Picture of the Genneperpark Eindhoven.
A visit to Zutphen
A backstreet view. Zutphen, hanzestad in the Netherlands [link].
Guus!
French DRM Law Revised for iTunes
I am afraid that the French have no balls!
Read this article [link] in BetaNews. The French have watered down the original bill which would ban the use of DRM formats that are closed down for third parties. Or easier said; A person who buys a DRM protected piece of data should be able to play it on any equipment it has. So if I buy a song on iTunes I wouldn’t be forced to buy an Apple iPod to be able to play it on something else then my PC.
I hope the Scandinavians have bigger balls.
Cool USB stick
Check out the FosFor Gadgets website for a very cool USB stick (link).
Le Mans 24 2006
Oh my god, I do love the Internet.
I am watching the Le Mans 24 hours race on the Internet. RTL7 is streaming the live coverage and at the same time I am listening to radio Le Mans. All the TV channels are only broadcasting small bits of the race.
Audi is running first with a R10 TDI, that is a diesel. Yes, a diesel! But more important Jan Lammer is still running, and he is running in third place ate the moment (23:30 saterday evening). He probably will not hold that place because there is another fast Audi on the track behind him. The Pescarolo’s will probably not make it to the end.
This is great!
Microsoft
This has been quite a week for Microsoft; Scoble leaving, share prices going down and than now Gates leaving!
Robert Scoble; http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/
I have been reading Roberts’ Blog for some time. Him leaving Microsoft was not really a suprise to me. There were some signals in his writing; the time he stopped blogging, the moment he unsubcribed to all his RSS feeds (wooh!), his questioning what to use of blogging was, which indicated to me that he was looking for something new something fresh. The passing away of his mother might have made the step easier. Whether PodTech will provide him with the new stumula, we will see. Good luck Robert.
Microsoft stock prices going down. Everybody could have seem that comming; the success of Google, Flickr and all those ‘small’ new firms, Vista being delayed, etc. It is just the short term vision of the stock market, they are just looking for a quick buck.
Today Bill Gates announced that he was leaving Microsoft (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/5085444.stm). I didn’t see that one comming but I think it is a good thing for Microsoft. Microsoft has always been to much Bill Gates and not enough Microsoft. There are so many talented people working at Microsoft, maybe they can dust off the ‘old’ image and move Microsoft into new areas.
Every year €200.000.000 down the drain
The European parliament has two seats in Europe; Brussels and Strasbourg.
Since years, every month the parliament picks up its bags and moves from Brussels to Strasbourg. There it stays for a week and goes back to Brussels. This is costing the European taxpayers €200.000.000 a year (direct cost). The indirect cost due to inefficiency is not included.
If you think is ludicrous go to the site http://www.oneseat.eu and support the petition for one seat in Europe.
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.
I will have to think about it. I want to go digital but I am also thinking about the money.
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.
Some old pictures from the Waddenzee
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.