cestdelamerde.com

iPhoto is one of the simplest picture management tool ever written, so simple that it is not well suited to manage a huge picture library :
- it consumes a lot of memory,
- pictures are stored into a directory structure that only iPhoto developers seems to be able to understand thus organizing you picture files as you want is not possible,
- backups are not possible
- usage of removable media (DVD, hardrive...) is not possible,
- classification is painful, at the application launch all picture are displayed,

I finally installed Adobe LightRoom, and magically everything I wanted to do with my pictures is now possible.

LightRoom has a kick-ass GUI organized the same way Eclipse does : it features some kind of "perspectives" to classify, retouch, print and publish pictures. It can run fullscreen allowing to take advantage of modern large screens. It does not destroy you're files folder when importing picture directly from an hardrive, and has a convenient import tool. Batch editing is really easy eg: add 9 hours to dates of pictures of only one camera model = less than 5 clicks and no need to go to a menu... Surely the best GUI available today for a Mac OS X application.

I will never launch iPhoto again

January 11, 2008 kde.org annouced KDE 4.0 is released !

Unfortunately, this release is not really ready for day to day use.

The new interface is beautyful but lacks of configuration options (eg:resizing/masking the taskbar).

A lot of application that used to work in kde 3.5 does not work anymore (eg: Kopete has a random behaviour when it talks to some Jabber servers).

Some kickass features in applications have been disabled : it is not possible to access directly to a tab in Konsole using a keyboard shortcut, adding custom applet (like a "show desktop button") to the taskbar seems not possible anymore....

Even worse, some settings are not accessible through the control panel anymore, eg: the number of desktops available for application windows can only be configured by right-clicking on the pager taskbar applet, the taskbar options (size, automasking...) seems to be gone, when removing the pager applet, there seems to be no way to enable it back !

After some time, keyboard shortcuts did not work anymore : Alt+TAB just does nothing, Ctrl+Shift+N (new tab in Konsole) split the screen...

So do not even think about installing it

Today at approximatively 22:30 CET google servers (at least google.fr and google.com) were apparently down : they displayed the welcome page of the Apache Httpd web server. See the screenshot below :

A few days ago, I've installed Firefox 3 beta 2 for Mac OS X.

It features new security mechanisms, a new URL bar auto-completion, a download manager that can be used by a human, a new password management and a faster rendering engine a bit more integrated to the os.

The first thing that surprised me is the new rendering engine using a new way to render fonts that forbids the use of non anti-aliased fonts : even setting "AppleAntiAliasingThreshold" to a very high value does not disable anti-aliasing

Anyway, it looks faster and this is a good news as Firefox is quite slow compared to Internet Explorer and Opera. But the more useful new feature is the way stored password are managed. The password manager do not ask you anymore before submitting a password form if you want save this password, but it asks you after you've submitted the form. This is especially useful because you can choose to remember the password only if the login was successful and not a priori.

Download Firefox Beta Version.
Firefox 3 beta 2 Release Notes.

During past few weeks, cestdelamerde.com was down because my dsl modem was unable to provide a stable connection. I finally choose for the new year to host this website at Gandi.