CamcorderInfo.com has a review of Canon's new Vixia HF10 Camcorder.



It's a zexy camera that I really want to love. It's a third generation flash-based AVCHD camera with a higher bitrate (17Mbps!) Tape seems archaic these days, but it's still a hard format to beat. The hard core users are still using tape (better quality, easier to get into your edit suite, etc.), but with media prices falling, it's hard to resist a flash or hard-drive based device.

The first of two things that give me pause about this camera is the AVCHD format, which is a great format... if you don't want to make edits. Unless you've got the latest Mac Pro, you're probably going to be waiting for AVCHD to convert to an intermediate, editable format. You'll also need to contend with the 4:1 disk space requirements. That is to say, if you've recorded a 16GB AVCHD file, you'll need 64GB to edit it. My second concern with this device (but also with most flash-based HD camcorders) is that it doesn't have optical viewfinder - an underrated feature. If you shoot lots of footage, you'll find that you prefer a viewfinder over the LCD screen.

If you are looking for a flash based camcorder, this Vixia is hard to beat. Outside of the performance of the camera alone, however, caveat emptor.

Tags: camcorders, avchd, canon, hd

Guy Kawasaki, best known as Apple's technology evangelist during the 80's gave a great interview with Steve Ballmer.

Unlike the Lacy/Zuckerberg fiasco at SXSW, Kawasaki doesn't really let Ballmer get away with simple PR answers. It's pretty interesting to hear the view from Redmond, especially if it's done by a good interviewer. I mean, how many people have the balls to ask Steve Ballmer "what's the deal with Vista?"

Tags: guy kawasaki, mix, steve ballmer, interview

I just finished reading Scott Rosenberg's book, Dreaming In Code. Rosenberg, who is one of the founders of Salon.com, a popular liberal web site. The book is about an open source project led by Mitch Kapor, the man behind Lotus. Yes, that Lotus.



At the beginning of the book, Kapor has dreams of creating a new personal information manager, code named Chandler. The project, like most major software projects, undergoes its share of trials and tribulations. What was expected to be a yearlong effort to reach its first release stretched itself out to three years. By the end of the book, 1.0 still had not yet been released. If you've worked in the software industry at all, you'll definitely identify with the pitfalls that Kapor's team encountered.

It's important to keep in mind that this book is written from a non-technical perspective. In fact, I highly recommend this book for this reason. Anyone who's been in earshot of my bitching during a project has heard me talk about stuff like Brook's Law, Joel Spolsky and "eating your own dogfood". This book can teach a non-techie all about the stuff that I talk about all the time in a non-boring fashion. It's a perfect primer (a cautionary tale, perhaps?) for anyone looking to get knee deep in the software industry, whether it be as a programmer, designer or project manager.

Tags: software, programming, chandler, mitch kapor

Some enterprising due has managed to get his own version of Guitar Hero to run on that retro classic PC, the Commodore 64.

Tags: guitar hero, commodore 64

There's been a huge hubbub over the 'keynote' interview at SXSW between Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. The geeks on hand in the audience weren't too impressed with the softball questions being lobbed at Zuckerberg, and Lacy quickly lost control of the entire situation, her attitude towards her interview subject or the crowd notwithstanding. Bizarre geeky soap opera ensues.

Twitter was abuzz with comments from people in the audience, with criticism (followed by apologies) coming from some of the bigger names of blogging, including the likes of Robert Scoble.

Tags: sarah lacy, sxsw, mark zuckerberg, facebook, twitter, robert scoble

This is a bizarrely wonderful illusion.

Tags: optical, illusion

Feeling OSX envy on your Windows machine?

Try Stardock Objectdock. It's free, and the dock works just as well as the one you'll see in OSX. The weather dock icon is very nice... I would say it's handier than using a dashboard widget.

Tags: freeware, mac, windows, dock

Apple has posted high quality video of the recent iPhone SDK announcement.



It's a bit long, and probably boring if you're not a programming nerd, but there are some interesting gems in there. If you've got the Next Great Idea for mobile software, now might be the time to get cracking. With their expanding market share, and improved enterprise support, the iPhone could just be the next big thing in mobile computing.

Tags: iphone, sdk, keynote, steve jobs

While there are plenty of Javascript/Ajax/CSS libraries out there, one of the best is the YUI libraries from the Yahoo Developer Network. They've got libraries for just about every major user interface component you can think of, and a little more.



The libraries are well documented, and there are also instructional videos that you can watch. The videos are also available in the iTunes store as podcasts (look for YUI Theater).

Tags: javascript, css, gui, library, freeware, open source, ajax

I came across an interesting banner ad on SourceForge for a product called Splunk, which is a log analyzer tool. If you're running an IT shop with multiple applications generating a pile of logs, this could be the tool for you.



Basically, it indexes your log files, and provides an interface that can help you spot trends and tag resolutions for recurring errors. It's free if you've got less than 500MB of logs per day to be indexed - after that's, prices start at a cool $5K for an enterprise license. It supports multiple platforms, including Mac, and it seems like it could be a useful tool, especially if you use a particular Business Intelligence suite that shall not be named that (shamefully) can't even produce a consistent log file format across its many applications.

Tags: splunk, log, analytics, freeware, statistics

Apple was recently profiled as Fortune Magazine's most admired company in America.

While there are a bunch of quotable nuggets in the interview, Jobs' view on surviving a recession is quite admirable:

We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time.

Tags: apple, steve jobs