I bought a Nikon D-40

Well,I have gone ahead and bought a Nikon D-40. I got it from this guy (his real world shop - #12 Palika Bazaar, not from the EBay one) The camera has good reviews, and is currently the 5th most popular camera on Flickr. I feel it's quite a steal for its price :)

Here's how my car looks like with a macro focus. (Click to see full size)

Here's a flower

And the same with my DSC-S60 for reference


Well! The DSLR shot certainly looks better :) Of course, I am just beginning to get the hang of it - there are all sorts of stuff (ISO, Metering, Aperture) to learn to really use a DSLR properly. And it uses focal length not zoom :) Should be fun!

User based feed in Picasa

Well I just figured out how to get a feed of user based feeds from Picasa. While Picasa makes it easy to get a feed of your photos out on the basis of a given album, there is no mention of anyway to get a feed out on the basis of a user, i.e. I want a feed of the latest photos by a user, irrespective of album.

Well the thing to consider is that the user based feed URL is of the form:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/ashish.vashisht/albumid/5128196317222632433?kind=photo&alt=rss

Hmmm... seems like an attempt to masquerade a get parameter as a URL. Let's try stripping the albumid and the album id (pun intended) from the URL

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/ashish.vashisht?kind=photo&alt=rss

Sure enough! Works!!

Now, how to get the Picasa slideshow thingie to show this?

Lets see the code:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fashish.vashisht%2Falbumid%2F5128196317222632433%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="192" width="288"></embed>

What we have to do is alter the feed= part to something relevant... One way to do this is to URL Encode it... Not very eays to do unless I write some code... Alternately, just search for the feed URL at Google.com and pick up the part after q= from the URL

Finally, the end result, you can see on the right side of my blog :)

Now all I have to do if to upload some new photos to if this really works...