Yes, Jason’s office is this scary looking inside

As soon as I heard the announcement from  bright and bushy-tailed VMWare CEO Paul Maritz that the company was shortly going to be releasing their ESX 3i enterprise-class embedded hypervisor for free, I was absolutely thrilled. Given the pace of technology reporting, I knew that I had to get it running on my test equipment right away.

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In the year 2016…

Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim milk and mocha is already waiting for him, thanks to his new Korean-made LG RoboCafe, which brews and extracts a perfect crema every time using pre-portioned, mess-free nitrogen-sealed pods imported from Brazil. He considers nudging his wife, Mindy, to get up and make him breakfast, but decides to leave her alone. Best not to wake sleeping dragons.

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I was gonna say, “throw the PC in the toilet” but thought better of it

If you’re so inclined, you can still boot MS-DOS 3.3 on the latest generation of Core Duo, Xeon, AMD64 and Opteron processors. Why? Because while the amount of core instructions increased in order to support new features (such as protected mode), the instruction word length increased from 16 to 32 to 64 bits, the amount of memory that the processor could use increased geometrically, and the number of processor cores increased, and the bus technology improved to handle higher speeds, at the end of the day, the basic architecture is fundamentally no different than what we started with in 1981. So why exactly do we still need systems than can still run CP/M and DOS on the metal?

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More 50mm Fixed Focal Length Food Porn

The F/1.4 50mm SIGMA lens continues to be a bundle of pure joy. I still wouldn’t say I’ve entirely mastered its use, as I find myself having to take more exposures with it than I normally would to get good results, but the results I do get are often stunning. Take a look at some of my most recent shots.

Ah, escarole and bean soup. I love the way you can control the depth of field by adjusting the aperature far more creatively than with the kit lens.

The only thing I did different on this one was adjust the F stop. Totally different effect on the picture.

Even one of our pedestrian Chinese stir-frys looks quite exciting through the new SIGMA F/1.4

I really like this particular wok shot.

Tasty results.

The tower of Barbecue Ribs. Full sunlight, ISO 100, F/5, at 1/500th of a second.

Mmmmm. Meat.

We… ARE PSYSTAR!!!!

Well, that was predictable, really.

A small startup in Florida decides to go make Mac clones, and surprise, surprise, Apple starts legal proceedings and unleashes the might of its superior Army of Litigious Immortals.

Well, we all know how that one is going to end, right? Apple is a multi billion dollar technology company with tons of money at its disposal for protracted litigation. In the most likely scenario, poor little Psystar will back down, turn its tail between its legs and cease and desist.

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I Think I’m Still in Stage 2

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EPIC iFAIL in Fort Lee

My wife Rachel has been awaiting the iPhone 3G for several months. Even though I am wedded to my beloved BlackBerry, she wanted to be able to carry a single device to play her music, act as a phone, and to be able to check her email. At the $199 price AT&T was advertising it at, it seemed like a no-brainer. So despite my usual reservations against buying Apple products, we headed to the AT&T Wireless store today on my lunch hour to see if we could pick one up for her.

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Whoa! Gambas a la SIGMA 50mm.

Since getting the new Canon XSi, I’ve taken quite a few nice shots. However, I knew that I couldn’t really take advantage of the camera until I got a professional quality primary, fixed focal length lens. The 18-55 telephoto that came with my camera kit was serviceable, but as those of us who do a lot of food photography know, the flash is not your friend. Really nice food photos are taken in ambient or natural light, and when you are in a restaurant environment, you REALLY don’t want to use a flash. And we also know that ambient light in environments where food is served can be challenging for food photography.

The downside of a telephoto lens is that the glass isn’t as big — the 18-55 kit lens for the XSi is 58mm wide, for example, so you don’t get as much light captured as say a 77mm wide lens. Having telephoto also reduces how wide you can open your aperture — the almighty F stop — which is key to natural light photography. A fixed focal length primary lens also allows you to shoot at a lower ISO rating in less light than a telephoto lens. So to summarize, Bigger glass, wider F stop, better food photos.

Having done some research on primary lenses, I finally settled on the newly released 50mm SIGMA F1.4 EX DG HSM. This comes in a Canon or a Nikon mount, and it streets for about $480.00. DPreview.com has a short write up of it here. Hey, I didn’t say the thing was cheap. Compared to the Canon L Series 50mm F 1.2 though at around $1400.00 which I originally wanted but Rachel would kick my ass if I went out and bought, I thought it was a bargain given this is state of the art lens technology. Canon also makes a 50mm 1.4 which sells for around $350.00, but it’s an older design, and I had a hard time getting one from online resellers without it being a special order item.

Here’s a photo of some grilled jumbo shrimp we made tonight, shot at f/2.5 ISO 500, using just the light in my kitchen. I’m barely scratching the surface of what this lens can do. Like driving a Ferrari, its a high performance product with quirks that the driver needs to adapt to. I’m finding that I have to bracket my exposures in aperture priority mode to finally get the image I want. With practice I should be able to tweak my depth of field just the way I want it. Hey, I’m a total gimp at real photography. Cut me some slack.

Ready for some primary lenses, octopus, and jumbo shrimp? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Bletchley Park, The Forge of Computer Creation

With today’s news of Bletchley Park facing possible financial rescue from a dim future of decay and oblivion, I decided to bump this back up to the top. I think all technologists can agree that this is an important historical site that needs to be preserved.

Bletchley Park Ltd
The Mansion
Bletchley Park
Milton Keynes
MK3 6EB

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

Today, the city of Milton Keynes is a large town with over 200,000 people living there, working at all sorts of office parks and such. But nearly 70 years ago, it was rural English countryside, with only scattered farms being the only indication that people were living there. Nothing really interesting at all.

Which is exactly what the British government wanted everyone to think.

The small town of Bletchley Park, which is now part of the greater Milton Keynes area, was the center for project Ultra, which employed thousands of people. The research and technology which came out of it is of huge significance, because without it, there would probably be no Information Age, no Internet, no Personal Computers, no Integrated Circuits … well really nothing that involves modern computer technology at all.

Bletchley Park can be rather Enigmatic. Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link for more.

It’s Planking Season!

You know how some things are so fad-like that you never want to touch them until years later when people aren’t really interested in them anymore? That’s kind of what I feel about cooking fish on planks. Planking is so… well… 1997 Emeril.

Still, what is old is new again, and just because I deem it so, it’s cool. It’s also a way to add a lot of flavor to a dish without adding a lot of extra calories in the process.

This weekend we visited our friends the Liebermans on Long Island. Mark Lieberman is my oldest friend, who I’ve known for 30 years. He was my best man at my wedding way back when, so when he tells me we have to come over and eat his planked fish, well, then I guess we better.

If you don’t plank, you’re gonna walk the… well you know.

Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more planking action.