Foxit PDF Reader

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Foxit PDF Reader
In the early days, Adobe Acrbat Reader was a great tool for reading PDF files. But in the past months, it has transformed into a slow-starting, update hungry irritating tool which pops up questions about upgrading parts of the program you didn’t even request to be installed. If you have the older version of Acrobat Reader without the update manager, hang on to it.

If you are looking for a nice alternative for Acrobat Reader, I can recommend Foxit PDF Reader. It is a very small program, free, and starts up in about 1/10th of the time Acrobat Reader takes to display just the splash screen (and subsequently, the annoying update manager). It can do anything I usually need when reading and printing PDF files, and the fullscreen mode is even richer than Adobe’s.

Adobe seems to have gone overboard with their userinterface. People just want to read the PDF, and not be bothered with complicated questions which very often result in downloading and installing megabytes of unwanted software on their machines. I will recommend alternatives to Acrobat Reader from now on, and I think the world will become a slightly better place 😉

Software

My movie rating

Posted on By rolfje 1 Comment on My movie rating

Found out about this link by accidentally browsing accros Ian Lewis’s blog. You can find out what your movie rating is. It seems I’m not for “all ages”. 🙂

Rating 12Suitable for 12 years or older. Starting to get interesting now, with more adult-themed storylines, but we’re still talking in mild doses. You may find more colourful language, some human flesh, and maybe even some violence. Nothing creepy though.

Examples: Batman, Naked Gun 33 1/3

See what your rating is.

Fun

Fun at “automatiseringsgids”

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Fun at “automatiseringsgids”

Even companies pretending to know about ICT, writing about companies doing it right or wrong, get it (very) wrong sometimes. People who have an account at De Automatiseringsgids know the login screen. But have they also noticed how their username and password are sent to the server in plain text?

Another funny thing a colleque of mine discovered is the really wierd way of displaying error messages. The server returns the error message as part of a redirect. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. No serverside things here guys, must keep memory usage down. No sessions here, move along… A really funny thing you can do is display your own error messages, like so: De automatiseringsgids with weird error

Wie dit leest is gekI think somebody will start playing with this, because you can do a lot more (very bad) things. Should they have it fixed allready when you are reading this, I saved a screenshot for you. You would have got something in the lines of this:

After discussing this wierd construction, we concluded that the programmers wanted to do a “post-by-redirect” construction, where you make the server return a redirect to the browser jsut after a post. This solves the “reload problem” where the browser asks if it can re-post the data for you. Since a redirect is a GET, the browser will just reload the page. Normally you solve this by storing thing in the session on the server and send a session reference to the browser. Combined with HTTPS, this would give you a relatively strong, and still not to expensive protection against scripting and spoofing attacks.

A fine example of what happens if you trust an external company to build your web application, but you “forget” to check that they’ve delivered something that’s up to your standards (or at least the standards you paid for). Have fun playing around with this, and let me know what interesting things you found. (hint: Iframes and javascript can do a lot on this page 😉

Fun, Software

GSM Abonnement: Wisselen of blijven?

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on GSM Abonnement: Wisselen of blijven?

This article is about selecting a new phone contract. Since this article describes a specific Dutch situation, it will be in Dutch. Sorry.

Dit jaar lijkt een constant “blijven of wisselen” jaar te zijn. Wil je de nieuwe zorgverlof regeling of blijf je spaarloon houden? Wil je een nieuwe Zorgverzekeraar of wil je bij je oude blijven? En vandaag is was mijn beltegoed voor mijn gevoel te snel op, en rees de vraag “Wil je prepaid blijven bellen, of wil je een abonnement?”. Gelukkig was de vraag bij welke provider ik wil blijven snel beantwoord, ik heb altijd goede ervaringen met Vodafone (als bedrijf) gehad dus het moet Vodafone blijven. Ik ben al lid sinds het nog Libertel heette, en heb ook nog steeds hetzelfde nummer.

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Uncategorized

Wikipedia is not the truth!

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on Wikipedia is not the truth!

Wikipedia is not as good as you might think. Things written on Wikipedia are copied “verbatim” by other sites. By the time somebody checks the wikipedia story, he finds the verbatim copies and sees them as confirmation of the wikipedia story. And so the story stays on Wikipedia, spreading wrong ideas to schools, teachers, and you and I.

Spreading wrong information on the internet can have very big consequences, and John Seigenthaler knows this by personal experience.

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Uncategorized

Brilliant Fluids

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Brilliant Fluids

Patience has paid off! In stead of stripping the front fender from the terrible italeri decals, I left it as is, and started searching the web for solutions. I read some brilliant tips on the forms at www.modelbrouwes.nl, and went to the local model shop and bought some Microscale SET and SOL decal solutions.

Actually, de bottle labled “SOL” proved to be the most useful. After you applied the decal, and it is all dry (like my carbon fender struts), you gently apply the SOL fluid to the decal with a soft brush. As you may have guessed, SOL stands for “solution” and that’s what it does, it dissolves the decal slightly. The decal becomes so soft you can push and stretch it with the soft brush. Don’t overdo it, if the decal won’t go any further just let it dry, and try again tommorow. Sometimes it takes 2 to 3 tries.

The funny thing is that when the SOL fluid is applied, your decal may start to wrinkle. Ignore this. Just let it dry for a few hours (don’t touch it!) and it will straighten out. Really great stuf!

The SET fluid smells like vinigar, and you are supposed to apply it to the model before you put the decal on. I have tried it, but I haven’t seen the benefits of it yet. Maybe the SET fluid de-greases the surface a bit, but since I keep the surfaces clean anyway, it won’t do much for me I guess. I have a lot more twisty and lumpy carbon parts to do, so maybe I’ll get back at this…

Workshop

Exhausts Airbrushed

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After a lot of masking, lot of paint-mixing, and very little airbrushing, this is the result of my airbrush adventure to make the exhaust pipes look more realistic. I smuggled a bit, because normally exhausts are welded out of several bended pipes, to get the desired curve. The welds are allways on a spot where two bends meet. In this case, the welds are on random positions, and because I don’t have a very acurate airbrush (rigid needle), they are seperated a bit more than normally. By doing it like this I can make the 3 gradients I wanted from metal to dark bronze-like oxidated metal.

It may be not competely realistic, but it sure beats my normal pencil-only paintjobs! For the observant reader: Yes, that’s another yucki Italeri decal on the engine side cover which is supposed to look like a carbon part with slots in it. The thick Italery decal can not follow the detail of the slots. I still haven’t got the micro set fluid which could solve this (from hear-say). More on that later this week I guess, when I have time to stop by the local modelling shop to see if they have it in store.

I also notice that it seems to be harder to get the larger models more realistic. Small models are easier because at some point, you simply can’t add more detail, and it will look good. I built my first ducati in less time, without an airbrush, and it looks quite nice. I think I’ll stick with the smaller models from now on. Shorter build time, takes up less storage space, are (very) cheap and fun to do.

Workshop