5 things you don't know about me

I got tagged by Arje the other day, so here goes:

Five things you don't know about me:

1. I listen a lot to loud house music, but I appreciate some peace and quit


2. My girlfriend is quarter Chinese, quarter Arabic, quarter Dutch and a quarter Polish


3. I drive a Fiat model 'dot'


4. I used to be addicted to Half-life Counterstrike for over 2 years.(it kept me up till 2am)


5. I'm going to move from the big city to the small countryside in 2007

Over to Ross, Jelle and Niels.

HippoCMS.org restructure

As you might have noticed, we are currently moving some pages around on the HippoCMS.org website. This really needed to happen, since it was becoming one big mess. I think that a good product needs good documentation, so i'll try to add as much undocumented features on the website over the next couple of weeks.

But of course you can help us out here. If you found out some nice feature of Hippo CMS , which does not have any documentation on our website, be sure to post your story on to our mailinglist, so we can put it up there!

Hippo CMS progress update

As I promised a while ago I would keep everybody up to date on my progress with some new/improved CMS features.

So what's new? Well there are two new/improved features available in the Hippo CMS trunk.

• Multiple asset upload


• Copy document made it into the document actions panel

More exciting things are coming up soon. I will keep you posted!

Zoom zoom zoom

Well this weekend I went on a wild chase for the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM zoom lens. I looked around on several pricewatch websites to get this lens as cheap as possible, but ended up with nothing after a Saturday cruising around Amsterdam. It seemed the lens was out of stock in every shop and they did not know when it would arrive at the store again, since Canon seemed to have had some delivery problems with this lens for the entire year.

I figured this would happen, especially at the end of the year, since the lens was one of the items in the cashback book coming with my Canon eos 350D. So back at home I was not giving up and called in Google. I ended up at the DigitalWareHouse, which was located in Haarlem. They did not have live stock on their webshop, so I just send them an email. Sunday afternoon I got a reply saying that they still had it in stock, so I reserved the lens I picked it up the same day. They guys at the DWH was very friendly and knew a lot about the lens. I would recommend the shop to everyone driving by Haarlem.

Here is one of my first shots. It's not that impressive, since it was taken behind glass and the light was very bad at the end of the day, as it was going to rain. The image is best viewed large, so you can see the details on the bird. The great thing about this lens is the Image Stabilizer. It's really great when you zoom in a lot. Any small movement is corrected by the IS. If you are thinking of buying a zoom lens: save the extra money for the IS lens, because it's really worth it!

Looking at the size of my camera with the lens attached I feel a bit like a paparazzi. :-)

Christmas at Flickr.com

Happy things are happening over at Flickr.com. It seems they are in the Christmas mood!
They've created a Christmas Gift Certificate card, but even better:

Your recipients will get unlimited uploads — the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we've upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!

I was planning to upgrade soon, since I plan to make more use of my 350D then before, but having the 100MB upload for now is great!

One other note is that you can now attach notes on Flickr with the text ‘ho ho ho beard’ or ‘ho ho ho hat’. It will give you the nice Santa beard or hat :-)

GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source

As of yesterday Google WebToolkit (GWT 1.3 Release Candidate) is 100% Open Source and Apache 2.0 licensed. This is a great step for GWT and for web developers around the world.

Since our primary mission is to help users (as opposed to hoarding proprietary development tools), opening up GWT has always been a no-brainer -- we just had to decide when. Now that GWT has some serious adoption and a lively user community, open-sourcing is the obvious next step to help GWT evolve more quickly.

We've been playing around with GWT here at Hippo to get some insight on the toolkit for Hippo CMS 7. We haven't decided yet on what framework will power Hippo CMS 7, but Google's decision makes it more interesting.

Enabling WPA on Ubuntu Dapper the easy way

I've been strugling with WPA on my Ubuntu Dapper installation for a while now. There are numerous installation guides to get WPA working, but none of them worked for me or they were extremely complex and far beyond my linux knowledge. I would like to work with Dapper more, but it did not allow me to connect with the wifi network at the Hippo office or at home.

Yesterday I continued my WPA quest and I am happy to report that I finally got it to work.
Fred made an easy list to follow and in the end I actually did get it working. I tried it this morning in the office as well and it works like a charm.

What's up for this week?

Well last week I was told that I was about to get some time for implementing cool new features in the CMS like Niels mentioned last week.

First up is the multiple binaries upload which will make working with the CMS a lot easier for most people. I'll promise to keep you up to date on my progress and let you know as soon as possible when these features are available, so you could give them a try.