Home Page Commentary 4 June 2000 (SLR Film Cameras 2 / Windows JI)

Comment of the Fortnight
4 June 2000

Yeah, I know

The comment is a week late.

SLR Cameras Redux

So, no sooner had I finished my previous comment lamenting the lack of good Single Lens Reflex (SLR) digital cameras, when I re-discovered the Sony DSC-D770. When it first came out, it cost about US$1800, which is why I didn't pay much attention to it and pretty much forgot about it. Now it's on sale for US$800, and at that price, it's quite a bargain. In fact, it answers most of my wish list:

• It's SLR.
• It has 5x zoom.
• It has full manual control for focus, aperture, and shutter speed.
• The time between shutter button press and picture capture is quite small.

I bought one, and you can see some first pictures here.

Windows^TM©® JI

In a couple of weeks, I'll be teaching a CGI course at a local company. I went out there last week to check to see if all the machines were set up properly. The machines, all running Windows NT^TM©®, had to have Perl and server software running on them. Perl was there, but the server software (Personal Web Server ^TM©®) was only serving up FTP and Gopher pages, but no HTML.

Two of the company's tech folks came in and spent the next hour trying to fix the problem, eventually having to dig down into the registry^TM©® to correct the problem. While I was waiting for them to make the fix, I investigated a “Plan B.” I downloaded the Apache Web Server -- the version with the installer -- and installed it. I then wrote a couple of quick test scripts, and found that HTML and CGI were working just fine. Total time: fifteen minutes.

I think that Windows NT should be renamed Windows JI -- for Job Insurance.

Let me know what you think.

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