May 6, 2010
Came back!

Hi all!

I came back from Madagascar two days ago, great trip and incredible country. I suggest to all to visit it while it’s not so much crowded of turists. If anybody is afraid about security I can say I travelled across many cities and I NEVER felt any dangerous. Just in the biggest market in Antananarivo I wasn’t really confortable with my reflex in the hands (but actually nothing happened).

Now I came back home, I really missed the italian weather (in Madgascar on the coast it’s quite hot and humid), I’m confortable with 1x° :)

I turned my Mac on and I got a HUGE amount of information! Hundreads of emails (fortunately just some of them require an answer), hundreads of tweets, thousands of items in NetNewsWire and so on .. I need some days to organize and filter them all!

In two weeks I got less than 1500 photos, I was afraid to don’t have enought memory with me but 2 compact flash of 8Gb (for Canon 40D) and 1 SD of 16Gb (for Canon SX210IS) was really enought!

Now I need time to get updated about everything happened in the world in these two weeks, then I will begin to organize photos and I’ll publish some of them here and on my DeviantART account

For the moment I uploaded a video with lemures taken in Ranomafana National Park (next post)

2:41pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/576077784/came-back
April 19, 2010
The Adventures of BeetleCam

Great great post! I had the same idea in the past but I stopped on realization due costs :)

I really like the images, and I’m quite happy to didn’t do it because it cost a Canon 400D :)

Nice work guys!

9:22am  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/532729299/the-adventures-of-beetlecam
April 13, 2010
Bad experience with craghoppers.com

First of all, I have some Craghoppers and I’m really happy with them. But now I won’t buy anything from them!

I ordered two things from their website for my next trip to Madagascar. Both were labelled as ‘available’ and I decided to buy both.

After some days I received an email telling me that 1 item was just shipped. So i asked why the other wasn’t and they told me that it wasn’t available.

Now the second item is still not available and I won’t have what I want because they can’t manage their inventory!

There are many places where I can buy Craghoppers, I decided to buy on craghoppers.com because products were available and shipping timing was ok for me. But now it’s too late to buy the same thing elsewhere (I’m leaving on 19th) and I have to buy something similar.

I asked if it were possible to get a faster shipping (before I know the product isn’t still available) but they answered ‘no’.

So, if you want to buy some product of craghoppers.com DON’T buy on the craghoppers.com, my experience was really bad!

4:43pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/518396686/bad-experience-with-craghoppers-com
Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again - NYTimes.com

A really interesting article! In some cases it would be really useful!

4:27pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/518369094/hallucinogens-have-doctors-tuning-in-again
April 11, 2010
There are so many places where you can find useful/interesting information that it’s really difficult to get updated by all. For example I checked my Twitter account (I don’t use it too much) and I got tons and tons of new tabs in my browser. They seems to be all interesting, but they are so many! :)

There are so many places where you can find useful/interesting information that it’s really difficult to get updated by all. For example I checked my Twitter account (I don’t use it too much) and I got tons and tons of new tabs in my browser. They seems to be all interesting, but they are so many! :)

3:40pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/513090125/there-are-so-many-places-where-you-can-find
April 6, 2010
Juggernaut

I found this page in a feed and I thought “looks interesting, check it out!” but I have to admit I’m really impressed, in 3 minutes (thanks to Juggernaut and Rails’s scaffold) I had everything working. And it works! :)

I’m not totally happy because it uses Flash but I really like how easy it is, you have just to drop 3 or 4 commands and you have a connection to all your clients :)

And you send them javascript data so you can play with prototype too .. really interesting.

Will it scale? Who knows .. by now I’m sure I won’t use it in any production environment, but I’ll some tests! Great job!

(I hate its name :P )

5:37pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/500883190/juggernaut
"Brand Butlers"

An interesting article from trendwatching.com about “Brand butlers”

4:43pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/500787507/brand-butlers
April 4, 2010
Introduction to EventMachine

A nice introduction (114 slides!) of EventMachine, an interestign reading :)

5:27pm  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/495861670/introduction-to-eventmachine
Supermodel - ActiveModel in memory

Today i found this library called Supermodel, it’s useful to have an ActiveModel stored in memory and not in a DB.

It’s interesting to have data in memory with the confortable access by ActiveModel, but I don’t know which is the advantage to use Supermodel instead of using MySQL with MEMORY engine (with its model and ActiveModel obviously).

Anyway an interesting thing, it can be useful sometimes :)

Thanks to Alex Maccaw :)

11:28am  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/495361571/supermodel-activemodel-in-memory
April 2, 2010
Canon Powershot SX210 IS

Hi all!

As I told you before I’m going to do a great trip to Madagascar the 9th of April.

I love photography so I’ll bring with me my Canon EOS 40D & co. But honestly it’s not everytime possible to get DSLR out of the backpack (and in some places it’s not a good idea).

So I decided to buy a small camera for day-to-day use and to use it in some ‘particular’ situations in my trips. I read many specifications (I can’t believe how many digital cameras there are!) and finally I decided for the Canon Powershot SX210 IS.

It’s a 14 megapixel camera .. too much for my needs, but it’s not an issue (some people don’t like many megapixel on a small sensor .. I know .. but it’s not a problem for me).

The SX210 is really cute, I like really much its design (my camera is the black model). It looks quite solid in general, just controls look a bit fragile. The camera has many extra-features like fish-eye effect, color selection, video editing, macro-effect .. all features quite un-useful for me, but I apreciated them anyway.

I got it yesterday so I haven’t tested it too much, but I’m happy with it. It starts in a resonable time (I don’t compare it with 40D obviously) and the audio in video is not bad.

My first choice to shoot will be 40D forever but this camera will be helpful in many situazions.

A nice feature I didn’t know when I bought is the zoom, it’s a 14x optic but when you arrive at the end it zooms with digital zoom up to 56x (it’s impressive!) .. while zooming you can hear the ‘vrrrr’ (and you can hear it in your videos) but for me it’s not an issue :)

I posted a video on youtube to show the zoom of this camera :)

This is the link to Canon’s website

These are the firsts impression on this camera, if I’ll find something else I’ll write in the next days, for example I’m curious about the battery time.

11:13am  |   URL: http://log.dallangelo.com/post/490900517/canon-powershot-sx210-is
FILED UNDER: camera digital canon powershot 210 SX SX210IS