News of Canon’s newEOS 50D with ISO sensitivity as high as 12,800 has my mouth watering. I used to push my black and white film so much that development times were as long as 45 minutes (I bought super cheap ASA125 and pushed it to 1000) just so I could get decent natural light. I leave my Canon Digital Rebel set for 1600 and usually only remember to knock it back when I go outside and find I can’t shoot wide open. Three stops more light sensitivity is better than trading my $85 F1.8 50MM lens for the $1,500 F1.2 model. And my F3.5 10MM lens suddenly becomes useful in falling light. I expect there’s plenty of noise, probably a little less than the ISO1600 print film from yesteryear.
The Axiotron modbook is cool, I gotta admit, but with so many rumors of a MacBook Touch due this fall, I suspect that potential buyers might be holding their breath. But, on the other hand, those people have been waiting for a Mac tablet since Jobs killed the Newton, and rumors of a tablet are hardly unusual — see 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. Still, the whispers of an over-grown iPhone device are getting a lotofechoslately.
I so want one of these sweet Draganflyer X6 helicopters. The two pound powerhouse can carry up to one pound of camera equipment, carrying it smooth enough to get decent video and stills.
More videos are at the Dragonfly website, including one which supposedly demonstrates that it’s quiet enough for wildlife photo work (scroll down and look for “hawk”). Who knows how much it costs, but I requested a quote. Anybody want to guess the price?
I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with it, but thanks to this tip about webkit2png, I now know how to get screen captures of websites. Maybe useful for archiving. Who knows.
CAS — Central Authentication Service — has no logo, but it’s still cool. Heterogeneous environments like mine offer hundreds of different online services or applications that each need to authenticate the user. Instead of throwing our passwords around like confetti, CAS allows those applications to identify their users based on session information managed by the CAS service. It also obviates the need for users to offer their credentials to potentially untrusted systems — think externally hosted systems.
So CAS is great, but what about WordPress integration? Andrej Ciho and Stephen Schwink both worked on the problem and were kind enough to share their solutions with the community. Now, building on their work, I’ve released the WordPress CASplugin we’re using at Plymouth State.
It’s compatible with both regular WordPress and WordPress MU. You can configure it via a settings menu, or a conf file. And if the CAS user doesn’t exist in WordPress, the plugin can call a function you define to provision an account for them or do whatever you want. It’s written for easy maintenance — your configuration info won’t be lost if you svn up, for example — and convenience, but then, you also have to have a working CAS environment going before it’s useful.
Sure, volleyball is the new gymnastics, so much so that the White House posted a picture of Bush with Olympians Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh in their “News & Policy” section. Chalk it up to August being a slow news month. Still, I can just imagine the old man telling Laura “I think you should invite those volleyball girls to the house sometime.” And Laura, I hope, responds: “You can watch them shake it on TV if you need another look.”
Brooklynite Joshua Longo’s crazy animals are showing at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont through October 26th. Sweet for me: I’ll be in town this weekend. I’m hoping to check it out.
