Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Tuesday 18 April 2006

Sensor cleaning

The other I during a shoot in the north of Outaouais, QC, I found out that I had a huge dust speckle on my sensor. So huge that it was visible on the camera LCD preview (without zoom) and it was visible on the sensor itself.

So I used the spat-u-swab method: pec-pads, Eclipse solution and the "spatula". The first time it took me 10 time to get it right. This time it was done in one shot. I should note that the biggest photo store in Montréal had none of the pec-pads and eclipse. Almost shocking, I was not impressed.

Hint: when doing the test shot, close the lens as much as possible. Due to diffraction, the dust speckles are even more visible when the lens is stepped down. f/16 or f/22 seems to be a good value.

nVidia caught lying

In this article:

For Nvidia, intellectual property is a secondary issue. "It's so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help," said Andrew Fear, Nvidia's software product manager. In addition, customers aren't asking for open-source drivers, he said.

There are two lies in that quote. Mr Fear, thank you for your FUD. But who are you to claim that the talented x.org developpers wouldn't be able to understand the code if you open-sourced it? And if you don't want to provide the code, why don't you provide the documentation? After all if the same people are able to understand how the card works without documentation, they'll likely understand the documentation and/or the code source.

And what planet are you living on to claim that customers are not asking open source drivers? There have been numero requests from numerous people.

If I haven't purchased one of your card, either directly or indirectly is because you don't want an open source driver.