Author: Bob Beela

Enno ter Keurst, Waalre, the Netherlands, IT Consultant with Atos Origin.
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Should I buy a Nikon D200

Some time ago I blogged about the then to be released D200 from Nikon. I was speculating about the specs and whether I would buy one. At the moment I have an analog F90x which is still very good. I also have a film Nikon filmscanner so I already made a move from film to digital.

My F90x is more than 7 years old and clearly technology has moved on. Digital is the future. Just watch what Kodak is doing, it is closing factories where they produce their films. The same goes for Fuji. Canon will stop producing analog camera’s, Nikon has already announced to do so.

The only problem I have with buying a D200 (besides the money) is all the lenses I have. I have stuff ranging from 20mm to 200mm. All that changes with the 1.5 crop factor. It will mean I will have to buy some new lenses and dump some good old ones like a 28-70mm/f2.8.

nikon-d200-4-th.jpg

I will have to think about it. I want to go digital but I am also thinking about the money.

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From Mambo to Joomla

Recently I moved one of my sites from PHPnuke to Mambo. I did not know whether I made the right move and instead of Mambo I should have moved to Joomla as it is a split off of the Mambo CMS.

The last couple of weeks I have been looking at the development around both CMS’s. Finally I made the decision to move to Joomla now or stick with Mambo. Migration to Joomla is easy is you are running Mambo 4.5.2. Once Flambo and Joomla have moved up a full version (4.6 and 1.5), migration will be less easy.

So I tested it out on a test website and as it did not prove to give any problems I then moved the main website. Let’s hope I made the right decision.

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Mambo experience

So, I finally made the decision and moved one of my websites from PHPnuke to Mambo [link].
I have all the basic functionality and kept most of the data and users from the old site. I’m pleased with it.

How did I do it?

First I did some research on the functionality of Mambo and Joomla. How easy can I customize it, what about add-ons. Are there add-ons like photo gallery, bulletin board, attendance record, etc. Answer; Yes, but a lot of them are still in Beta and a lot are moving from Mambo to Joomla, there are also a lot of site templates available. Most of them are fixed width and I am looking for a variable width version.

Next I tried it out on a test website. I migrated the old data, tried bulletin boards, photo galleries and other add-ons.

  • There is a add-on available for if you want to migrate data from PHPnuke to Mambo (ezPHPnuke). It worked good, it’s still Beta.
  • As a bulletin board I used Simpleboard, that is good and stable.
  • As a Photo Gallery I used Zoom. That is also still in Beta.
  • Other add-ons I tried were a newsletter add-on, an attendance record, other bulletin boards and all kinds of site templates.

The only question is; shouldn’t I have moved to Joomla? Well, I don’t know. I tried Joomla and the version I tried didn’t work. Instead of trying to get it to work I tried Mambo and that worked in one go.
Joomla originates from Mambo and at the moment most of the add-ons work on both versions. That will change in the future and maybe I will move to Joomla if the add-ons are no longer supported.

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Hirsi is leaving us

So, now we know; we have a really strict immigration law in the Netherlands and an even stricter immigration minister.
Yes, you may enter the country but you you must tell the truth about your name, place of origin en age. If you don’t, you won’t get access, even we if we find out years later.

Does that sound harsh? Well, how many other countries act the same way; US they are erecting a fence on their south border, Denmark act the same way, Germany ditto, UK ditto, who else?

The attitude of the minister has lead to some controversy in the last couple of years. Nevertheless she is a popular politician simple because she is straightforward and she does was says she will do.
Unfortunately, with taking away the Dutch citizenship from Hirsi she has taken one step to far. Yes she has lied about her age, origin en name, but she has done a lot of good for the Dutch society, asked a lot of critical questions, ruffled a lot of feathers and as a result is under 24 hour protection program.
In this case the minister should have said; Yes, you have lied, on that fact you should be kicked out, but taking in account your role in Dutch society and the fact as a result you need 24 hours protection we will grant you the Dutch Citizenship.

The Dutch parlement has pressed the minister to reconsider her decision or she can leave.

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Will they never learn?

Here we go again, I told you so, I new it!
Merkel has said that when Germany takes over the chairmanship of the EU, they will try to get the EU constitution accepted.

No thank you, France en the Netherlands already said NO once. We are not going to do that again.

[link]

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Mambo testtrack

As I wrote in the previous entry, I am in the process of testing Joomla and Mambo. I want to replace the PHPnuke software I use for a couple of sites. Joomla didn’t work for me so I moved to Mamboserver.

Yesterday I tested the 4.6 RC1 version. I dumped that one quickly because it complained about safe mode settings. As I didn’t wanted to change that in this stage of the process I moved back to 4.5.3.
That seems to work. There are still some things like; finding a good variable based template, keeping a welcome message fixed as first message on the website, finding some good components for a gallery, a forum, a league table, etc. There is tons of stuff but it is all close but no cigar.

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Move from PHPnuke to Joomla

joomla_screenshots.jpg

I run a couple of website of which some are based on PHPnuke. As PHPnuke is not very safe plus development is slow, I’m now testing Joomla.

Conversion is a problem, installation is not easy. But it is promissing