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

Dark clouds over Papendorp

A HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo taken from the office.

The HDR looks relatively normal. Not that bad if you think that I shot the 9 images with the bare hands.

More HDR on my flickr page

Photoshop Actions FTW

Have been experimenting with photoshop actions the last couple of days. The latest action (a vintage look) I created (with some help / ideas I found on the Internet.

Combine this with the border/watermarking action and you get the following result.

Learning a bit every day.

Flickr Stats

I've been using for about two years now, and today I found the stats page (you need to log in to view your stats). No idea if this is new, but it sure gives a nice breakdown on your photo activity.

Sad Times

I usually don't put too much personal stuff on my blog. But every once in a while things happen. Things you have to do.... reluctantly.

As of yesterday, I'm no longer the (proud) owner of two of my cats. Both Isabella and Lilly went to a new owner. Four cats was just too much to take care of (all of them were 'left-overs' of a previous relationship).

I miss them already :sad: .

Photoshop CS3 Watermark / Frame Action

Ever since I started uploading photos onto the Internet I needed a way of 'protecting' my images. I could choose to upload a very small photo, with terrible JPEG artifact, but that's not the way you want to be remembered. Especially today. Today we have the bandwidth and the online storage to upload large images, so why not do that.

If you don't want that other people (or companies) to (financially) benefit from your hard work (1, 2, 3), you may want to 'tag' your photos. Just to make sure who created the original image.

When you shoot lot's of photos and share them with others on the Internet, you don't want to manipulate each photo. You would want to automate this.

Thankfully, there are numerous programs out there that can do such a thing. Some are free (free as in speech, and free as in beer), and others are commercially available.

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