June 26th, 2009 by Don
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To follow up on a previous post about evaluating Digital SLR cameras, I picked up one a few weeks ago before Alex and Avery’s 3rd birthday party. As stated in the title, I ended up going with the Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I ended up picking up a kit bundled with the standard 18-55mm lens and a telephoto lens (50-250mm).
There are definitely a ton of options, most of which I don’t understand. I do feel like so far just using the auto-mode the photos have been awesome. The best feature that I’ve been loving is the quick recovery time between shooting pictures. I hope to learn more about the advanced features in the future when I have more time. For now I’ll rely on the auto and scene modes.
One thing that I did do was update the camera’s firmware this week. In case you’re not aware, it’s always a good idea when purchasing any kind of camera, camcorder, etc. to check to see if there are firmware upgrades. Typically they fix bugs or ad support for new accessories that may have come out since the product was initially released.
If you’re a fellow Rebel XSi owner you can get the latest firmware and upgrade instructions here. The process is very easy and only requires that you have a card reader for your SD card.
By the way, speaking of SD cards, I highly suggest that if you’re in the market for a DSLR camera that you pickup a good quality SD memory card. Going with a cheap generic card, which cheap, will not allow you to fully take advantage of the speed that your camera can most likely write to the card. Generic and cheap cards are slow, and you’ll wait for the images to be written to your card between pictures. In order to eliminate this bottleneck I went with the SanDisk 16gb Extreme III 30MB/s Edition SDHC High Performance Card.
They key here is the 30MB/s speed. That’s where this card stands out above others (the 16GB of storage doesn’t hurt either). I had picked one up at Best Buy the day before the kid’s birthday party for almost $80 more and ended up ordering the one linked above from Amazon because it was much cheaper. Once the Amazon.com one came I simply took that box back and returned it to Best Buy.
All in all I’ve taken a few hundred pictures with the new camera and love it. It’s definitely bulky and not as convenient as carrying around the old point and shoot, but the end result is worth it as far as I’m concerned.
June 9th, 2009 by Don
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You can get an early build of Google Chrome for Mac here. Use at your own risk!
I’ll let you know if it blows up my Mac in my next post…
May 30th, 2009 by Don
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After years of dealing with crummy point and shoot digital cameras with what seems like 30+ seconds wait time between shots we’re considering purchasing a SLR camera. And with the latest Consumer Reports doing a rundown on 20+ SLRs it really has me close to making a decision now. (It’s funny how Consumer Reports always seems to sense things that I’m considering purchasing and drops a review in the next issue. It’s almost like they’re reading my minds…. scary.)
While I don’t think the Digital SLR will completely fill all of our photography needs I think it will slowly become the better option as the kids (two of which will be 3 here in June) get into more activities which will require their own personal sports illustrated (or whatever they do) photographer. I still see us throwing the crappy old battery hungry point and shoot into the van for occasional use where we may not feel like lugging around a bigger camera.
The one model I’m seriously considering is a basic/entry level SLR from Canon. Consumer Reports recommended it and my main dilemma now is to decide if I should get a kit where they bundle in a basic lens or get the body and my own lens separately. For simplicity sake here’s a link to the Canon EOS Rebel XSi from Amazon.
As you can see from that link you can buy the camera body only or the standard bundle with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS (Image Stabilization) Lens. If you go by Amazon you’ll see that there’s about a $100 difference between the two models. And while not a big deal, the standard lens is only about the same as a 3x magnification range and is about what I’d have with my standard point and shoot. While I realize the quality difference would be massive when compared to the point and shoot I feel like not having the ability for distance shots may just have me reaching for the smaller one a lot of the time.
I wonder if it would just be better to get the body by itself and find a full range lens (18-200mm) and carry around 1 lens vs. having two in the bag. I guess I’ll really have to consider what the majority of the shots will be. Maybe having standard zoom (the one you get with the bundle) will be what I use most of the time and I could pickup a telephoto lens (50-250mm) for when the kids start soccer or whatever. Or, you can find other places like B&H Photo that sell kits with both the standard zoom and telephoto bundled together.
Hmmm… decisions, decisions. If any of you guys have any suggestions I’d love to hear them. With two vacations coming up in the next few months I think pulling the trigger soon will result in lots of nice pictures when we’re on the beach in the Outer Banks this summer and down in Florida conquering Disney this fall.
May 29th, 2009 by Don
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We use SQL Server 2008′s Reporting Services for all of our site’s reports here at work. Along with that we also use Microsoft’s Report Viewer control which gives you the ability to serve up the RDL files that are stored in SQL Server. One of the features that the control offers is the ability to print your reports. To accomplsih this it uses Active-X, which we all know can be funky and a hassle to troubleshoot when it’s not working properly.
When we released our new system back in February we got most of our users printing with minimal support. We encouraged all of them to upgrade to IE 7 (many were still using IE6) which did fine with the control. Shortly after our launch Microsoft started rolling out IE8 and our users slowly started upgrading.
That’s when we found many of them having issues printing. As you’ll see in this screen shot, they would simply get a generic error when clicking the print button, even after successfully installing the print control. As a work around we were having folks export to PDF and then print from there. Obviously this wasn’t an ideal solution and we started troubleshooting to figure out what the problem was.
After doing some testing on our end on virtual machines we were able to reproduce the problem and narrowed it down to Windows Vista running IE8. Since we weren’t able to resolve the problem on our virtual machine configuration with anything we tried we eventually opened a support ticket with Microsoft.
After some support calls with Microsoft they informed us that in order for this to work properly you have to add the site that’s using the report viewer control as a trusted site if you’re using Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Vista. We thought this was odd because we definitely had tried this on our virtual machine setup and didn’t have any luck.
What we found out on our own later was that as that this solution does not seem to help if you originally started out with a Beta or RC (Release Candidate) copy of IE8 that had been upgraded to the final release. That was the scenario we had on our virtual machine that we were using to test IE8 and even the trusted site fix didn’t help in that scenario.
So, if you are having this problem and you’re using a clean install of IE8 or an upgrade to the final release of IE8 from a previous version adding the trusted site to fix this problem is easy.
Just open up IE and click Tools > Internet Options and follow the steps shown here in the screen shot to add your site as a trusted site:
Restart your browser and you’re in business.
Now if they could only get away from Active-X so our users that decide not to use IE can print.
May 29th, 2009 by Don
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Google’s Gmail Notifier system tray application for Windows can’t launch Google Chrome when it’s not setup as your system default browser. Uh, hello? Both of these are Google applications, you think they would have updated the notifier to support this by now. As you can see here from my screen shots the Gmail Notifier options show every other browser I have installed EXCEPT Google Chrome.
There must be some way to hack this. I even made sure that I had the latest version of the notifier and I do. Anybody have any idea on how to accomplish this?
April 23rd, 2009 by Don
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To get $5 OFF your next online purchase of $50, use promotion code 5OFF50 upon checkout.
Hurry, offer ends 4/27/09.
April 23rd, 2009 by Don
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Last night at the Frederick .NET user group Jeremy Kadlec of Edgewood Solutions (one of the founders of the Baltimore SQL Server Users group, was a speaker. I didn’t realize that this group met so close to where I work here in Columbia. After checking out the website I was excited to learn that they met on the first Monday of the month. Tuesdays and Thursdays, which seem to be popular days for most of the other user groups in the area are not an option for me since I handle the kids those nights while my wife tutors.
So, I’ll be checking out the group for the first time on Monday May 4th.
Presenter: Jack Richins of Microsoft
Title – SQL Server 2008 Security
Abstract – SQL Server 2008 introduced three new security features – Transparent Data Encryption, Enterprise Key Management, and SQL Audit. With increased concerns about privacy and data thefts, security remains a “must have” business feature even with constrained budgets. Come learn how to use these features to better secure your database applications and met business compliance regulations.
Learn how to:
* Protect your data at rest
* Use 3rd party key management systems to encrypt data in SQL Server with keys stored outside of SQL Server
* Keep an audit record of access to sensitive data without tanking your performance
Learn more about their meeting schedule here. If you’re in the area and are interested in the topic, stop by!
April 23rd, 2009 by Don
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I have been dragging my feet for the past few years in regards to finishing up my Microsoft development certification. Actually, the last test I took was 70-229 Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition back on Dec 08, 2003. WOW, I had no idea it was that long until I just looked it up.
Anyway, what finally got me to get moving was a great voucer/coupon I got via email from Prometric, the testing company I used last time. Not sure if it’s specific to me because I’m already a MCP (yes, I passed that test from years ago) or not but I’ll share it just in case it does work for others…
…Improving and validating your technical skills can help.
That is why Prometric is providing a limited offer to the first 4,000 individuals to help get your Microsoft Certified Professional status current or achieve an additional certification.
Offer available for customers who have taken their last certification exam prior to January 1, 2007.
Use this promo code ‘MCPBACK’ and get a $25 USD Certification (Normally priced at $125 USD). This offer is valid for any exam in the MCTS/MCPD/MCITP track. Does not include Microsoft Office or Windows end-user (non-IT) focused exams.
Go to: www.Prometric.com/microsoft to sign-up for your next exam.
But you better hurry!
You must take your exam by June 30, 2009.
Offer valid in US and Canada only.
My plan is to obtain the MCTS: .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Applications certification related to Visual Studio 2008. What I’m going to do is take the C# test rather than VB.NET, which is what I mainly use here at work. I can work in C# and have written a few things in it, but my main language since I’ve been working in .NET has been VB.NET.
I figure this will be a good way to become more familiar with C# and will force me to learn the language. Once you’ve been working with .NET for a while and looking through code samples on Google you’ll quickly realize that the majority of the code samples out there are done in C#. So, as you can imagine, converting those to VB.NET can be frustrating after a while.
So, we’ll see how it goes. I only spent $25 to book the test and another $44 to upgrade my copy of MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation
to the second edition. I picked up the first edition a year or two ago when I first decided I wanted to get the MCTS and only got about 1/2 way through it.
My test is set for June 17, wish me luck!
April 23rd, 2009 by Don
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One of my co-workers asked us (the IT department) how she could print a certain page number or range of pages using Microsoft Outlook 2007. Since I was the only one in IT to have Outlook 2007 we looked at things on my system. Honestly, I don’t know if I had tried that before so I wasn’t entirely sure where you would set those options. My first guess would have been in the print options, where else?
Well, after fumbling around for a few minutes we realized that there didn’t seem to be anywhere to actually set these options. Shortly after my other IT co-worker found this Microsoft support article offering up workarounds since they decided to remove this feature.
Why the heck? “Gee, this is a really useful feature, let’s take it out and make them use workarounds.” “Good idea, this should hinder productivity!”
April 22nd, 2009 by Don
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I’ll be attending the Frederick .NET user group tonight. Tonight’s topics will be SQL Server Performance and Coding for Fun and Profit. More information can be found here.
