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Well, the biggest news since you’ve written in Java is probably the language features introduced in Java 5. There were several enhancement features, ranging from the awesome (generics—think C++ templates) to the nice-to-have (for-each loop syntax) to the ghastly (varargs, ugh).

The standard libraries have been built out in too many ways to count. Notable changes in the last 5 or so years might include the new I/O stuff (basically, a form of direct memory access for manipulating large amounts of data) and much-needed enhancements to thread management (read- and write-locking) and garbage collection (different kinds of references that don’t necessarily guarantee the referent will be preserved by the next gc pass).

I think the lenses you buy must be determined by the type of photography you’re most interested in. If you like landscapes, then you’ll want to buy a wide angle lens. If you like portraits, then a short telephoto with a large maximum aperture is where you want to be. Shooting skittish animals requires a long telephoto.

It sounds like you’re interested in flexibility and “street scene” photography for the most part, because you’re talking about replacing the 18-55, what I call the “walk-around” range. You might consider upgrading to the 18-55 IS and save some money if you like that range;I understand many of the image issues with the non-IS version have been worked out with this model, plus it includes image stabilization. The 70-300 (which is not an L, by the way) doesn’t really replace your 18-55…I’d recommend that you hang on to the 18-55 if you buy this lens.

It is true that L glass is the best, but I don’t recommend it for beginning photographers. It’s expensive, and heavy, and if you’re not going to adapt your shooting style to make the best use of this higher quality glass, then it’s a lot of wasted money. I think that you should learn how to shoot in a way where the equipment is the limiting factor before you upgrade;that’s the path to managing your budget effectively. :-)

I would also recommend staying away from the “all-in-one” lenses with high focal length ratios, such as the 11x lens you describe. Those lenses are not very good for learning photography and tend to encourage lazy framing and composition habits, which is fine if you’re experienced and know when you can get away with it. Also, these lenses typically have small apertures, particularly at the long end, meaning you can’t shoot in lower light situations without a tripod. Often, the best pictures are made in lower light, while the sun is setting or rising and the oblique angle of the light can be used to show the texture and quality of your subject. (All in one lenses are very limiting indoors as well for the same reason…even indoor areas that seem fairly bright are many stops dimmer than outside on a sunny day.)

In general, Canon tends to make lenses of higher quality than third-party manufacturers, but this is not true for every model, so I’d encourage you to research the specific lenses and read reviews on third-party models you’re considering (a great location for information is dpreview.com). You should always have at least one Canon lens, though (I recommend the cheapest one: 50mm f/1.8, a great lens for the money, particularly for beginning photographers). Should you have any problems with your camera and require service during the warranty period, Canon will only provide support if you can prove it’s an issue with the camera and not the lens. (Sometimes lenses can fritz out and send wrong information, causing the camera to behave strangely.)

I think the choice comes down to: do you want to take photographs, or do you want to take snapshots? If you’re just interested in memorializing a moment and you don’t care about controlling any aspect of the image, then a compact is for you. If you’re a hobbyist interested in photography and you want to understand and control the process of image creation, you need an SLR.

That’s not to say you can’t take excellent photographs with a pocket camera, just that the SLR affords you far more flexibility. With the latest generation of dSLRs, though, I don’t think that size is as big a factor as it used to be unless you’re interested in hiding the camera for the most part. (This doesn’t imply nefarious intention—for instance, I bought my wife a Canon SD950 pocket camera because she doesn’t regard photography as a creative pursuit…at least, all the time…it’s more a lifestyle choice for her. So she needs something tiny that she can slip out of her purse when the occasion calls for it, but is unobtrusive the rest of the time.)

The upshot is: the best camera is the one you have with you. If you’re unwilling to carry around an SLR, it doesn’t matter how great it is…you’re not going to get any good pictures if you leave it in the bag. Having said that, recently a new crop of “prosumer” fixed lens cameras have been introduced that address most of the limitations of a compact. They’re larger than pocket cameras, but come as a single package and don’t require as much space as a dSLR. If your plan is to buy a dSLR and you know you’ll only be sticking one a single lens, then it’s definitely worth investigating these models.

I own mostly zoom lenses, the only prime being the 50mm f/1.8 (for my Canon EOS). I generally use the 50mm when I’m shooting in low-light situations or I need very shallow depth of field (for portraits). I also find that primes generally are better for flash photography, as they usually have wide apertures that allow me to balance flash and ambient light.

I use a combination of Picasa and my own organizational method. Basically, I group my photos by timestamp into “photo sessions”. A significant break between any two photos in time indicates I changed location or some aspect of photography.

Each session gets its own folder with a long, descriptive title. This way, when Picasa auto-indexes the photos, each one in that session is tagged with each word in the title. When traveling, I organize my photo session folders by location, and everything is organized further under folders by camera. So when I’m done, a photo might reside at: C:\Media\Photographs\Canon 40D – severoon\Shanghai, China\Humble Administrator’s Garden\_MG_3021.CR2.

Because Picasa uses the words in the path to automatically index photos and organizes them into albums by folder, I can restrict what it’s showing me to any subset of the photos I want, by any criteria in the folder names, EXIF data, etc. To see all the photos taken in China, I’d search for: “China”. To restrict to shanghai: “Shanghai China”. I could add “JPG” to restrict further to jpegs, or “40D” for only photos taken with that camera model, or even “f/2.8”, “ISO 400,” etc. I have about 50k photos stored, and I’ve never spent more than a few minutes looking for a particular image.

Because Picasaweb also allows galleries, I can further pick individual photos and store them by gallery, and even upload the gallery to the web with just a couple of clicks: http://picasaweb.google.com/severoonsviewings.

Hi all, I’m severoon!

I’m what you’d call a “hard core geek” living and working in the Silicon Valley area. I am currently employed at an R&D lab that is tasked with innovating in the web 2.0 space with a focus on convergence (that includes web, mobile, wireless, etc).

I am primarily interested in this course from the standpoint of an observer. One of the many ways I personally try to create new ideas for the web is to follow creative ways people use tools on the web—often in ways the tools were not intended to be used. Every now and then someone comes up with a creative usage for an existing technology that is generational; that is, it works wonderfully well. In that case, I try to explore building out that technology or integrating it with other tools in a way that benefits the new usage.

Most often, attempts to use web tools in new ways isn’t very successful, and in those cases I try to identify the gap. What does the user want from this tool, how did the misuse come about, and what kind of application would be appropriate for this user’s purpose? Often, “innovating” is as simple as studying these issues and coming up with answers. :-)

I think blogs and wikis serve different purposes, so it could make sense to use either (or both) depending on what you’re trying to do.

Blogs are good for one-way communication from a single information source to many readers comprising an audience. Many blogs support comments from readers, but for the most part this is meant for brief discussion or feedback to the poster(s) and little else—it is not typically useful for hosting detailed discussions. Besides one-way communication, a blog also normally communicates information with a limited shelf life. This is because older posts are pushed out by newer ones.

So, because of this, blogs are particularly well suited for broadcasting news collected by a single source about a particular topic to an interested audience. Used in this way, blogs are a powerful way to break down information silos that develop in companies, educational institutions, etc.

A wiki is a different beast entirely. Whereas a blog allows one source to communicate with many readers, a wiki allows many writers to communicate with many readers. The nature of the communication is different as well—instead of each individual playing the role of either writer (as in the case of the blog poster) or reader (as in the blog reader), wikis encourage collaboration between individuals by allowing each person to play both roles.

The other significant difference between a blog and a wiki is the type of information communicated. Whereas blog posts are suited for information that has a shelf life, wikis are intended to capture information that does not grow stale with time. So, wikis are particularly well-suited to capturing institutional knowledge that is distributed over many people that all have a stake in recording that knowledge.

There is one significant limitation of wikis, however. A wiki is typically not very good at keeping information that requires complex hierarchical organization. The best examples of the most successful wikis are sites like wikipedia, which has a very flat organizational structure. There is a main page from which users can look up entries, and a flat catalogue of those entries, and that’s about it. Wiktionary is another good example.

If the goal is to document information that fits into a complex hierarchy, a wiki will be most useful if some flattening of that structure can be agreed upon, or the task of documenting and policing that hierarchical structure is undertaken as a first step.