After several months of tests and experiments, I have finally determined something: Infrared with the Lumix DMC-FZ8 just doesn’t work.

I’ve been trying to use a R72 Near-Infrared filter to filter out the “normal” light that we see, leaving only the infrared light that I wanted to capture. The FZ8 is sensitive to infrared, as can be easily demonstrated by taking a picture of a TV remote control. What you’ll see is a couple points of light coming from the remote; these are the infrared lights that are used to transmit commands to the TV.

Though having a camera that is sensitive to infrared, doesn’t make it suited for infrared photography. While the FZ8 is a great camera, being light weight, offering pro-level options (such as RAW mode) without the bulk of a DSLR – this is one thing that just doesn’t work.

Here are a few of the issues I’ve seen, and so far been unable to get passed:

• Auto-Focus: While this isn’t a huge surprise, auto-focus doesn’t work when the R72 filter is in place.
• Manual-Focus: The FZ8 does offer manual focus, though using it when there is so little light making it to the sensor is nearly impossible.
• Grainy: Even when ISO is set to 100 instead of the default of auto, the images are extremely grainy. While this can provide a somewhat artistic effect – it’s not what I’m looking for.

While it does seem to have some promise in replicating an infrared version of pinhole photography, it simply doesn’t work for traditional infrared.

I’ve been working on a project recently that uses avatars, while planning out this specific feature it occurred to me – why should we re-invent the wheel? There’s already at least one service that specializes in doing it right: Gravatar.

While building something as simple as avatar support takes a relatively small amount of time, when working against a tight deadline or a tight budget every minute counts. In the world of an ISV (especially a young one) the balance of user satisfaction and development time is critical. Using a service such as Gravatar is a great way to give the users what they want with minimal impact to the timeline.

With a super-simple implementation we were able to get it running within a few minutes – compare that to at least a few hours to build a custom system. Plus, reduced server load as we aren’t hosting the images and a cleaner, simpler interface as it’s one less option the user has to look through.

Over the next few weeks (and months) I’ll be posting a series of articles on the tools and services that start-ups can use to make their business both more efficient and more profitable. This is aimed at ISVs (both micro and close to micro) though most of this should apply to any technology startup.

When you are starting a business, there are many important considerations with anything you use, here are the keys points I’ll be looking at:

• Expense – This is probably the top requirement. Budgets tend to be quite limited, and there are always too many demands on what budget is available.
• Effectiveness – It has to work; when running an ISV you simply don’t have time to waste. There is software to build and a business to run – there’s no time to waste on things that don’t work.
• Power – Just because you’re running a small business, doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the power and features available to significantly larger business.
• Flexibility – ISVs have a great benefit over larger businesses; agility. The very nature of smaller businesses give them a great ability to adapt to change – and the tools and services they use should be just as flexible.

There are many great resources out there – the challenge is digging through the clutter.

Posts so far:

• Start-up Tools: Microsoft BizSpark
• Start-up Tools: Open Atrium

I’ve been a fan of Tasks for quite some time, though as time goes on and updates don’t come out, it seems less and less attractive. As most web-based services have fully embraced Web 2.o with all its AJAXy goodness, Tasks remains firmly entrenched in Web 1.0; and I’ve finally given up.

We are in a world where instant is no longer a nice-to-have, but an absolute must. Applications and services should; no, must provide immediate feedback and minimize full page loads whenever possible. Tasks has failed on this front.

Enter Remember The Milk, a simple yet highly customizable task management system. While some things are rather different from Tasks (such as having multiple task lists, and not having nested tasks) for the most part it does everything that Tasks does – only it’s free (or $25/year for a Pro account). With a low price, simple easy to use interface, and plenty of AJAX to keep things moving – it’s a real winner.

When I started using RTM the biggest issue I had was the lack of nested tasks that I had become so accustomed to in Tasks. The more I use RTM though, I’m finding that not burying tasks inside of other tasks is actually helping me to get more done, as less is being lost and forgotten about. While seeing all of the tasks laid out in front of me does seem a bit overwhelming at times, I am getting more done.

Overall, RTM helps me get thing done, while wasting as little time as possible managing tasks. Highly recommended.

So here we go again – my 4th hosting company since I started this blog. Maybe I’ll have better luck this time? For those interested, here’s the rundown of which hosts I’ve used, and what I’m doing today.

Radical Vision – Lasted 4 years

Radical Vision was once a great host, though as time went on I had more than a few issues with them. I tried to give them a chance (several chances, actually). During the first year or so, they were great about updating software and keeping things on the cutting edge – by the end, they were using a known vulnerable version of PHP and behind updates on pretty much every major piece of software in use.

After broken promises and many unanswered support tickets, I decided to close my account, that’s when the worst came. It took me two months of emails, support tickets, phone calls, and even contacting the company that owned the data center they were located in before I was able to close my account.

As I was fighting to close my account they were bought out by another company, I hope things have gotten better since the buy-out.

HostingRails – Lasted 1 year

After being with a host that was so far behind, HostingRails was a breath of fresh air – everything was cutting edge, latest version of everything. Support was great, servers were nice & fast, really good host.

I was quite happy with them – with one exception: server load. Normally I would expect to see high loads on servers that are oversold, but I don’t think this was the case as the normal load was quite low. The spikes on the other hand, were anything but low – by the time I switched, it wasn’t uncommon to see load jumping to 20+ and on a few occasions the load exceeded 50!

It may have just been a matter of me being unlucky in having another person on the sever that was abusing the system, but either way it was getting old. I’d like to do business with them again, though next time I’ll go VPS instead of shared.

Servage – Lasted 6 months

Servage provides budget hosting with a nice set of features, quick support, and a fairly impressive control panel. If you are looking for a low-cost hosting company with a few nice extras – Servage does quite well. Though soon after switching I ran into a familiar issue – server load. While it seems that their web servers are quite fast – the database servers are often bogged down.

After getting yet another database connection error, I decided it was time to look for another option.

DreamHost – Current

I’ve heard many good things about DreamHost – including from a few start-ups running their projects from the normal shared hosting package. If it’s good enough for them, should be more than enough for me.

These people have just completely wowed me so far – the best control panel I’ve used, the most features I’ve seen from a shared host (especially in this price range), extremely fast servers. The best for me, is the SSH access – as it seems fewer and fewer shared hosts are allowing this type of access.

For now, if you are looking for good, low cost Linux hosting – DreamHost gets my vote.