Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 17:37 The GiSTEQ Corporation has released a OSX compatible version of their software for managing the Phototrackr GPS unit.
I hope that more will follow, because there not that many OSX compatible devices out there. The good thing is that e.g. PhotoGPSEditor DOES support RAW photos (at least Nikon's RAW format).
Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 11:25 I got my wire remote (MC-30) for the Nikon D300 recently. Finally able to start shooting in the dark (on a tripod) without the fear of movement unsharpness.
More photos on my flickr page
HDR, photo in Personal, Photography Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 17:59 A couple of days ago I upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After the upgrade I opened the blog, and added a new post. Both of those actions worked properly.
After the upgrade I noticed a major decrease in comment and trackback spam. But today I discovered the real reason why comments AND page views were close to zero.
There's a bug in Wordpress 2.6 where the permalinks are not working correctly. If you're using permalinks with the date, name, etc. (e.g. /index.php/switched-to-mac/) you get a 'Not Found' error. A definite WTF moment.
When you change the permalinks setup in the wordpress admin pages to default the pages/posts are accessible again. It seems that the issue is known and will be fixed in Wordpress 2.6.1. Untill then, most of the Google search results which end up on my website will result in a 'Not Found' error.
I would go back to an earlier version if I could. After the upgrade (which I thought that worked correctly) I removed the 2.5 installment... Yet another lesson for the future.
UPDATE: the pageviews are returning to normal :)
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 17:28 Adobe has released Lightroom 2.0.
The new features for this release are (my favorites);
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.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 23:00 Like most security conscious people I use Firefox (FF) for my everyday browsing on the Internets. So when the Mozilla guys released version 3 I installed it on all my machines (2 Windows and 2 OSX platforms).
It was a bit getting used to. The underlying FF part had been changed. Bookmarks, history etc are all stored in sqlite databases. So no more flatfiles. This took me a couple of hours to figure it out, but finally I got 'there'.
Using FF was business as usual... Apart from one very annoying bug; Opening new windows (not new tabs) results often in an empty bookmarks bar. And this is happening on Windows and OSX versions of FF.
The bookmarks are 'there' but not click-able. Using the right mouse button (on OSX: ctrl-mouse click) on the bookmarks bar and selecting 'Open All in Tabs', FF opens every bookmark in the bar.
The only way of restoring the proper bar is the completely shutdown FF and restart it. After that it works for a certain amount of time.
The problem isn't isolated to my environment. Just google on the issue, and you'll find more people. There's one suggestion I haven't tried yet. Starting with a fresh/clean profile, but I do need my settings/passwords/bookmarks. I'm lost without those :(
UPDATE: I tried a new profile, and this seemed to work. After this I started to repopulate the new profile with the old settings, etc. Everything went fine until the point where I added the extensions. It seems that even old / not active extensions (SwitchProxy in my case) are still able to f*ck things up.
Saturday, July 19, 2008 at 16:43 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 :-)
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 22:06 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);
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).
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 21:40 Firefox is the default browser on all my platform, and every once in a while I run into strange dialog boxes.
E.g., this evening I updated some digital certificates for the test environment of VeriSign MPKI backend. These certificates are issued by a (private) VeriSign CA. So there's no trust by default.
After generating the keypair in FireFox 3 I got the positive dialog box as showed below.
;)
No problem so far, but the next dialog box 'scared' me a little;
;)
This dialog box, or at least the result, would remove (or delete) the certificate I just generated. The issueing CA is not installed in FireFox (or on the machine itself for all it matters). But in fact the certificate was installed in the Crypto/Certificate store of FireFox, and I could use it to access the VeriSign test backend.
So, eventhough, FireFox warns the user that the content will be deleted (or not added), it doesn't exactly does that at all. Let's see if I can file a bug report, because this occured on all 4 certificates I generated/imported.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 19:56 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?
