There are few topics so heated as the debate between these two camera systems. These two brands have always been in competition with each other, but recently the heat got turned up by a couple of notches. This all started with the release of the Nikon D3 and D3x, including the D700.

Before those cameras were released, i.e. 2007 and earlier, Canon was leaps and bounds ahead of Nikon in both fast prime lenses, speciality lenses as well as sensor technology. Canon's sensors had superior image quality, lower noise and higher resolution.

So when the D3, D700 and D3x were released during late 2007 and early 2008, coupled with some high profile lenses (14 - 24mm F2.8 and some fast primes and updated tilt/shift lenses), everything was thrown upside down. Not only did the Nikons eliminate the lag in technology, they jumped ahead by at least two generations in terms of image quality. Their 14 - 24mm F2.8 lens was better than Canon's expensive 14mm F2.8 II prime lens, and retailed for almost $1000 less. Things were not looking good for Canon. Many people jumped ship. I was tempted as well, but decided to wait a bit.

I have a client that suffered for the past couple of months from poor performance on their Windows 2008 terminal server. Part of the problem was due to additional load placed on the system by various users' activities. But there was a deeper cause. The following steps highlight the troubleshooting process I took.

1. First and foremost I had to figure out if the system slowness is quantifiable or if it is just user perception. For this I fired up the trusty Task Manager and sorted the processes by CPU usage. One jumped out - WmiPrvSE.exe. It consumed between 4% and 10% of CPU time consistently. This process is the Windows Management Instrumentation service host process that basically provides a system instrumentation service for clients.
   

   

2. Since this service is a Windows process and is really a service provider it did not help me much. I still did not know which client process was consuming so much CPU time via WMI calls. So I fired up Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This allowed me to drill down much deeper than what Task Manager allows.
   

   

3. Next was to figure out why this process is using so much CPU time. Seeing that it is a wrapper process I was hoping the Threads view would help out.
   

   

4. That pointed to a system DLL called RPCRT4.dll which basically deals with remote procedure calls. It did not really help me. Next I reviewed some other details, such as the IO requests. It was extraordinary high. The real screenshot was much higher as this view was captured moments after a server reboot.
   

   

5. Ok so now we have a system service that has high IO counts and consumes too much CPU. I decided to enable WMI trace logging. It did not lead anywhere.
6. Next step was to investigate the IO count. I fired up Process Monitor also from Sysinternals. This utility provides insights as to what files / handles an application has open or is accessing. I ran it for a couple of seconds and filtered on wmiprvse.exe.

   

7. Note all the calls to CreateFile on a file called tzrez.dll. Firstly, CreateFile is a Win32 API call to open / create a file. In this case the call was to open the file for reading. This file is related to time zone information and is a system DLL. So we have a system service calling a system DLL excessively. This plot thickens. At this point I ran out of ideas so I went to Google...
8. A quick search for "wmiprvse reading tzres.dll" yielded this link. Reading it revealed the issue is with Windows System Resource Manager. A quick disabling of the Windows Resource Manager service confirmed this to be the culprit WMI client process - the CPU usage dropped to 0% for WmiPrvSE.exe.
9. Scrolling down I found this link: KB970067. It contains a hotfix and a registry change required to fix the issue. I still have to reboot the server but this seem to have fixed the issue.

Not sure why people keep on doing this. It is common knowledge that at web resolutions, any modern camera will produce acceptable pictures under good illumination.

Yet that comparison sucked so much it hurt my eyes. Why? Its conclusion:

An iPhone 5 can take photos that stacks up well against a $4000 DSLR

I have been asked a couple of times before whether a $300 USB microscope or even a $500 Chinese brand can produce the same results one get from a research grade microscope. My response to this is always: You get what you pay for. Here is an example of a $500 Chinese branded microscope with a 2.1MP CCD Motic camera specially designed for microscopy versus a research grade Olympus BX53 with UPlanSApo objectives and a Canon 600D camera. Both used a 10x objective and bright field illumination, using the same subject.

You decide.

For some strange reason I had this impression that if you are shopping around for a software application, and found one with a really elegant, modern user interface chances are very good that the engineering behind the system will also be bestowed with the same level of attention to detail and quality.

Boy am I wrong. Kayako is a ticketing system that seemed great on the surface. Their main web site, as well as the Kayako application itself seem modern, well designed and Web 2.0 based - all atributes I liked a lot. Their support is responsive and that tells me a lot too about the effort these people must have put into designing and supporting this system.

However the devil is in the details. Once I started using the system, I picked up three problems. One I will discuss on a future date, the other two are quite horrible.