small, have a nice style and I can load it with 3 days of music. And it is enough.
And I am very pleased of my choice!
I can have it every day in my suit at work and you do not feel the weight.
The sound quality is the same than the big one.
And, cherry on the cake, you can use it with mountain bike as you do not have an hard drive inside.
So, the iPod Nano 8GB is the perfect iPod up to now. Try it and you will love it 
Intel is trying to improve PC designs.
They are offering $1m to have sexiest PC. Apple has actually the lead on the design. And I am almost sure they will always have it in the future.
It is not the money that is making the design, but this is a company strategy.
Good luck Intel!
I have already written some time ago on the Canon HV10 HD camcorder.
And now, Camcorder info has published a review on it (the first one).
Here is the article’s conclusion:
Now for the section you all probably jumped ahead to: our verdict. To be honest, we had a hard time with the Canon HV10. Everyone wants high definition, but everyone wants it at the price and convenience of the camcorders they’re used to. Canon seems to have met so many of those needs with the HV10. It’s highly portable, easy to use, and under $1500.
But there were some serious issues that give us pause. The upright, pistol-grip body produces some very real handling issues. For anything but point-and-shoot operation, making adjustments can be a pain, and upset the picture stability. More seriously, the low light performance was terrible. You’ll be shooting in “low light” more often than you think, as camcorders require a lot more light than the human eye, which makes this category so critical. Bright light video looks great, but you have to consider the whole package. The weakness in audio is also a huge killer for us.
Compared to the Sony HDR-HC3, it’s a very tight race. We loved the Sony’s ease of use and handling, both of which trumped the Canon, but Canon’s manual control set is a crucial upgrade for many users. At the end of the day, if you’re a point and shoot user, the HV10 is likely going to satisfy your needs better than any user group out there. If you want something that is a bit easier to use, go with the HC3, but, if you want something that is ultra-compact (which many people do) the Canon HV10 is a good choice.
And my conclusion is: we have to wait a little bit to have a first good HD camcorder. Each contender has some serious issues that are not acceptable. The Sony’s camcorder is too big and heavy and the Canon has bad low light performances.
Imagine playing Super Mario Bros on your shirt, wherever you are!
The beginning of the Macintosh story:
I really like Firefox as a web browser.
You can have several tabs, remove ads with useful extensions, etc…
But, if your run it for a long time (several weeks) and you have some tabs opened (around 30), it starts to “eat” a lot of memory.
Firefox (v1.5.0.6) is actually using 1 205 916KB of memory (click on the picture to enlarge it). And if you are closing some tabs, it does not help too much. You have to close the browser and start it again to clean up the memory.
I have this problem since version 1.5, I hope the Firefox team will fix this problem with version 2.0.
InfoWorld has published an interesting article: “Is Windows inherently more vulnerable to malware attacks than OS X?“
This article points out weak security points on Windows.
My favorites are:
- Windows requires that users log in with administrative privileges to install software, which causes many to use privileged accounts for day-to-day usage
- Windows requires extraordinary effort to extract the path to, and the files and TCP/UDP ports opened by, running services, and to certify that they are valid (note from me: and it is also painful when you are working on web applications and want to check what is happening!)
- Access to the massive, arcane, nearly unstructured, non-human-readable Windows Registry, which was to be obsolete by now, remains the only resource a Windows attacker needs to analyze and control a Windows system
If you have a lot of memory on your computer, you certainly wan to apply this tweak.
It will force Windows to keep in memory its core system. It will not be swapped anymore.
From the Registry Guide for Windows:
System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\
Memory Management]Value Name: DisablePagingExecutive
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = default, 1 = disable system paging)
You will have to restart Windows for change to take effect.
Tweak Guides is publishing the ultimate tweaking guide for Windows XP.
You can download it in PDF format. This book contains 177 pages and is replying to a lot of questions people are asking around about Windows XP.
It also covers BIOS optimization, Drivers, security tools and a lot of other topics.
