It was a (relative) cold and wet summer here in the Netherlands. Chances are that autumn and winter will be equally depressing. Thankfully, my favorite TV series have started in the US, so not everything is bad.
Both
House M.D., and
Stargate Atlantis started this week. House was great (as usual), and Stargate.... well they ended last season with a
'to be continued', and they started with a
'to be continued' episode :-( .
A while ago I cataloged my photo's in
iView Media Pro (now property of
Microsoft). It took me hours to do this, and it still needed some finetuning.
Somewhere along the line, I decided to switch to
Adobe Lightroom for some weird reason. The actual importing of the photo's was quite easy, but somehow I wasn't able to import the metadata I had attached to the photo's. So this meant that I had to do this all over again. This time it took me hours without a couple of minutes. I did it a bit faster because of the more intuitive interface. Man, tagging sucks. I must remind myself to do this everytime I add new images.
Next time when I have an epiphany about changing image catalog/management tools I might want to read this as a discouragement.
B.t.w. the reason for changing from iView to Adobe was the better collaboration between the OSX and Windows versions. Somehow iView lacked this, even though it was available on both platforms. iView used absolute path to the images in the catalogs. As far as I can see, Adobe uses relative paths if you exchange catalogs. Anyway I exported, and imported several catalogs between the platforms and so far everything worked.
Wordpress.org release version 2.3 of their blogging software. Lot's of improvements, so time to upgrade.
The upgrade itself was pretty straight forward. First backup everthing. Second, upload the new files and run the upgrade script. After that it was business as usual.... Well not quite.
I needed to alter my theme to allow widgets etc., and that wasn't that easy. Especially since I'm not that familiar with PHP. Finally I got most of my plugins up and running.
The only thing that won't work is the Rich Editor. When I want to create a link the 'window' doesn't appear. Only a white placeholder appears.
UPDATE: Oke, I found the cause of the white placeholder after some deliberation on things I did the last hours. Apart from the upgrade on wordpress I didn't do much. I did however play with OpenID for a couple of minutes, and installed the VeriSign OpenID SeatBelt extension for FireFox. After disabling the extension everything worked just fine.
I wonder if this is an extension, TinyMCE, or a FireFox problem?
Yesterday, I bought a new piece of glass for my camera. I had two on my radar, but only enough money to get one. The contestants were:
And the winner is: the Sigma 10-20mm. A very nice ultra wide-angle lens. I guess that the Nikkor has to wait a couple of weeks.
You can see some other images I shot today on my
Flickr page.
OK... Disaster struck... Yesterday morning I had a flashing DSL LED on my DSL modem. Flashing ain't good. A stable green light is good, flashing is bad, very bad. Flashing means it tries to connect to teh Internets, but it can't.
Thankfully, I have a nice neighbor with no encryption on his wireless. Downside is that I need to sit in the hallway to use it. Hopefully the problem will be fixed tomorrow. If not you might be reading this somewhere next week (if ever).
UPDATE: Well things are improving (a very tiny little bit). Statistics show, that the website is available 15% of the time instead of 2%.
An optimist would say; 'an improvement of 750%'. My opinion is not that optimistic I might say......
UPDATE#2: No idea what's wrong with the Internets connection. Last night it downloaded three movies worked without any problems. This morning I had to switch it off and on to get it going again. I must say that the modem itself is running awfully hot. In the mean time I have two different types of modems in spare (510i and a 546i). Strange thing is that the logs show disconnections due to idle time?? Idle? The thing hasn't been idle ever since I installed it.
UPDATE#3: Well, the techies suggested a downgrade path to check if it might help. Off course, I'm against this. This means slower lines, slower downloads etc. It's like going back to the digital stone ages. Furthermore, it worked perfectly over the last 7 years.... The performance didn't degrade over time. The performance just said 'poof'.
Anyway, in the meantime I'm back to 4Mbps, and things seem to look good, but it also looked good yesterday. So until further notice this website might be online (or not, or whatever).
Yesterday, Apple Launch a complete new line of music players. Every player is renewed. The biggest changes are:
As I might have mentioned my 'old' iPod Photo 20GB is acting up, so I was kinda going to buy me a new one, but which one do I want? The
iPhone touch is just gorgeous, but the iPod Classic holds ton's of music and video's...... *sigh*.
Guess I have to let fate decide....
Now it's time for apple to start shipping 'Leopard' as soon as possible. I don't want to buy a iMac now, and buy Leopard next month (even if it is with a discount).
Today my Windows PC started to show major hick-ups. The drives are making 'clacking' noises together with high pitched sounds :cry: . Also the system freezes up every ten minutes or so.
So, you can imagine that I'm starting to backup my stuff with the hope that it makes it to the external drive. Every time the system crashes (during the copying) I see my digital life flash in before me.... Hope I can make it before the flames come out.....
UPDATE: OK, I finally got my data of the PC, so that's one worry less. In the mean time, I've ordered a new hard drive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I guess I have to upgrade prematurely to an iMac..... The current components are all quite old, so I have to replace everything if it's not just the drive. I might sell the GPU (NVIDIA(Asus) 7900GTX/512MB/PCI-e). So if you're interessted
Not every TV serie will be successful. So it's possible that some series won't be continued on TV. If this happens, most of the time they have some sort of scenario to end the show. Star Trek Enterprise was one of those shows. The show was killed, and they had 4 (or 5) episodes to end it. Not my cup of tea, but the show ended somewhat decent.
Lately, the dutch TV stations are buying new TV shows from the US. These shows are pretty new (Heroes, Day Break, Traveler, etc.), so finally we don;t have to wait 5 years to watch a new show. But there's a catch. Almost every new show was killed prematurely in the States. So the result is a TV show with a crappy ending.
[spoiler]
Traveler has 8 episodes, and ends in the middle of the action, with a ton of unanswered questions (who was the black bellboy, What happens to the main character's girlfriend?, etc.). At least ended Day Break a bit decent.....
[/spoiler]
Everyone who has worked a bit with Linux/Unix/OSX knows that the command '
rm -rf *' is kinda destructive (understatement). Compare it with the old '
deltree.exe' command in MS-DOS. The latter explains it without saying too much about it.
Anyway, yesterday I ran into an annoyance of OSX (and it wasn't the first time I ran into it). Every once in a while when I mount a smb share on my MacBook Pro nothing happens. When I try to connect again I get a message that I'm already connected to that share :?: :?: , but there's no visible indication in the Finder of this.
The way to see the shortcut to the share (for me at least) is to relaunch Finder (Force Quit). But this is highly annoying.
Yesterday I decided to take a look under the hood, and started terminal and opened the Volumes directory. This contained over 30 sub directories, and they all had names similar to the smb shares (ftp, ftp-1, ftp-2, web, web-1, etc). the directories were empty (the +10 I checked anyway), so I wanted to delete al those directories in the hope that my annoying messages about being connected would be gone.
First I entered every directory and removed the
.DS_STORE file by hand and after that I removed the directory with
rmdir. This would take more time than I wanted to spend, so I needed something quicker, and what's quicker than the rm command with all the appropriate switches??
I made sure that I wasn't executing the command from the root of the drive (he, I'm not that stupid). So after I executed the command I heard something weird. I heard the hard disks in my server go crazy.....
Aaaaaarrrggghhhh
Somehow there still was a share mounted, and the rm command was recursively deleting ALL content on the share. By the time I realized this (about 5 to 10 seconds) my 300GB drive was 90% empty instead of 95% full.Thankfully I had some excellent undelete tools on my server so I was able to recover the content over the network to my PC, and after that I could copy them back to my share.
The summer is playing up on me at this moment. The long days are killing my movies hours so to say. normally I could watch a couple of movies a week, but the last couple of month I've been neglecting myself (sort of).
There are over 15 movies which I have to see, but there are more and more movies released every day. Also the sitcoms aren't helping. At this moment I'm going through the "
That 70's Show" like a maniac (3 seasons done, lots of them to go). That
Donna chick keeps me going :P ....
And now the
Traveler series is starting here in the Netherlands.... Even more to catch up to. When will it end??? (Hopefully never :wink: )
