Thanksgiving at Crater Lake

Here are the results of first experiments with Canon Rebel XSi Digital SLR.

Digital SLR buyer's guide

Between yesterday morning (when I woke up with an epiphany that I need to by a new camera, and that too a digital SLR) and 5 minutes back (when I clicked on the "Place order" button of Amazon's shopping cart), I learnt great deal about digital photography.

I always like Amazon's reviews (no matter which site I am buying from). Also their "X% people bought this item" feature gives some idea about product popularity (although those numbers look pretty skewed when you check out second item on that list). So Canon Rebel XTi (10MP) and XSi (12MP) seemed like decent candidates for my budget (after a long fight with my stingy self of course). From the reviews these models seemed clear winners. XSi was rated 5 stars by 170 out of 213 customers. And 85% bought people bought it. But I still wanted to understand what I was getting before drilling this big a hole in my pocket.

One of the reviewers mentioned this book "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. It's a fantastic book. After going through first 40 pages, I got pretty good idea of all the photographic jargon I found on DSLR product page. The aperture, shutter speed, lens, CMOS sensor, significance of MegaPixel, etc. I also found useful articles elsewhere . Although I didn't read it fully, I found the wikipedia article on "depth of field" amazingly detailed. Also this article on the lense that comes by default with XSi, (18-35mm f/3.5-5.6) is also detailed.

edealinfo.com showed a pretty good deal on the XSi model. Although their math showed that it will cost me $607 at Dell Home, I found out that they have conveniently forgotten $50 tax. Especially when I compared this on Amazon, which had the camera for $637 and free shipping and zero tax - my decision was easy (Moreover this earns me 3 times points on Amazon visa).

... the pocket feels lighter. Hopefully it will pay off in long run ...

more fun with notify-send

I like notify-send. Here is one more simple script that uses notify-send. (notify-send is the command line utility that shows pop-up message in the right hand bottom corner of desktop).

# cat runmon

!/bin/bash

COMMAND="$*"

eval "$COMMAND"

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
   notify-send -t 0 -u normal "$COMMAND Done!"
else
   notify-send -t 0 -u critical "$COMMAND Failed!"
fi

Use it like this:

# runmon make all

# runmon cdrecord -v speed=2 dev=2,0 cdimage.raw

# runmon wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/.../Fedora-9-x86_64-DVD.iso

It is useful for monitoring the tasks that take long time. Like build of entire product or burning of a CD. When I leave something to build and get to other work, I would like to be notified when it's done - even if it is running in some background screen session.