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Recently I was deciding what new digital camera to buy. A friend of mine lent me his Canon EOS D1 Mark II with some high-end lenses. I lugged several 1000 $ of equipment and several kg’s around for one long weekend and was able to snap around 1000 pictures. This camera is incredible good, the picture quality is great, and the controls make so much sense (once you get used to using two hands to change anything). Clearly a DSLR is the way to go. Maybe not a D1, but an amateur version, maybe a D350 or a Nikon D70 or similar. ...

My - time flies. If you’re in Zurich, come by tonight. There might be cake. There might be wine. I’ll be there.

On February 27. and 28. I will be hosting Ruby On Rails Training in Zurich, Switzerland. There still are open slots, so if you want to learn hands-on how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails, now is the time to sign up. Details: Venue: Badenerstrasse 585, 8048 Zurich Cost: CHF 750.– Language: German Content Introduction to Rails Database to prototype in 15 minutes Building an attractive, performant and secure web application Using AJAX for dynamic user interfaces Testing using unit and functional tests Using agile development techniques Send an email to info@invisible.ch to sign up for this seminar. ...

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby On Rails have launched their next application: Campfire. Campfire is a chat application, that shares some traits with Internet Relay Chat but runs inside a web browser. There are some added benefits like searchable transcripts, file sharing. Plus, it looks really nice: I’m running on the 30 days trial account to see, if it solves enough problems that it’s worth to shell out $12 per month for a regular account. ...

Tim Bray over at Ongoing talks about AJAX Performance. His point being, that we should use AJAX to offload heavy computation from the web-server to the users browser. I suspect there’s a huge system-wide optimization waiting out there for us to grab, by pushing as much of the templating and page generation work out there onto the clients. In particular, when you’re personalizing a page, assign all the work you can to the personal computer sitting in front of the person in question. ...

One of the really bad things in the blogosphere is keeping track of all the comments you made around other blogs. And if you use a news reader to aggregate the RSS feeds, it’s even worse, because you don’t even see any comments - unless you visit the blog in your web browser. Enter CoComment by a team of Swisscom Innovations. Laurent Haug also has his fingers in it somehow. This application keeps track of the comments you posted and comments to your comments. It integrates as a bookmarklet, but Firefox users can take advantage of a Greasemonkey script to handle the really difficult taks of hitting a bookmark prior to posting. ...