REDELIJKHEID
Scripts made in Adobe CS3 may not work in Adobe CS4 product. I tried an evaluation version of Photoshop CS4, and found out that my watermarking action 'crashed'.
The crash is triggered by the CS3 version of the 'Fit Image' script/command.
So much for backwards compatibility...
UPDATE: I've updated the watermarking action. This one works with CS4. For CS3 you need this one.
UPDATE 2: New CS4 Watermarking Actions
It's very frustrating if people 'steal' your images when you're a photographer. It's annoying if they 'borrow' them (hotlinking, use them in other websited), and it's downright evil if they are using them for generating money [1, 2, 3].
Anyway, on a 'local' forum, some of the members found out that Hyves.net members (you need to be a Hyves member to view this) were using copyrighted photos. Other 'Hivers' can use these images to create collages, or use them to 'pimp' their personal pages (yuk!!).
Some of the original images still showed the copyright info, while other photos were modified to remove the copyright text (deliberate copyright infringement if you ask me).
The 'fun' part is that people who use these images get mad if you ask them to remove the image due to copyright infringement. The general consensus seems that everything you put up on the Internet is up for grabs.
So, if you don't want others to (mis)use your photos don't put them online. If you have to put them online, make sure other people can't remove the copyright info without 'destroying' the photo (e.g. humongous watermark across the photo). Or just put very small versions of the photos online.
Band of BrothersWhy buy them? I bought a couple of movies in the last couple of weeks. Including the 'Band of Brothers' DVD-box (probably the best TV-miniseries ever). Just to be reminded (again) that the original product (in general) is annoying as hell.
I started the DVD, and the first thing that I saw were some crappy trailers of crappy movies. The menu appeared only after I had FFWD'ed every single one of them.
After watching the first episode I wanted to quickly skip to the second.... No way of doing that besides stopping and starting the DVD from scratch. Which results in trailers etc. of the same (crappy) movies I have no interest in..... Every f*cking button, which might guide me to the menu, on my remote was unresponsive.
First thing on my list when I wake up tomorrow; rip the DVD's, remove every piece of DRM crap and enjoy the remaining episodes my way.
Honest people are hijacked by the MPAA (and associates) by forcing all this DRM crap upon those who buy legitimate DVD's. No wonder people are ripping and copying DRM protected content.
Every now-and-then you try to do the good thing, only to be reminded why you were ripping DVD's in the first place......
Lots of data is recorded in photos every time you take a picture with a modern digital camera (EXIF data). Stuff like; make, model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc. Nowadays, it's possible to add GPS information as well. This information is available in programs like Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture.
Unfortunately, the recorded information might get lost if you use graphics software to manipulate the photos. For example, I take 5 photos and blend them into one for a panoramic photo or an HDR photo. The result can be stunning, but mostly, the original EXIF information is gone. In these situations I copy the information using jhead (exiftool is an alternative) from one of the original images and place this in the final (manipulated) image. Downside is that this is kinda disrupting for my 'workflow', because is done by the command line.
It would be nice if e.g. Lightroom had a context menu of copying the EXIF information (this is possible for other metadata in the photos), and pasting it in the new photo.
Some might say that this might not be very ethical because the data is from another image, but then again, there are tools already available for doing this. Even though these aren't very user friendly. Perhaps a small suggestion for the developers.....
After running 'chkrootkit' on one of my Ubuntu server at work, I got a responds:
Checking `bindshell'... INFECTED (PORTS: 4000)
A message which started a 'mild' shiver across my back, because the rootkit checker just reported that one of the processes on the server could be compromised.
First I took the server of the network. Just to make sure. After that I searched the Internet for a possible explaination. Nothing substancionally. until I found the following command to see what is occupying the port.
sudo netstat -e -p -n -a | grep 4000
This gave me the following result:
udp6 0 0 :::4000 :::*
65534 13886 4739/coldfusion8
So it seems that Adobe Coldfusion is using this port. But this can't be found in any of the official Adobe Coldfusion documentation. There are some (blog)posts related to this, but nothing more.
If you think that things are going (relatively) well, they come right back at ya....
This time it's my laptop from work. I used to enjoy my HP NX8220 widescreen laptop. It served its purpose well over the last 3 years. Since it was out of warranty (and noisy), it had to be replaced by a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E8310.
Personally, I never liked the Fujitsu Lifebooks. They feel like cheap plastic laptops that might fall apart with every keystroke. Apart from the physical look and feel, there's the 'need' to use hardware which can only be used by installing a gazzilion Fujitsu installers/drivers (on the HP I only needed half the drivers to get a functioning laptop).
The quality of these drivers are questionable. On a default Windows XP Pro SP2 OS with ALL the tools/drivers recommended by Fujitsu the hardware and Windows OS don't seem to get along. Without any reason, the OS seems to hang every once in a while. And lately things have gotten worse....
Last week I reported that the upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 didn't go as planned. Well, the upgrade went fine, but it seems that there's a permalinks bug. The 'old' URL's won't work, so I have to cope with a "?p=449" notation of the links to my posts. A direct consequence of this is that everybody using a search engine to find stuff on my blog ends up on my website, but not on the page with the actual article.
From over 600 pageviews per day a week ago, there's a small 40 a day left :-( .
It may be that the new Wordpress 2.6.1 Beta 2 solves this issue, but it may also break other things. Let's hope they release the next (working) version yesterday.
I ran into the most annoying (understatement) thing about certain Microsoft automatic updates (on Windows XP Pro). It seems that last Tuesday was yet another 'patch-Tuesday'. Nothing unexpected about that, but this update (or at least one of them) required a reboot of the PC (yet, still nothing wrong with that).
Normally, the automatic update process bugs you about rebooting, but somehow this reboot interface had a timer. A timer of 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes the PC will reboot.
Totally ignorant to open (modified) documents. The shutdown process kills all open programs / documents and reboots. Without waiting for user input on e.g. saving files.
I tested this with opening a notepad document, altering it and leaving it open. After 7 minutes, the PC had rebooted, and all changes to the document were lost.
Yet another 'Thank You, Microsoft'
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 :)
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.