Unusable Flickr?

Is it me, or is Flickr's UI crap? More specifically: how do you navigate to view all pics in a set?
I have a Profoss set, and when looking at the first picture, how do I go to the next one? Is this mini-thumbnail lying silently and unnoticed on the right, the only way? What's more, this couple of thumbnail is certainly not intuitive: the left pic is the previous pic to the one displayed on the page, and the right one is the next. So when you go to the next picture, the one that was displayed goes the the left thumbnail, and the right thumbnail shows the new next picture. Let me tell you this is not intuitive, and certainly not for novice users.

And what if I want go to the 10th pic?

Compare this with Smugmug's interface, and you'll understand why people a ready to pay twice the price than what Flickr asks for their Pro account.
With Smumug, you get:

• rapid access to pictures, not only to the next one
• a layout adapting at the size of your browser window, showing the current picture in a bigger size when you maximise your window

Here's the gallery for my temporary account, which could become obsolete if I don't subscribe within 14 days.

Maybe Flickr's tools are more advanced (picture editor, stats), but what's the point if their interface is unusable for people not used to Flickr?

I'll keep using the free Flickr for now, but if I have to pay, I think I'll switch to Smugmug.

Any better suggestion?

VMWare at Profoss!

Yes, it's true. It's been a long journey, but it finally happened!
Jeremy van Doorn will represent VMWare in our panel discussion "Open or closed source, an open discussion". He joins Dirk Tombeur from Microsoft and Werner van Unen from Citrix. I expect Frank Kohler from Novell will participate too, but I'm waiting for a confirmation.

This will be a really interesting discussion, so don't hesitate and register! ;-)

Server alias: superfluous?

That's what I wonder when I try to visit

• rtbf.be
• la1.be
• la2.be
• easynet.be
  

I find the last one especially sad.....

N810 of EeePC?

De Nokia N810 is eindelijk beschikbaar in Belgie (online bij Nokia) voor €459.00. Maar de EeePC is ook te verkrijgen, het grootste model voor 380€ bij Expansys.

Ik zal nog wat reviews moeten lezen en goed nadenken om te beslissen wat het best past voor mijn gebruik. Asus heeft toch iets moois met de EeePC, en de N810 blijkt alles te hebben wat ik bij een PDA nodig heb.....

The importance of Microsoft's presence at Profoss

So today I got the confirmation that Dirk Tombeur from Microsoft will participate in the panel discussion at Profoss titled 'Open or closed source: an open discussion'. I think this is very good news for the event attendance: they'll get several point of views exposed, and will be able to choose the best solution for their environment.

Profoss has never been started to convince people that they should switch to free or open source solution. Profoss was started so that people can make their own informed decision. And when I say informed, I mean "by knowing there are possibly free and open source solutions that are worthy alternatives to closed source proposals that should be taken into account".

With its stated goal to be objective, Profoss will let people compare proprietary software to free/open source software. It's no fun when everybody agree in a room. There's no progress happening. Progress happens with a constructive discussion when people disagree and present alternatives. At least strong and weak points of each party appears in such a debate.

I'm really looking forward to this friendly panel discussion!

Batch operation adding a filename suffix

I wanted to resize all sponsors logos on the Profoss website. The file name is of the form logo_company.ext, and I wanted to rename it to something like logo_company.small.ext so I didn't loose the original files. The trick here is to split the filename in 2 parts: filename without the extension and the extension.

This is easy with bash, as it lets you manipulate strings quite easily. For example, if the complete filename is stored in the variable $f, the filename without extension is obtained with ${f%.*}, and the extension with ${f:(-3)} (my file extensions where always 3 characters long ;-)

With the convert tool from imagemagick, it was a piece of cake to get the expected result. Here's the command:
for f in logo_*; do file=${f%.*}; ext=${f:(-3)}; convert -scale 50% $f $file.small.$ext; done

Final schedule of Profoss

The final schedule for the Profoss event on virtualisation on 22 and 23 january in Brussels was published.

I'm really excited as I honnestly think the content that will be brought by the speakers will be very interesting. Each speaker is a specialist in the field, but coming from different horizons.

Here are the speakers, in no particular order:

• Frank Kohler, Virtualization project manager for SuSE
• John Abbott, chief analyst at The 451 Group
• Mike Kreiten, Product manager workstation and server at AMD
• Duncan Hardie, Solaris Product Manager at Sun
• Kris Buytaert, co-author of Virtualisation with Xen
• Tarry Singh, virtualisation advisor and Avastu CEO
• Kristof De Spiegeleer, Q-Layer CEO
• Herbert Poetzl, project leader of Linux-VServer
• Niko Nelissen, VP Business development Q-Layer
• Mattias Rechenburg, OpenQRM project manager
• Werner Fischer, Developer and OpenVZ specialist

For the price of 145€ excl VAT for one day, or 290€ excl VAT for two days, with the restaurant and coffee breaks included, who would want to miss this out? So if you're interestd in virtualisation, don't wait any longer and register!