Point & Shoot

Ever since a certain split-up, I'm in need of a decent point&shoot camera. A nice small camera to fit in my pocket for every day snapshot use, but with pro-like features. Why?, because they won't allow you to attend a concert with a Nikon D300 and a 80-400mm lens.. (or any lens for that matter). And the camera on my Nokia N95 is not satisfactory at all.... But then again, it's a phone.

At the moment I'm kinda interested in the Canon Powershot G9, or the Panasonic Limux DMC-LX3 (which is not available yet. The first is.. well... kinda a legend at this moment, but the second is throwing high hopes for that segment. The new Nikon P6000 lacks Mac support and uses a closed RAW format at this time, so that's a no go (even though the integrated GPS in kinda neat).

Guess I have to wait for the first reviews of the Panasonic Lumic DMC-LX3. I hope it's available soon.

Brilliant Olympic Photos

Fotostrecke: Die besten Bilder der Spiele - Olympia 2008 - stern.de

Reflecting Windmills

Taken @ Kinderdijk, the Netherlands

More photos at my flickr page

Corrupt / Missing Windows Profile

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....

Click to read more ...

Create Your Own EV Certificate??

Most web browsers support the extended validation certificates. These certificates give a visual indication (green browserbar for example) that the SSL connection is trustworthy. The only problem is that they are expensive. Especially compared with the 'ordinary' SSL certificates.

These certificates are special because the Certificate Authority (e.g. VeriSign) validated the company who buys these certificates. This way, the end user can shop / bank / or whatever online without worrying too much.

Some affiliates / certificate vendors already did this years ago (validating the actual companies), so this is nothing new. Yet another way to fool the consumers, and make some extra money.....

The problem I run into is that I used to have a 'yellow-ish' addressbar when I entered an https website. Today (at least with FireFox 3) the address bar remains blank. The only indication is a tiny lock displayed at the bottom of the browser. Something you might (and definitely will) overlook.

I use a home made Certificate Authority to create my own certificates (for webmail, secure IMAP, SSL, etc.), but I would like to see a proper visual indication of the SSL connection. So, is there a way to create an EV-like certificate (or even a new CA) by using Microsoft Certificate Services or by using OpenSSL which displayes the colored addressbar?

I did find some info on the EV requirements, but these should be 'spoofable' some way or another.....

UPDATE: I found a website which suggests reconfiguring Firefox 3. Problem with that is that I need to reconfigure all my browsers. I'd rather do it by 'faking' the specs.

It seems that the OCSP-responder is mandatory for the bars to turn green....

Wordpress 2.6.1 Fixed the Permalink Bug

The highly anticipated Wordpress version 2.6.1 is finally released. This version fixes the permalin bug I reported on earlier.

Upgrading was a piece of cake (I think). First gonna check all the plugin functionalities......

There Goes My Traffic

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.

Microsoft Automatic Reboots

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'

XS4ALL Plans Outbound Port Filtering

A usenet posting suggests that XS4ALL will provide a filtering service to their subscribers. The filter would consist of 5 levels. Ranging from fully open to 'fully' closed. The first will give you the possibility of running your own services at home, and the latter means you're only able to e.g. surf and e-mail (through the XS4ALL SMTP server).

The filters would give the basic/ignorant user the opportunity of preventing the spreading of malware and other stuff by default. The more tech savvy subscribers can remove the filter for running a bunch of services (webserver, ftp, mail, DNS, etc).

Definitely a good decision. I just hope that the other ISP's will do something similar, because most of the virus/malware/massmailing 'software' is running on PC's run by the average user. Totally ignorant of the malware running on their PC's.

Yet another 'thumbs up' for the quality provider of the Netherlands

A Day at the Beach

We went to the beach @ Bergen aan Zee last Sunday. Weather was almost perfect. The wind and sandblasting sucked a bit. Especially for the kids. His enthusiasm lasted only for a couple of minutes.

On the beach (the wet sand) the sandblasting itself was gone... Until we had to head back home.

Fortunately, I didn't change lenses during this trip. If I would have, I'd probably had a body full of fine sand and salt. The circular polarizing filter I used did need a proper cleansing.
Wind, sand, and salt... not a good combination. The 'salt-damage' on the polarizer would have made a nice macro, if I would have thought of it :) . Thankfully, it's clean again.

More photos at my flickr page