Having agonized over the decision of buying a new digital camera for months, I finally picked up a new Nikon D40 DSLR using the plethora of FutureShop gift cards my family got me for Christmas. It's an awesome piece of gear! Let me tell you about my journey to get here.

I bought my first digicam about 4 years ago and it's been a decent camera. It's a 3-megapixel Toshiba PDR-M71 with a 2.8x optical zoom with many manual controls such as shutter speed and aperture. It takes fairly good pictures and was well reviewed in its day. (In fact, I wrote a review on FutureShop's web site and won a FutureShop gift card for my efforts!) However, my biggest complaint with the camera is that it is slow. Slow to power-up, slow to recycle, just plain slow. And of course, being a consumer-level digicam, most of the advanced settings are buried in menus making it difficult to experiment. Another feature that I yearned for was a better optical zoom - I like to take the odd nature picture and it's difficult to get close up to the animals of nature, you know?

So, for the past several months I've been looking at the "super-zoom" class of cameras, namely the Canon S3 IS and the Sony DSC-H5. They are significantly faster that my old Toshiba, take excellent pictures and have 12x optical zoom to boot. They also come with the added bonus of "movie mode" allowing you to take pretty good quality videos (my Toshiba has a movie mode, too, but it's only at 320 x 200). However, I've also secretly lusted after the holy grail of digital cameras - the digital SLR. These are the domain of the true photographer and for good reason. DSLRs come with interchangeable lenses, super-fast speed, and more manual controls than you can shake a stick at. But they are damn expensive, and they can lead you down the path of an extremely expensive hobby - some lenses cost well over $1000!

This week I finally made up my mind. I was on my way to FutureShop to pick up a Sony H5. It's a very nice camera and it was in my price range. So I get to the camera counter and I start fiddling around with the H5 (something I have done frequently over the past little while) and it's just kinda missing something, you know? It's kinda small and the viewfinder is actually a tiny LCD screen where it's almost impossible to tell if the frame is in focus. I had gotten spoiled earlier that day because I spent some time at Carsand Mosher trying out a D40 (and a Canon S3). The viewfinder on an SLR is a totally different experience than the standard point-and-shoot digicams. So, I was less than thrilled with the shooting experience with the H5. As luck would have it, though, FutureShop had one Nikon D40 left - an open-box item with a nice discount to boot! There is no way I can turn down a bargain (must be the Scottish blood in me) so I bought it instead.

I've been taking pictures constantly since I bought it. This thing is so FAST that it truly makes it a joy to use. There is no "boot" time, there is no shutter lag, and the recycle time is so fast you hardly notice it! The camera just feels "right" when I'm holding it and it's so easy to use. I get carried away with it and I just keep clicking the shutter button - it doesn't really matter where the camera is pointed. I can't stop myself - it's addictive.

The camera is not perfect, however. I wish I could have bought a lens with more zoom capability - the standard lens that comes with the kit is roughly equivalent to a 3x optical zoom on a point-and-shoot. Also, this being Nikon's entry-level DSLR, it doesn't have exposure bracketing which I like to use as "insurance" when taking pictures (my Toshiba has this feature, oddly enough). For this feature I would either have to spend an extra $300 on Canon's Digital Rebel, or an extra $700 on Nikon's next model up, the D80. I really like the Nikon cameras and an extra $700 just wasn't in my price range.

Still, the D40 is a wicked piece of kit for the money. If you're looking at upgrading your current camera, you should really take a good look at the D40. I'm sure that it will totally change your photographing experience like it has done for me.

I just finished reading a rather interesting book called Showstopper! written by G. Pascal Zachary in 1994. The book chronicles the development of Windows NT from its inception in the fall of 1988 until its first release in the summer of 1993. It is exceptionally well written, focusing more on the people involved and less on the actual technology being created. In fact, you don't really have to be a technology enthusiast to enjoy the book. Every page is filled with the heartaches and triumphs of the hundreds of programmers, testers, builders, and program managers involved in the creation of this brand new operating system.

People and personalities play a very strong role in this book. The book's primary focus is on the uber-architect and team lead of NT, David Cutler, who on page 2 already has a broken finger and a cracked toe from taking out his frustrations on the walls of Building Two at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Throughout the book he is portrayed as a dark, brooding drill sergeant who is feared by many and regarded as a hero by others. Cutler came to Microsoft from Digital Equipment Corporation where he and his team developed the VMS operating system that ran on DEC's Vax computers, released in 1977. At Microsoft, Cutler rules his team with an iron fist and he has a unique vision for this new operating system: it will run on multiple hardware platforms. Up until this time, an operating system was strongly tied to the hardware it ran on. Even UNIX had so many flavours that any software written for it had to be built with a specific version in mind. Though NT started out with a promise of being able to run OS/2 programs (OS/2 was a joint operating system venture between Microsoft and IBM), the commercial failure of OS/2 had the team change gears so that NT would run older DOS and Windows programs instead. The OS/2 debacle showed that customers weren't willing to leave their old programs behind (OS/2 couldn't run programs written for DOS or Windows).

The original schedule for NT called for it to be released in March of 1991. However, many things conspired to push this ship date back by more than two years. The initial CPU targeted for the new OS was Intel's doomed i860 RISC chip, which really didn't exist in any commercial form - the NT team had to assemble their own hardware to fashion an i860 computer on which to run the earliest versions of the OS. The team later had to switch gears to Intel's mainstream x86 series and the new MIPS chips. OS/2 compatibility was dropped in favour of DOS/Windows compatibility. The new file system (NTFS) was delayed by the need to retain compatibility with older file systems. The size of the team mushroomed over the life of the project, and there were several turf wars between various teams, divisions, and program managers.

Over the life of the project, many personal relationships were destroyed as team members spent countless hours at the Microsoft campus. Spouses and children were relegated to second place in favour of the new operating system that would define Microsoft's future. Stock options made millionaires out of many on the team, though some left giving up hundreds of thousands in vested stock just to retain their sanity. Throughout it all Cutler is there watching over everything, making his demands and demanding from his team, cursing and swearing, punching walls, sticking to his guns and making few compromises. At the end of the book I found myself asking, "Why is it that so many great leaders have to be such large assholes?" Honestly, does greatness have to exact such a hefty price?

Though you may not be a fan of Microsoft or Windows NT, it is largely irrelevant as the most interesting aspect of the book is the multitude of personalities and their interactions with each other. And though the book is over 10 years old, it still holds some fascinating insights into the development of large software programs.

Development in today's world of .NET Framework 2.0 (and now 3.0), Visual Studio 2005 Team System, SQL Server 2005 and other vaious high-power applications requires sturdy hardware on which to code. Being on the bleeding edge of any technology usually requires the latest and greatest in hardware resources in order to be even moderately productive. After running all of the aforementioned apps on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 desktop with 512 MB of RAM for several months, my employer blessed me with a brand new Dell Latitude D820. And not a moment too soon, either.

I have been using this new laptop for about 3 months now, and it is one of the best latops I have ever had (previous models I have used include a Compaq M500, two other Dell Latitude models, and an IBM ThinkPad T40). My configuration includes an Intel Core Duo T2600 at 2.16 GHz, 2MB 2GB of RAM (the single most important item, IMHO), a 60 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, a CD-R/DVD drive, and a 1680 x 1050 15.4" widescreen display running on an Intel 945GM adapter. My OS is Windows XP Pro, SP2. Though heavier than a 12" laptop, it's still light enough for everyday travelling while preserving a solid feel and high build quality.

The keyboard is quite nice for a laptop, though I still prefer to use an external keyboard when I can. There are four dedicated feature buttons above the keyboard, two for audio volume, one for mute, and the power button. The keyboard is flanked on either side by speakers. On the left side of the laptop is a slider switch to control the built-in WiFi card. It turns the laptop's WiFi antenna on and off, but it also has a really neat feature where sliding the switch all the way up will illuminate a small green LED if a WiFi signal is detected. This feature works even if the laptop is off, so you can quickly determine if a hotpsot is within range without opening the screen and turning on the entire machine. Also on the left side are 1394 (Firewire), audio line-in, and headphone jacks, in addition to the IR port and the PC and EC card slots. The back of the machine has the following connections: VGA, 9-pin serial, 2 USB ports. The right side has an additional 2 USB ports and the CD/DVD drive.

While performing usual development tasks, the machine is extremely responsive, even with three instances of Visual Studio 2005 open, SQL Server Management Studio, several browser windows and driving an external 20" display at 1680 X 1050 in addition to the laptop screen in an extended desktop configuration. I attribute this to the dual-core processor and ample RAM. It is as responsive or even more so than my personal hyperthreaded, overclocked P-4 running at 3.5 GHz with 2MB of RAM and an ATI X800XL video card driving a single 1920 X 1200 display. Hard drive intensive operations still seem quicker on my desktop, though it is running two 200 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration, so I would expect it to have the edge speed-wise.

Battery life is also quite impressive. Though I haven't benchmarked it properly, I appear to get about 4 hours on a single charge while performing elementary tasks such as web surfing or typing new blog entries. In fact, the only thing that I don't like about this laptop is the display. Cramming a 1680 x 1050 display into a 15.4" screen results in a pretty high dpi, and text that is very clear, but microscopically small. This, combined with a viewing angle that results in a dimmed display when you're even slightly off-axis results in a display that is not very pleasant to use. The high resolution is nice, but I generally prefer the much brighter and easier-to-read display on my wife's budget-class e-Machine's laptop.

The solution to the display issue for everyday use at the office is, of course, adding a docking station and external display. The docking station I use is Dell's XXX unit which provides all the usual ports in addition to a DVI video connector, an S/PDIF digital audio out, and an S-video out. The company-provided external display is a 17" CRT which is sooo 1990's. Not satisfied with such an antique, I bought a Dell 2007WFP 20" widescreen flat panel to use at work. Compared to the built-in laptop display, this unit is an absolute joy to work with.

So, if you are in the market for a new laptop, I heartily recommend the Dell Latitude D820. I would suggest, however, that you opt for the "real" video card option and maybe a larger hard drive. I am so impressed with this unit that I would seriously considering buying one with my own money if I had to buy my own gear.