blog.seric.at

Canon EOS 60D finally here!

seric — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:00:29 +0000

Canon EOS 60D

As I was assuming a couple of weeks ago, the Canon EOS 60D is finally here. Canon just posted a press release and added a product walkthrough video as well as a sample video shot with the Canon EOS 60D. The interesting parts: The camera features an 18mp DIGIC IV processor which is capable of 1080p H.264 video. As a new feature for any Canon EOS camera, the 60D will have an articulating 3″ LCD screen. Specially for taking videos this could be a real enhancement. The rest of the features is more or less a mixture of the bigger EOS 7D and the smaller EOS 550D/T2i like the ISO range from 100 to 6.400 (plus H 12.800), in-camera video editing (who needs that?).

The EOS 60D will be available in September for roughly 900 Euro (Body) or 1.100 Euro (including an EF-S 18-135 3.5-5.6 IS lens).

UPDATE DPreview did a small but nice little preview of the EOS 60D. Also Philip Bloom mentioned the new 60D, and yes he is totally right: We will see, what time brings and the EOS 7D needs a firmeware upgrade immediately.

Automatic Anti-Pattern Corrections for PHP

seric — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:23:45 +0000

During my computer science studies at the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences I wrote my bachelor thesis about “Automatic Anti-Pattern Corrections for PHP”. As a fan of the open source philosophy, I want to share my work with others. I invite everyone to contribute to the great lex-pass project and this approach to better PHP software. Please share your thought and ideas on this with me and others by leaving a comment or sending me a message.

The thesis is written in german but at least there is an english abstract.

Abstract

Since the first release of the programming language PHP, PHP has been rapidly developed. As a result to these huge improvements, many of the features from PHP 4 have been rewritten or replaced in PHP 5. For instance exception handling, abstract classes and interfaces have been introduced. Additionally, objects are not getting copied (call-by-value) every time they are assigned to another variable or used as function parameters, but assigned as reference (call-by-reference). As a result, many old and bad constructs remain in already existing applications. This leads to several issues.

That is why many companies struggle especially with security and performance problems. Manual refactoring of existing source code is time-consuming and a reason why a lot of companies abandon such improvements.
The open-source initiative of Facebook led to the tool lex-pass which is already capable of some very basic refactoring transformations. It is using the abstract syntax tree (AST) to transform PHP into corrected code according to predefined rules.

This bachelor thesis detects several anti-patterns and implements some basic transformations. As a result, these anti-patterns are automatically corrected with lex-pass. Then the implemented transformations are explained in detail and some further possible corrections are discussed. For demonstration purposes, some well known open-source projects are being tested and corrected with the written transformations.

As a conclusion the advantages and disadvantages of automatic corrections are explained and the usefulness and limitations of such automatic transformations are illustrated.

Download “Automatic Anti-Pattern Corrections for PHP” bachelor thesis

I would like to thank the people from Mayflower GmbH for their great support and Daniel Corson from Facebook for his contribution to my work.

Received My Canon EOS 7D

seric — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:35:24 +0000

Today my new Canon EOS 7D arrived and I am off to play now. Can’t wait to take awesome pictures and interesting movies.

Canon EOS 60D coming soon?

seric — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:34:16 +0000

Just last week Canon introduced the new EOS 550D (Rebel T2i) and this camera will soon be available. Anyone who – like myself – is playing with the idea to upgrade from a previouse three-digit EOS camera to the EOS 550D, will probably also checked out the Canon EOS 7D, which offers similar features but in some areas performs significantly better. The interesting thing about the EOS 7D and EOS 550D are, beside a lot of other outstanding features, the new HDSLR opportunities, ie HD movie recording with a digital SLR camera.

But, there are already 18 months in between the introduction of the EOS 50D, which has a body that is certainly at an equal level to the EOS 7D. This usually speaks for a quick upgrade from Canon’s site.

This means for me, that I will not immediately buy the new EOS 550D but wait a little for a hopefully soon comming EOS 60D. The 60D will for sure have a price tag positioned between the 550D (about 700 euros) and 7D (about 1,300 euros) and so get probably in the range of about 1,000 euros.

So let’s wait and see. Meanwhile the Canon Rumors website can be checked regularly.

Symfony 2.0 Preview

seric — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:51:57 +0000

Here we go. Fabien Potencier last week released the preview website for symfony 2.0 (symfony reloaded). Me, as a long time PHP and symfony user this preview shows a lot of new interesting stuff comming to web development with symfony. A Quick-Tour of Fabiens newest baby is also available and points out major changes to the framework. First thing to notice is the completly changed directory structure. Another major step is the use of >= PHP 5.3.2 which adds support for namespaces and gives a great performance boost. As release date for symfony 2.0 “late 2010″ is scheduled.

Windows 7: Changed

seric — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:51:33 +0000

Ok, I don’t like Microsoft and Windows. I did like Windows XP for a while but never tried Vista because of the bad things I saw at my friends computers. Recently I installed Windows 7 as second OS on my MacBook Pro. And my deepest despair turned into someting good. I already tried to install Windows 7 with Parallels in OS X a couple of weeks ago, got several bluescreens and thought about never trying Windows 7 again. Anyhow, it seems Microsoft did an actually not so bad job with Windows 7. (Quite) all the anoying stuff is gone. The desktop looks nice, the windows align nice, the networking works nice (internet connection sharing worked within seconds).

Now there is Snow Leopard on my Mac and I have to say, it seems Snow Leopard runs faster but still have some problems with the now all 64bit applications. Windows 7 still lacks of decent 64bit support but seems to be quite stable though. What is the better decision? Turning to full 64bit support now and have some problems with but have for sure better updates in the future OR stay with the 32bit and have no problems with (but be a little slower).

Anyway. We will see in the future what was the better decision but for now Microsoft did a better job with Windows 7 than with Vista. Thanks.

Sweden is different, Part I: Beach?

seric — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:09:22 +0000

If you wake up in Sweden, go down to the beach, you probably don’t expect that. But yes, also cows like the sea.

Last Day in Sweden – Moving to Denmark

seric — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:08:23 +0000

I am so sad – Sweden is such a perfect country for me. It feels like living on the countryside but still be in a big city (Jönköping) with so much party and great people! Especially I will miss the people from the students accommodation Cyclamen.

I will hopefully be back asap!

But I am really looking forward to go to Copenhagen, Denmark tomorrow. Starting with an introduction day tomorrow and a welcome dinner on tuesday.

Was wählt man in Deutschland?

seric — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:05:41 +0000

20:01 <@seric> haja. was würde man als mündiger bürger in .de bloß wählen?!
20:01 <@sarah-> seric, ganz klar
20:01 <@sarah-> die schweiz

Eigentlich traurigerweise richtig.

Unicode print fail

seric — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:27:49 +0000

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