I got a Canon EOS 20D since April 2005, completed by an ultrawide-angle lens, the Canon EF 17-40 f/4.0L USM. This lens is absolutely great, but it is an ultrawide-angle, and sometimes you need a more flexible lens, which you can use as a zoom, for example. After some on-line researches (how did we realize that *before* the web??), I decided myself for a Canon EF 28-135 f/3.5-5.6 IS USM.

How it looks like

Specs

• f/3.5-5.6 maximum aperture
• Micro UltraSonic Motor (USM)
• Image Stabilizer
• EF mount; standard zoom lens
• Internal focusing; full-time manual focus; aspherical lens
• 28-135mm focal length
• Closest Focusing Distance: 0.5m
• Weight: 500g

The rule of thumb of a correct IS usage

The rule of thumb to get crisp photos without image stabilization is that your shutter speed should not be longer than 1 over your focal length. So if you are taking a picture zoomed in at 135mm, your shutter speed needs to be 1/135 sec or faster, and since no camera I know of has a 1/135 setting, that means going up to 1/160 sec (on cameras with stops in 1/3 increments) or faster. The image stabilizer means that you can go 2 f-stops slower than you normally could using the rule I just explained. So if you’re shooting at 135mm and you have the IS switched on, you can shoot at 1/40 sec instead of 1/160 sec. That means four times as much light goes past the shutter, or that you can get the same quality results with 1/4 of the ambient light you would normally need.

Some reviews

• EOS documentation project
• CameraHacker
• Bob Atkins
• William Castleman
• Amazon reviewers

One example (without flash, with IS, very low-light)

[click]

(1600 ISO, 1/8s, f4.0)

[via BetaNews]

A new version (v1.42, 27.3 MB) of K-Lite Mega Codec Pack was released. As usual, this audio and video codecs and players package contains all the things you need in this field (incl. a QuickTime and RealTime alternatives which are running greatly). All for free, very good packaged, super easy to install and to update. A *must* have.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-Decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats.

The K-Lite Codec Pack has a couple of major advantages compared to other codec packs:

• It it always very up-to-date with the latest versions of the codecs.
• It is very user-friendly and the installation is fully customizable, meaning that you can install only those components that you really want.
• It’s easy to make an unattended installation.
• It has been very well tested, so that the package doesn’t contain any conflicting codecs. It tries to avoid potential problems with existing codecs and even fixes some problems.
• It is a very complete package, containing everything you need to play your movies.
• There are different packages. From small to extra-large.

[via Bloomberg]

Peter Drucker, one of the most significant contributor to the concept of modern management, has died. He was 95. Peter Drucker is impacting us all in the way we are doing business today.

I like particularly one of his book, Management challenges for the 21st century, worth a read!

No single person has influenced the course of business in the 20th century as much as Peter Drucker. He practically invented management as a discipline in the 1950s, elevating it from an ignored, even despised, profession into a necessary institution that “reflects the basic spirit of the modern age.” Now, in Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Drucker looks at the profound social and economic changes occurring today and considers how management–not government or free markets–should orient itself to address these new realities.

Drucker sees the period we’re living in as one of “PROFOUND TRANSITION–and the changes are more radical perhaps than even those that ushered in the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ of the middle of the 19th century, or the structural changes triggered by the Great Depression and the Second World War.” In the midst of all this change, he contends, there are five social and political certainties that will shape business strategy in the not-too-distant future: the collapsing birthrate in the developed world; shifts in distribution of disposable income; a redefinition of corporate performance; global competitiveness; and the growing incongruence between economic and political reality. Drucker then looks at requirements for leadership (“One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it”), the characteristics of the “new information revolution” (one should focus on the meaning of information, not the technology that collects it), productivity of the knowledge worker (unlike manual workers, knowledge workers must be seen as capital assets, not costs), and finally the responsibilities that knowledge workers must assume in managing themselves and their careers.

The Drools project, a well-known open source Java business rules engine, will join JBoss.

The Drools project

Drools is a Rules Engine implementation based on Charles Forgy’s Rete algorithm tailored for the Java language. Adapting Rete to an object-oriented interface allows for more natural expression of business rules with regards to business objects. Drools is written in Java, but able to run on Java and .Net.

Drools is designed to allow pluggeable language implementations. Currently rules can be written in Java, Python and Groovy. More importantly, Drools provides for Declarative Programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of your problem domain with Domain Specific Languages (DSL) via XML using a Schema defined for your problem domain. DSLs consist of XML elements and attributes that represent the problem domain.

The JBoss announcement

The addition of Drools represents another critical step in the evolution of JEMS as the Open Source Platform for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). With Drools, JBoss is again demonstrating its commitment to bring a cohesive open source middleware platform to the mass market. Incorporation of the Drools rules engine into JEMS will allow organizations to easily customize their products and service offerings using business rules that can be applied across an SOA based on actions, events and historical activities.

Thx Nick ;-)

I have decided for a while to buy the Shure E2c earphones. Really great, although you are a bit ridiculous when you try to plug correctly these headphones :-)

Great to see that Russell is also a fan of the Shure earphones. He decided himself for the E3c series, have a look at his review. Quite similar results, pros & cons as my own experience.

As already mentionned in one of my post on October 23, we are invited to talk about our case in Moscow at the end of November. The program and speakers are updated. Have a look at insuranceforum.ru for more detail.

I hope we will have some good local support concerning the lamguage/translation :-)

That is a *real* foreign language. As an example:

Дидье Бек, директор E-Center solutions Helvetia Patria Group, Швейцария

[via Skype News]

A milestone is reached for Skype. Some interesting figures:

• At peak time, we’re pumping out close to 10 downloads a second. That’s almost a million downloads every single day by now. Not quite a million every day yet, but we’re getting there.
• The download traffic at peak time adds up to 500 Mbit/sec, or 0.5 Gbit/sec. That’s 500 times more than an average 1 Mbit home “broadband” connection.
• We got from 0 to 100M downloads in 595 days, from 100M to 150M in 124 days, from 150M to 200M in 83 days. There’s no signs of the pace slowing down.

[via Tom Peters]

As usual, feed for thoughts…and really cool to hear/read this kind of input from time to time :-)

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
Herb Kelleher

“A good plan executed right now tops a perfect plan executed next week.”
George Patton

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

“If Microsoft is good at anything, it’s avoiding the trap of worrying about criticism. Microsoft fails constantly. They’re eviscerated in public for lousy products. Yet they persist, through version after version, until they get something good enough. Then they leverage the power they’ve gained in other markets to enforce their standard.”
Seth Godin

“I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it.”
Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan

The Leader’s Seven Essential Behaviors

1. Know your people and your business
2. Insist on realism
3. Set clear goals and priorities
4. Follow through
5. Reward the doers
6. Expand people’s capabilities
7. Know yourself

Source: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives. I’m not knocking education or looking for dumb people. But if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.”
Source: Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an ability to accumulate wealth, he’s actually found a negative correlation. “It seems that school-related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,” Stanley concluded. What did predict success was a willingness to take risks. Yet the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. Most educational systems reward those who play it safe. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to take risks later on.”
Source: Richard Farson & Ralph Keyes, Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins

After Calvi (Corsica, France), we really needed to book our next holidays as quick as possible :-) So, after having “tested” St.Barths in the Caribbean this year, we decided ourselves again for the same destination for our Winter Holidays in February 2006. It is the first time that we return to the same destination more than one time. It was *such* a great time :-) We will combine a stay in Anguila and in St.Barths.

Anguilla – CuisinArt

So, we will first stay in the Hotel CuisinArt at Anguilla.

St.Barths – François Plantation

Then, return to the paradise at the Hotel François Plantation at St.Barths. Another interesting resource about St.Barths.

[via Novell Press Room]

Some news from Novell. Their new strategy doesn’t seem to be implement yet…

02 Nov 2005—Novell, Inc. today announced it will concentrate its business on key growth opportunities in the Linux and Open Source and Identity and Resource Management markets, resulting in a restructuring of the business that will reduce annual run rate expenses by more than $110 million.

[…] As a result of the restructuring, product development and consulting resources are now more focused on the company’s growth businesses, Linux and Identity. Novell also expects to continue to evaluate non-core consulting activities.

[…] Novell also announced today that its Board of Directors has authorized management and its financial advisor, Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, to explore strategic alternatives for Celerant, Novell’s consulting subsidiary. The company has previously stated that it intends to separate Celerant from Novell when market and other conditions are appropriate.

Celerant, as the e-Services division of Novell, integrates, among others, the former Cambridge Technology Partners.

Thx Philippe ;-)