Microsoft FireFox 2007 Professional Edition

Microsoft has released their latest Internet Browser, and the new features are phenomenal.

LOL

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Hamachi v1.0.1.1

Hamachi is a great tool of connecting to your server / PC at home while you are on the road (or at work). The program allows you to create a Virtual Network between (configurable) clients without the need of opening ports in your DLS/Cable modem or router [screenshots]. I use Hamachi at home where I can access my servers as if it were on the same network. After a long beta period, they finally released an official final 1.0.1.1 version of this tool (available for Windows, OSX). If you need some tool for administrating servers on a 'shielded' network, this is the tool to use. Another practical use is for remote assistance for family or friends. Just have them install Hamachi, and when ever they are in need of any assistance, they launch their Hamachi client and you can access their PC for troubleshooting.

How Hamachi Works

Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a third node called a mediation server to locate each other and to bootstrap the connection between them. The connection itself is direct and once it is established no traffic flows through our servers. Hamachi is not just truly peer-to-peer; it is verifiably secure peer-to-peer. Believe it or not, but we are able to successfully mediate p2p connections in roughly 95% of all cases we have dealt with so far. This includes peers residing behind various firewalls or broadband routers (aka NAT devices). It is high-tech and it is really cool :)

Don't worry about other people getting in, because the Hamachi client needs to run, you need to know the name of the created network, AND you need to know the password created for that network.

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Apple Teams Up With Airliners to Deliver iPod Integration

Good news for the air-traveller, who owns an iPod. Apple is planning a cooperation with several Airliners to integrate iPod support in the seats on the planes

Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration

Even though that the Dutch airliner KLM denies it at this moment, it definitely adds up to earlier news that KLM would invest millions of euros on improving the interior of their planes.

UPDATE: The denial from KLM seems to hold. Apple acknowledged that there was a misunderstanding. iPod integration is scheduled for Continental, Delta, and Emirates though.

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Microsoft Vista RTM Leaked

Microsoft released the RTM (Ready To Manufacture) of Windows Vista. This new operating system (which was delayed numerous times, and stripped of intended innovations like WinFS, and Windows PowerShell) is supposed to be the next best thing that could happen to you. Well, I have to see that for myself first. I played around with some beta's in the last couple of months, and I can't say that I'm impressed. But maybe, the RTM will surprise me. Today I stumbled onto a leaked RTM iso file on the Internet which holds all versions of Vista (both 32bit and 64bit versions). This means that I could test all versions of the OS. With no valid license key it's possible to evaluate Vista for 30 (or 60) days, so I will start to evaluate within the next couple of days, and see for myself if there's any need in upgrading my Windows XP Professional PC to Vista. I'll keep you posted on the evaluation. UPDATE: I installed Vista in Parallels on my Mac Book Pro. The installation took about 30 minutes, which surprised me a little. I choose the Ultimate Edition of Vista, which is supposed to be the most expensive version of Windows Vista. Within Parallels, you have the possibility of installing the Parallels tools. They enhance the user experience of the virtual machine, and install the appropriate drivers for video and the network adapter. After installing the tools Vista isn't able to shut the OS down properly. After selecting 'Shutdown', the virtual machine crashed. Same thing happened on earlier beta versions of Vista. This means that an Parallels update for this 'Vista' issue is imminent. Apart from that it seems to work fine. Perhaps, I should try VMWare as well as a testing environment. Too bad that VMWare doesn't work on my Mac Book Pro :( If all goes well, I'm able to get an official MSDN-key for Vista later next week. Let's see if this version will accept the key, so that I'm able to experiment a little longer than the initial 30 days.

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Pixelpost stress

Pixelpost is a PHP based image gallery for showing photos. It includes displaying EXIF info, and (according to the website) is VERY EASY to install. Since I'm not a PHP guru (yet), and needed to have a (customizable, and not too overpowered) photo gallery for my photos. Downloaded the 'install kit' from the website, and followed the instructions. When I installed Wordpress on my Windows server, I ran into some problems with permissions on directories. Especially on directories which were used to upload stuff to. Armed with that piece of knowledge, it shouldn't be too difficult to get it up and running (I thought). The installation itself was a piece of cake. The Pixelpost admin tool has an overview (General Info) which said that all settings were made correctly, and therefor should work. All directories were in place and were writable. The MySQL database was also set up correctly, because the initial tables were created by the PixelPost install script, and the config table was filled with the correct settings. Time to upload my first test image.... Nothing happend. No matter what I tried, no images were uploaded to the server. Still the General Info page of the Pixelpost admin tool said that everything was OK:

Configured Imagepath: ../images/ Image Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777 Thumbnails Directory: OK - Can we write to the directory? YES. CHMOD: 0777 Language Directory: OK Addons Directory: OK Includes Directory: OK Templates Directory: OK

Even after setting the security for the entire PixelPost directory structure to allow the Internet User Account (IUSR_MACHINENAME) full control over the structure, nothing happend. Well, that was another 3 hours well spent..... Off to find another PHP gallery.

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Holiday images online

I've placed a rough selection of photos on my Flickr page. They can be found here. They'll be 'fine-tuned' in the next couple of days (tags, descriptions etc.), and there might be some new ones later on. Enjoy them.

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Firefox 2.0 removes third-party cookie blocking

In the older FireFox versions (<2.0), it was possible to allow cookies from sites you visit, but to disallow cookies which do not originate from that site (e.g. advertisements etc.). These cookies makes it possible for the advertising sites to track your movements on the Internet (amongst other things). Somehow, the FireFox developers removed that functionality from the user interface, and it seems to be disabled by default. It can be enabled by using the about:config command (just type it in the URL bar in FF). This opens the registry/configuration of FireFox. Search the config for network.cookie.cookieBehavior (you can search by using the filter), and set the value to "1" (without the quotes).

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Elections in the US

I can't stop wondering (for about 6 years now), how the hell the Republicans won the President elections. G.W. Bush itself has an IQ of a walnut; ".... The non-partisan researchers who evaluated the twelve presidents determined that the six Republican presidents for the past 50 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155. President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. ......" So he couldn't have won on his own. He needed lots, and lots of intelligent people to get him into office. But who are those people? .... not your average Republican senator I hope.

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Alternative to Speedlimit Signs

Even I wouldn't go around violating speedlimits when we get the 'Denmark' sign here in Holland.....

Speed Bandits

Slighty NSFW

via vkmag.com

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Internet Explorer 7 annoyances

I noticed today that Internet Explorer v7 showed up as a critical download (according to Microsoft). Since I like to experiment (I know... it's wrong), I decided to give it a try. What can happen? I use Firefox as the default browser. I played with IE7 in Vista RC2, and seemed (!!!!!) to work fine. After installing it, I might have lost all my bookmarks, or perhaps I didn't have any to start with in IE6 :) . Anyway, that's something to remember when I upgrade IE on my laptop from work. Here are some annoyances I ran into:

• Clearview Lame ass anti-aliasing. I thought I had some sort of eye-disorder. (can eventually be switched of in the advanced options, and it needs a restart of the browser).
• Anti-phising More pop-ups asking stupid questions... Somehow it wanted to check my own website against a phishing list.... disabled it immediately.
• Flickr bagde Can't get it to work in IE7. Not even if I remove all security restrictions. So if you don't see any pictures in my flickr badge, it means you're using a fucked-up browser. Solved: I needed to install the Flash player component AGAIN especially for IE7 (/me wonders why IE7 doesn't mention that it doesn't have the necessary components to view the page correctly)
• Menu bar Is disabled by default, and if you enable it, it's not at the top of your window (???)
• ....

Strangely enough, WordPress seems to work fine, since I'm using IE7 to write this post. (correction: when I wanted to submit this post, there was an error on page according to IE7....) Well, back to good-old Firefox 2.0, and leave all the IE7 annoyances behind me :D. Conclusion: Microsoft created a great (visual) copy of Firefox. Too bad that they had the urge to add bugs and annoyances to it. I can hardly wait for Vista and the new Office suite :)

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