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If you’re tired of the sheer embuggerance involved in cleaning your DSLR’s image sensor, you might be interested in Fixation, a professional photographic services company at Vauxhall in London. They offer while-you-wait sensor cleaning for most cropped sensor Canon and Nikon models at £28.00 + VAT, and at £55.00 + VAT for full-frame models.

That sounds pretty good to me. Given that the last time I attempted to thoroughly clean my sensor it took me an entire day, £28.00 + VAT sounds pretty reasonable. I’ll probably be dropping off my camera there sometime in the next few weeks. I’ll report back with the experience.

If you’d rather clean your sensor yourself, Fixation have a useful looking guide on their site full of tips regarding cleaning technique and products. Given their experience, it’s probably one of the more trustworthy guides available.

(I finally got my sensor cleaned by Fixation. Here’s the update)

UPDATE: The JavaScript script that is pulling in the promotional image from ubuntu.com is now (November, 2008) grabbing the latest one, for Intrepid Ibex. The script is obviously a generic one and will presumably automatically update the image again during the count-down to the release of Jaunty Jackelope.

I’m looking forward to the next release of Ubuntu, not least with it being an LTS and all. My last upgrade, from Feisty to Gutsy wasn’t as smooth and trouble-free as my previous one from Dapper to Feisty (I skipped Edgy). The upgrade from Dapper to Feisty went well using the Distribution Upgrade facility (via Edgy), but Gutsy didn’t behave itself satisfactorily until I installed it clean, from scratch, on the two desktops I use and on our family ThinkPad. Moreover, it took several months’ worth of updates before some of the more irksome bugs were swatted. (I should add that I’ve encountered no significant issues running the command line-only 7.10 Server Edition on my development server.)

I won’t be in a rush to upgrade this time around. I wasn’t in a particular rush at the last release and had intended to wait for at least a month or two, but problems with Feisty’s support for WPA and the wi-fi card in our laptop caused me to install Gutsy early, and once it was on the laptop, I couldn’t resist installing it on my desktops and server as well, if only to keep all machines on an equal footing.

For me, Gutsy has never felt as well-sorted as Feisty. I’m speaking loosely, most of the issues I’ve had have been within applications and utilities and I’ve really been too busy to spend time finding out to what extent responsibility for those glitches lay with Ubuntu developers or with the maintainers of the applications and utilities themselves. Sometimes it’s clear from Launchpad whether or not a particular issue is an Ubuntu-only one, other times the picture is less clear. Whatever, by month 3 or 4 of the release, it seemed that Gutsy had finally settled down. Firefox memory management and proprietary Flash support aside, Gutsy and its apps certainly seem reasonably sorted now.

I like the philosophy behind the LTS releases, but it can be hard to resist compelling new features that appear in the interim releases. 6.06 (Dapper Drake) suffered from relatively poor wi-fi adapter support, which no doubt made it hard for users of such cards to resist upgrading to subsequent non-LTS releases. Perhaps the pending LTS release will fare better vis-a-vis its non-LTS successors, at least for laptop and home users? I see that release 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is planning a complete desktop overhaul. Call me shallow, but I’ll probably find that hard to resist and throw the greater stability guarantee of 8.04 out of the window in order to get me some new chrome!

Some Gutsy groans aside, I’m still enamoured with the whole Ubuntu project (as well as the broader FOSS movement in general). I’m not only highly appreciative of the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, but also the Ubuntu project’s underlying philosophy and its wider aims in promoting free software (and maybe soon, open hardware?). I’ve been a computer user now for 18 years or so, and for the first time I’ve cared enough about the software I’m using to buy a logo-emblazoned T-shirt, mug, sweatshirt, hooded top and even stickers. I’m 42 years old and I bought stickers! Melissa thinks I’m suffering from an early onset of mid-life crisis.

Well, here’s looking forward to 8.04 Hardy Heron. I’d have put the countdown graphic in my sidebar, but it’s too wide for the my (clumsily hacked) default WordPress theme, and having written this, I’ve now exhausted my lunch-break free time, so, for the time being at least, in this post the graphic will have to stay.

“A New Zealand man who claimed he was raped by a wombat and that the experience left him speaking with an Australian accent has been found guilty of wasting police time.”

The full, lurid story.

I think Scott Adams’ two line reply to the pastor is perfect.

Response to an ‘offended’ pastor.

This is heartening, two established security software firms are expressing reservations about the Phorm system which several major British ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse) have been trialling recently.

What’s more, from the quotes in the article, it sounds like the questions submitted by The Register to the ISPs involved are causing some pause for thought at those companies.

As with The Register’s previous posts on Phorm, the comments left on this latest article provide a pretty good indication of what many savvy IT types think of the proposed system.

“Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.”

“Mike” is Mike Nash, the Corporate Vice President of Windows Product Management at Microsoft. The above quote is from an article in today’s New York Times.

When you need to “bounce back”, this is how you should do it. Writing as an armchair West Ham fan*, I feel compelled to congratulate Arsenal on their fantastic performance last night. Awesome, scintillating football! Not only has no team from England so dominated AC Milan on their own ground, but I don’t ever recall seeing anyone else do so either.

Given Arsenal’s recent travails and signs of apparent psychological frailty under pressure (epitomized by the sight of an emotional William Gallas collapsed on the turf at the end of the Birmingham game), I’m sure more than a few Arsenal fans went into last night’s match fearing the worst. What they got was quite simply an awesome display of football played at the highest level. The individual skill, strength, determination, fitness, and superb positioning of the Arsenal players, particularly in midfield, quite honestly made AC Milan look like a team of schoolboys for long periods during the game. How often has it been possible to say that about Milan? They were fire-fighting for much of the match and seemed to be in a state of bewilderment in the face of Arsenal’s power-play. Towards the end of the second half they appeared to have been rendered ineffectual as a unit.

Adebayor and Diaby seemed to be able to go past their opponents at will, Hleb and Fabregas appeared to have super-glue on the end of their boots and they unerringly collected passes and spun away from danger like matadors with black belts in Aikdo, Senderos was Adams-esque in defence, haranguing his colleagues, putting in vital tackle after tackle. I seriously doubt that the crowd at the San Siro has ever seen its team go for such long periods without the ball.

Fantastic stuff. Thanks to all at AFC for an exciting 90 minutes (if only the England team could play football like this). Here’s to an Arsenal-Barcelona final!

(*I haven’t been to Upton Park since 1979 and last went to a match in which West Ham played in 1996)