POTD

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Slashdot: iPod Dangerous When Wet
Eric: People Dangerous When Stupid

Leica has delayed the release of its Digital Modul R once again, this time until the end of May.

I had a chance to play with the digital back attached to an R9 at PhotoVillage last Friday. We were able to see how the film and digital backs can be interchanged and were able to shoot the camera.

Pretty nice. Surprisingly light, good controls on the back, really nice, bright viewfinder. One particularly interesting thing about the R9 viewfinder with the digital back attached; looking through it, you see more than the frame. Rather than change the viewfinder to accommodate the 1.4 cropping factor of the smaller sensor, Leica did the rangefinder thing. The viewfinder contains framelines showing where the image falls in the digital back. Very interesting.

My only issues were with the camera itself; something about a manual focus SLR feels weird to me. I'm sure I'd get used to it, though.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon setting up an instance of Weblogic with Hibernate. Good God.

It takes all together too much effort to create the Weblogic domain, a directory structure, stub out a session façade, make a DTO, create a Hibernate mapping, create a Hibernate config, generate the deployment descriptors, make a build file, get the twenty additional needed libraries assembled, and get a session factory in JNDI.

Just to get a working server application shell that doesn't (yet) do anything. We haven't even started talking about the client application.

This really needs to get easier some day.

POTD

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POTD

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Self portrait.

Iraqi cultural forums.

"Now come the first stirrings of what may be the most telling sign of this shift from hardcore to hybrid: people who are both middle of the road and off the grid. Across the US some 185,000 households have switched from the local power company to their own homegrown, renewable energy."