Schonhose

Today I went to the highly anticipated ZOOM.experience 2007 in Utrecht. It is profiled as being the consumer event in the field of digital photography, so my expectations were high.

What a drag it turned out to be…. To summarize it in short: overcrowded, overpriced and definitely overhyped. People were walking around with their cameras and flash units, so you had to be real careful not to hit anybody. I admit I also carried a camera, but an Ixus 70 is relatively small compared to digital SLRs with flash units and zoomlenses. The problem is that I’m certainly not made for walking in a large crowd, standing at an even 6 feet 5 inches (1.98 meter). I truly hate walking in crowds because everybody keeps bumping into me and I just refuse to budge. So typically that will get me some nasty looks and some elbows to go along with that.

As for the overpriced part: people payed 55 euro for a reflector disk you can order online for 25 euro. Needless to say I ordered my reflector disk after the event online.

So was it overhyped? Yes, in my opinion it was. Large stands, hard to find or not enough information and too focused on the casual photographer.

I did see some funny things I would like to share. To promote stuff, some stands hired babes. These babes were either located in a car or on a bike. Imagine what that must have been, sitting in a car all day getting photographed by all these horn.. uhm.. “dedicated” photographers (needless to say I didn’t meant the kids). When I saw this I couldn’t resist to take a snapshot.

The big question is: would I go again? Most likely not. I rather spend a day at my favorite shop where I can actually feel and test the stuff before buying. And for the pretty girls? They have them too.

My feedreader informed me that Adobe has released an update for Adobe Lightroom. Based on the release notes this upgrade is not of any use for me since I don’t own a Mac or have any of those fancy new camera’s.

• Additional camera support for the Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D3, Nikon D300, Olympus E-3, and more
• Updated Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard support

But looking a bit deeper I found the following (amongst others):

• Writing XMP metadata automatically has been corrected for performance issues

This is something I’m interested in, so I installed and updated. First impression is that it really works smoother and is more responsive (that is after I added it as a trusted application in Kaspersky Internet Security). So let’s see how this would work out.

On a high note: I found out why my Winamp was starting so slow. It had to do with a plugin part of the essentials package: gen_undo. It has something todo with the undo of a playlist but the behavior I observed was that it did do a lot of writing in winamp.ini, increasing the size up to more then 10 times the normal size. So it would build up in size and then take it down again to normal size. All this writing made Kaspersky a bit nervous, so a lot of scanning was done also. This slowed down the start-up process considerably.

I solved it by deleting the plugin. I didn’t use it anyway. At least Winamp starts up much (and I really mean much) faster now.

Well, to answer the question directly: I won’t anymore. I refuse to support that sorry excuse for a internet browser. That browser is more then 6 years old, which is ages in internet time. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 over a year ago and when I design webpages I focus on the more recent browsers.

I pride myself in writing correct and clean HTML with nice CSS which looks good in all major browsers. So I test in Safari, FireFox, IE7 and Opera. If it looks good in IE6, I consider it a bonus. If it doesn’t, too bad.

Three reasons why I don’t support IE6 anymore:

• IE6 was released in 2001. Sure, there have been updates but the core code remains old.
• It has major issues with correct semantic HTML and CSS. Check the blogosphere, you will find numerous sites just dealing with hacks for IE6. I just refuse to spend evenings making pages suitable for one browser.
• IE7 is out for a year now and has been part of the regular updating scheme of Windows. Since October 5, 2007 there is no ‘genuine software’ checking anymore, so everybody can benefit from the new IE7. It is not perfect, but way better than IE6. With that said: grab your copy of Internet Explorer 7.

So, there you have it. I’ve said it, I made my point.

While I won’t support it, I’ll still have a look at it just to see how it looks. Recently I came across a site which provides an installer which installs multiple versions of IE on your system for testing. It is always fun to see what the page looks like in IE2.

Head on down to the “TredoSoft: Install multiple versions of IE on your PC” article and read all about it. A must for all you webdesigners out there still pursuing the impossible.

Update: Roy provided me with this beautiful smiley: . Thanks Roy!

On friday I went to the first Konijnenberg Exchange and I really loved their setup. There were workshops, stands with information about Nikon, Tamron, Canon, Sandisk and others, most importantly free food and drinks (after registration) and nice workshops by Niek Erents.

I made some pictures to give an impression of what the day was like.

Next up: the Zoom Experience in Utrecht at the end of the month!

Today the best new anti-spam measure is finally out of beta. That is right, Defensio is finally live. This is what Carl had to say about it on the Defensio blog:

If you’re a blogger, you are likely already intimately familiar with the “spam problem”. Spammers have been waging war on the blogosphere for months now, bombarding the comments section of blogs with literally millions of spam messages per day. This creates a lot of work for blog owners, who have to wade through hundreds if not thousands of messages every week, just to make sure their comment garden remains weed-free. It’s become such a problem that many simply don’t bother anymore, preferring to let the odd legitimate comment disappear; and an increasing number of bloggers are even opting to shut down comments altogether — an unfortunate, and unnecessary, concession to the cold-hearted spammers’ cause.

We felt that the time was ripe for a better spam management solution; so we built Defensio.

Currently they support WordPress 2.1+, Umbraco and PixelPost 1.7+. So if you use WordPress, head on over to Defensio, sign up and download the plugin.

If you use Pixelpost, you have to wait a few more days. Pixelpost 1.7 is really near. If you really cannot wait: check out the Pixelpost Forums where you can download the Release Candidate for Pixelpost 1.7.