Schonhose

There comes a time you absolutely have to do a complete reinstall of your system. Obvious, back in the day with Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME this time would be every other month. However, this hasn’t been the case with Windows XP.

Let me explain my personal situation, about two years ago I reinstalled my system from scratch, building it up to a state I was more than comfortable with. It has been running rock solid ever since (much to my surprise I might add).

Yesterday I decided to do it all again. Why you might ask would I go to the trouble of rebuilding my system from scratch again? Well, mainly because I had tested a lot of software, and some install routines where below par. Not all traces where removed while uninstalling the packages. This leaves a system with extra baggage and I felt after two years the time had come to start fresh.

Luckily I have learned from earlier experiences: no matter how hard you try, you’ll always forget to copy some important stuff. It might be some documents not in the ‘My Documents’ folder, it might be some settings from a particular program, but you always will forget something.

So I decided to make a image. What I needed was a small program, simple to use and most important: it should be able to let me browse the image and copy the files I needed. I’ve found such a program in IRestorer. It is small and does what it promises: making a diskimage on another drive. And best of it all, it is free.

Sure enough I found a couple of things I missed after install:

• Mail from Thunderbird (although I thought I had it covered)
• MySQL databases from my local XAMPP install (for development)
• Feedreader settings

I managed to fix it all by using the IRestorer software which mounts the image as a drive so you can copy stuff from it. I’ll bet it will save me some more in the next few days.

For those of you wondering what HDR really is, here is a quick introduction, courtesy of Wikipedia. Basically the best program for this has been Photomatix. It has been around for some time and we all thought the world of it.

Luckily for us, Imaging Luminary, LCC thought a bit different and started to create their own software for producing HDR images and apply tonemapping to the result. The beta versions of the program created quite a buzz at Flickr, allowing me to jump on the bandwagon. We’re allowed to test the software provided we gave detailed feedback about what we liked, disliked and issues we came across.

With each beta version the program got better, supported more files, more export possibilities and a superior algorithm for creating HDR and applying tonemapping. After some months (and some late night debugging sessions) I got an email announcing the release of the final version. So here it comes: a shameless plug: If you’re into HDR, try the community version for free. If you dig it, buy the program. .

It is faster and superior to Photomatix, but don’t take my word for it. See for yourself.

In case you’re wondering: yeah, I own a copy.

Recently I bought a new car, a Volkswagen, equipped with some cool options I never had before on a car. One of these options is the Cruise Control, which I absolutely love.

The only problem is that in the Netherlands the highways are overcrowded during daytime (and most of the evenings) basically rendering the system unusable most of the time. We got speedlimits, on general set at 120 km/h (about 75 mph) but the real speed lies between zero and 140 km/h. At one minute you might be driving 125, the next it may drop to 10, speeding up to 125 another couple of seconds later. Not the ideal environment for using Cruise Control.

Except for last night, at 10 pm. There wasn’t much traffic and I rode almost 165 km on Cruise Control. Driving this way is so much more relaxing!