Posts filed under Personal

Lightroom 2.0

Adobe has released Lightroom 2.0.

The new features for this release are (my favorites);

  • 64bit support
  • >10.000 pixel wide images (finally able to add a decent panorama to Lightroom)
  • Multiple monitor support

An overview of the (new) features can be found here.

UPDATE: I've been playing with the dual display feature for a couple of hours. This is definitelly a major enhancement. Finally, a real workplace of 2 * 24" widescreen.

Posted on July 29, 2008 and filed under Personal, Security.

Upgrading is Getting Easier

Normally I would be planning a Wordpress update/upgrade, because I have made several changes to some core files. Just to make life a little easier (mostly mail related).
But this time, I had about ten minutes to spare, and 'what the heck.., why not upgrade this minute?'.

Well 3 minutes later everything was up and running again (I even upgraded PHP to a more recent version in the same timeframe). Either I'm getting better at this, or upgrading has been made much easier :)

UPDATE: there's also 'some' improvement on catching commentspam. Before the upgrade I had about 20-30 comment/trackback spams in my Aksimet queue. But since the update the queue remains empty :-)

Posted on July 19, 2008 and filed under Personal, Website, WordPress.

Windows/Office Frustrations

The title should cover the topic appropriately.... The last couple of days there's this delay on opening Office documents on my work laptop. Every MS-Word or Excel document I open (by double clicking the document) takes approximately 25 to 30 seconds to open.

Using tools like procmon (formerly known as filemon from SysInternals) displayed nothing interesting. Apart from a 15 to 20 seconds delay between the WINWORD.EXE appearances in the logging.
Since this nagged the hell out of me, I tried some stuff (in a non-chronological order);

  • Removed McAfee AV
  • Removed all tooling I installed in the last couple of days
  • Removed  MS-Word
  • Removed Office 2003 completely
  • Removing all references to Office, MS-Word or Excel in the registry, and on the filesystem.

Running Word with the /a switch or even typing winword.exe c:\test.doc works fine. Everything works, except the default opening of a file by double clicking it.

Someone suggested to add another user on the system and try it with that user account. So I did. I logged on as the new user and every document launched as it's supposed to do :-) . So I logged out, and tried the original user, and guess what? The document opened lightning fast. I couldn't be more happy, because I didn't feel like reinstalling the entire system.

After working a couple of hours I restarted the system (application update), and everything went back to 'normal'... Opening documents took forever again.....
It seems that launching Word from a FRESH user account resets something. Everything afterwards works fine, just as long as you don't reboot... And since it's Windows...... Well, Friday is gonna be a re-installment day. Am I looking forward to that (that's something of a rhetorical thing).

Posted on July 16, 2008 and filed under Annoying, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Personal, Software.

SMS Costs

Not every cellular provider gives unlimited SMS for free. Some of them have dataplans in which you buy unlimited SMS for a price. More and more contracts have so-called unlimited dataplans. This means that you can surf / e-mail all you want on your phone, but this doesn't mean that SMS is for free as well.

When you think about the costs of SMS, it is probably more expensive than a barrel of oil, or even more expensive than a bottle of printer ink.
A single sms costs about 10 to 20 cents a piece (depending on your SMS 'plan'). This SMS contains a maximum of 160 characters (=160 bytes). This makes 1 Megabyte of SMS messages costs about 650 euro (@10 cents a SMS).... So, why even sms at all?

Posted on July 8, 2008 and filed under Annoying, Personal, Tips'n Tricks.

Massive Blog Spam

I, and probably the rest of the world as well, am being hit with spam in the comments at this moment. Over 100 comments a day are intercepted by Akismet.

It seems that all the spamjerks have found a way of creating userprofiles on public websites/forums/blogs and are referring to those in the spam. Below are some examples URL's which were active at the time of me writing this:

I send an e-mai lto Lonely Planet descibing their problem. Let's hope that they fix it soon.

In the mean time; All hail Akismet!!!!

Posted on July 4, 2008 and filed under Annoying, Internet, Personal, Website.

New York City 2008

Empire State BuildingLast monday was the day of my return from the Big Apple a.k.a. New York. It was a 7 day (5 nights) trip the the wonderful city of New York. The weather was great, and the company was even better :-P .

The holiday had a bit of a slow start, because we missed the plane (my bad), but, with a four hour delay, we finally got underway. As usual, plane trips suck bigtime. Cramped seats, and no sleep.

When we arrived we got our NY City Passes + 3 day bus tickets. This way, we got discounts (or even free entrance) at sightseeing. After all, we're still Dutch ;-) .

During the 6 days we saw it all (well, almost....);

  • Empire State Building
  • Central Park
  • The Financial District (Lower Manhattan)
  • Rockefeller Center
  • Fifth Avenue
  • China Town
  • Little Italy
  • Brooklyn Bridge
  • Brooklyn
  • Chrysler Building
  • Grand Central Station
  • Tudor City
  • United Nations Building
  • B&H Photo and Video :-P
  • Saint Patrick's Cathedral
  • Saint Thomes Church
  • Trinity Church
  • New York Police Museum

We even visited the theater on Broadway. The show we saw was a comedy (not a musical!!!) on 48th street called 'The 39 Steps'. A play by 4 actors playing over 150 characters.

During this stay I shot nearly 500 photographs. Some of those can be found on my flickr page.

Posted on June 26, 2008 and filed under Holiday, Personal, Photography.

Rent a Lens

For my trip to New York City I need a (zoom)lens with a wide angle. My current 24-70 (which is a great lens) doesn't give me the wide angle I need on a crop-camera. So I was looking for a zoom lens with a bit more wide angle.

The 17-55mm f/2.8 AF-S DX (etc) would suit my needs. Enough wide angle and a bit of zoom. No need for 100* zoom lenses because it's New York. Everything is cramped on top of each other. If I need zoom, I can always get a 1.7TC @ Adorama or B&H Photo in New York.

The 17-55 is bit on the expensive side (>1000 euros), so I rented it for the week @ Kamera-Express. Not that expensive, and now I got a decent lens for exploring New York. I just hope that the lens isn't that good, otherwise I need to have it ;-).

Posted on June 16, 2008 and filed under Holiday, Personal, Photography.

SymCAImport Donators, Thank You

The Certificate Import Tool for Symbian S60 (and other) phones was created on a lousy Sunday afternoon. Mainly, because I was frustrated with the lack of documentation AND support from Nokia on the issue. Nevertheless, it seems that really lots of people are using it (approx 300 a week), and every now and then I receive a donation through PayPal (just click on the donate button).

So to all the donators (you know who you are);

thanks for showing your appreciation!

Posted on June 2, 2008 and filed under Personal, Symbian, Website.