Recently I visited the camera section of a computer store and was surprised at the new cheap range of mini digital cameras available for the snapshot buff, or for the spies among us.

The couple I tested out, including a pen camera that stores in a shirt pocket, produce very decent pictures given their sizes and cost. The downside is that with most of these cameras the viewfinder is practically useless for attempting to frame a shot. You are better off just pointing the camera towards the scene you want, and hoping you get what you want.

The Luxo SpyPen is a little metal-bodied digital camera that is actually square rather than pen shaped. But it is only 59 millimetres wide by 49 millimetres high and 14 millimetres deep, small enough to hide in the palm of your hand. There is no flash, and the low-resolution images are only good for the putting on the Internet, or for printing very small pictures. The camera is manufactured by Plawa Germany, retails for about US$77 and can take pictures at up to a 1.3 megapixel resolution.

I also tried out Aiptek's Mini PenCam, which for US$90 also offers 1.3-megapixel resolution but for the extra price has 16 megabytes of storage compared to the SpyPen's eight MB. At the camera's highest resolution a user can take up to 160 pictures using the internal memory. This camera is built to fit into a shirt pocket, with the lens poking out for the quick snap. The specifications are available at www.aiptek.com.

There you can also check out Aiptek's new PenCam Trio VGA, a lower end version of the Mini PenCam. The Trio VGA was featured in I-Spy, a movie starring Eddie Murphy. At US$330 list Casio's WQV10D-2 Colour Wrist Camera is higher up price chain, but what a cool looking gadget it is! This is only for the person who wants to show off, as for that price you would be much better off getting a higher resolution digital camera. The wrist watch features a colour LCD display to show the snaps taken through the in built camera.

The lens sits on top of the watch face. A text editor in the watch allows you to add notes to your images, which might be handy for linking names and telephone numbers with faces. The camera's 1 MB of inbuilt memory allows users to store up to 100 images at the maximum resolution. The watch has a stopwatch, a monthly calendar, five alarms, a 12- or 24-hour display, and a countdown timer. A special cord allows the transfer of images from one wrist camera to another, or to a computer.

**********

A new report by Forrester Research Inc. confirms what we've always suspected: the continued sale of buggy software is a scandal and we should not take it any longer (I've always wanted to yell that out the window).

"Poor quality is so pervasive that business doesn't expect better," Forrester says. "So what 's new? Exactly - poor software quality is such a widespread plague that few even bother to ponder it. Users are simply accustomed to bad application behaviour and untimely crashes, both from commercial software as well as their own in-house apps."

But sitting back and taking this crap from software providers costs shareholders in US public companies about US$60 billion yearly, according to a May 2002 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The fix? Forrester says better testing of the software will help, but will not fix the underlying problems.

"Most software products comprise highly interdependent components that do their work too quickly for people to observe - and they are too complex to predict what will happen under all conditions," Forrester notes. "So, software development organisations can always justify some effort in testing before putting their code into production."

Another roadblock is that the cost of the fix, or patch, to remove bugs sometimes exceeds the costs of ignoring them. The NIST estimates that about two-thirds of bugs fall into this hopeless category. Many vendors rush to get their products to market knowing they are full of bugs. Businesses buying the software must change their buying tactics, by focusing on the software's lifetime cost - including outages and maintenance - rather than the immediate purchase cost. This tactic might encourage software providers to fix the root cause problems that are buried in the software development life cycle - quality control.

"Prevention of bugs is better than a cure," Forrester states. "OK, so it's a simple concept. Write code that works the first time around, without needing a massive infrastructure for testing and debugging."

Another problem is that great software architects who can prevent defects are expensive. Coders, Forrester states, are hard to manage, because they have strong convictions about how to do things and know they're hot commodities.

"There's no hope of corralling them into compliance - or retaining them - unless what they believe is right happens to coincide with corporate needs," Forrester states. In other words, don't hold your breath while waiting for something that works properly the first time.

*******

Tech Tattle deals with issues on technology. Contact Ahmed at editoroffshoreon.com