XP Mode consists of the Virtual PC-based virtual environment and a fully licensed copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3). It will be made available, for free, to users of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions via a download from the Microsoft web site

Secret No More: Revealing Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 [SuperSite Blog]

For a long, long time Microsoft tried to push Windows Vista to end-users as a replacement for Windows XP, a strategy that failed in many ways: users often "downgraded" to XP, many companies and retail vendors chosen not to upgrade (forcing the extension of XP’s lifecycle) and, in the end, Microsoft was forced to accelerate the development of Vista’s successor: Windows 7 (allegedly a Vista without all the “bloatware”). It seems Microsoft, in a classic case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, has gone one step beyond with Windows 7: instead of trying to kill XP, there will be an option to run applications in XPM (xp mode), which is nothing more than an instance of Windows XP running in a virtual machine

Looks like Windows XP is too tough to die…

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Vista,XP,Windows XP,Windows Vista,Windows 7

I’m a big fan of Twitter, it’s a pretty simple service and a great way to share thoughts with the “cloud” and interact with people, is even useful for organizations to get closer to their followers/clients/etc. Magnum Photos is one of those organizations that seems to know how to use it, and if your were paying attention to their Twitter account last week you may had seen the tweet shown above, where photographer Larry Towell spared some time to answer the questions of all of those interested in photography and photojournalism.

You can’t get more live than that, but you can still catch up with the virtual interview right here.

Technorati Tags: twitter, magnum, magnumphotos, photojournalism

Not long ago I wrote a little rant in this blog about the shallowness of Flickr’s “award groups”, today decided to be a bit more constructive and point some that give you more than shiny awards:

• Hit, Miss, Maybe, WHY?
• TWIP Critique
• Score 1 to 20 on 20
• DeleteMe Uncensored
• flickr Rank me!
• Digital Photography - Learning Zone
• THE WORLD’S LEADING YOUNG PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY COMMUNITY
• Score Me!
• Nikon Digital Learning Center
• The World Through My Eyes

Technorati Tags: flickr

Spam really gets everywhere, the screenshot on the right is from the Tags box in the front page of DotNetKicks, a Digg-like online community dedicated to .Net programmers.

Technorati Tags: dotnetkicks,spam

One of the most interesting sides of flickr has to be the social and community features: anyone can create a group and build a small, or not so small, community around a given theme,feature,camera,etc. (just like I did for Nikon FM2 owners). Nowadays there are lots of groups available and eventually the rules for some have become more and more complicated, like: must comment/tag/favorite (any combination of those three actions) X photos for each Y photos added to the group’s pool.

The latest trend in flickr is “award groups”, where you “award” (add a corny, colorful, flashy and sometimes large image) an existing photo in the group’s pool or, much worse, invite a photo to the group’s pool. These “award groups” are a bit like candy: it may taste good but in the end candy will give you teeth cavities, become tired of all that sweetness (check the figure below) and get absolutely no nutritional value. In other words: these groups “pollute” the comments area, have almost no meaningful information and are useful only to feed someone’s ego.

PS- For a kick-ass, but not for the faint-hearted, group head to Delete Me Uncensored.

Technorati Tags: flickr

AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G (via Digital Photography school)

Throughout these years I’ve been in the digital photography world (four, since I bought my D70) one of the things that has been nagging my mind was the lack of a normal lens from Nikon targeted to digital SLR cameras. Something that’s almost mandatory the film world. 

Until now the only option was the 30mm lens from Sigma, a nice lens but has the “problem” of allowing a f/1.4 aperture, which means it’s not that cheap. It seems Nikon finally woken up and released something with the same angle of view of those 50mm lenses in full frame film SLR cameras.

Technorati Tags: nikon,lens,50mm,nikkor

Unity is a pretty neat piece of work, it’s a simple and straightforward dependency injection container and it gets the job done, which is all you want from any implementation like this.

If someone’s trying to go beyond the “get an implementation instance for a given interface” examples found in most of the tutorials then proper dependency injection will be the way to go. This means returning the proper instance for the given interface, but also properly the objects that instance needs, and also the objects needed by those objects, and this could go on forever. Unity can do this almost automatically, but to do so it may need hints on how objects should be created, specially to choose the right constructor when multiple are available (by default will choose the fatest of them all).

One of the ways this problem is solved is using an attribute that indicates which constructor should be used (the same is valid for either properties and method calls), as shown below:

public class MyClass

{

  public MyObject(SomeOtherClass myObjA)

  {

    ...

  }

  [InjectionConstructor]

  public MyObject(MyDependentClass myObjB)

  {

    ...

  }

} 

The problem is: Unity, and all other dependency injection containers, want to solve a simple issue: reduce coupling between modules, classes, etc. That’s achieved by removing the dependency to the proper implementation, you only have to know the contract to use (the interface) and the dependency injection container will return the proper implementation, whatever that may be. But, by doing this we’re adding another dependency: to the dependency injection container implementation (like Unity), and while this is reasonable for the class that needs to use the container is not so reasonable for the classes the container will use.

Take the code sample above: MyClass is just a plain class, by adding the InjectionConstructor attribute we’re adding a needless dependency because that class will never use Unity, it will be used by Unity. For me using this can be a design flaw that goes against what dependency injection is supposed to achieve. A safer, but more time consuming, way to get around this is to explicitly configure those dependencies (either in design time or run time) instead of letting Unity try to figure them out.

Technorati Tags: microsoft,enterprise library,dependency injection,unity,ioc

Traditional social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious are great for finding articles and other text that other Web surfers have tagged as interesting.

For the visually oriented, the pickings have been slim. Now, however, a handful of photo-oriented bookmarking sites are emerging to entertain the eye as well as the mind.
Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing [Bits Blog]

Photo bookmarking, or visual bookmarking, it’s such a clever idea that you think “why haven’t anyone came up with this before?”. Nevertheless it’s a kind of service that’s still on its infancy and has some issues that aren’t solved:

• Browser integration- still no proper extensions are available, vi.sualize.us has a Firefox extension but they could go much further than that (I’m thinking of something as feature rich as the Delicious plugin).
• Current photo communities- how would such a service deal with the Favorites feature in photo communities like Flickr? Some kind of integration (if I’m a Flickr user then “favorite” that photo also) or think of at as a complete replacement? Because I still think I’m doing the same thing when “favoriting” a photo in Flickr/Zooomr or visual bookmarking in one of these services.

Technorati Tags: delicious, we♥it, we heart it, ffffound, vi.sualize.us, visualizeus, social bookmarking, bookmarking

LX3 and my black cat, by dannysay

This weekend I bought myself a new toy!

For some time I felt the need of yet another camera, something between my fully featured but also bigger and bulkier DSLR and my ultra-portable, always available but less powerful camera phone. So when I started reading all the so many people thrilled I got curious about the Panasonic LX3, and a few reviews later I ended up buying it.

I haven’t tested it properly, but for now it seems it’s exactly what I was looking for: it’s quite small and portable, only slightly bigger than the regular compact camera, but with a helluva lens and a few other features aimed to please photographers.

Technorati Tags: lumix, lx3, camera

Oh, and it also has a few mechanical things about a monthly Sprint and daily Scrum. Trivial stuff compared to the rest. But guess which part people adopt? That’s right–Sprints and Scrums. Rapid cycles, but none of the good stuff that makes rapid cycles sustainable.
James Shore: The Decline and Fall of Agile