Niels’ Homepage

Today Diona has started her own web design company. See aims mainly at small companies, private persons, and (sports) clubs. But I don’t think she would refuse other clients :)

So Diona, if you read this (duh! :) ): Good luck and have fun! If you need any help, you will know where to find me….

Do you never feel that you have a lot of ideas (not necessary good ones) and you do not have the time to execute them? Just looking at the software ideas the following list can be created:

• A portable application to generate bulk documents (invoices and the lot) and have this generation and production either local or even distributed on several systems. Currently the Eclipse BIRT project has something like this (there are others, I know), so it might be more interesting to use/join that project. But it is much more fun to do it yourself :). I also have some functionality in mind not provided by the Eclipse BIRT project.
  • Print management
  • Plain text output
• A content management system specifically designed for martial-arts teachers so that they can easily create websites and documentation with, for example, examples for their students.
• Another NanoBlogger plugin that combines several galleries to a single photo album. I got the idea for this from this site.

So much to do……

I hope I can find the time (between jiu-jitsu/aikido practice and the family) to do any of this. Programming has become fun again! But first some extra functionality will be added to sl. No one but me uses it I think, but I can use the extra functionality.

Version 0.2.0 of the Picture Gallery Plugin is available. This version should play nice with versions of NanoBlogger <3.3.

Beware: This plugin has only be tested with versions 3.1 and 3.3 RC3 of NanoBlogger. If I have time I will try to test the plugin for other versions. But don’t let that stop you from doing the same and provide me with feedback :).

You can download it here.

After trying to add a second picture gallery to this site the plugin would overwrite the title and the introductory text for all galleries with the ones from the latest gallery. This has been fixed in the new release together with a minor bug.

You can get this release here

Yesterday, Emma, Diona and me went to an ice sculpture festival in Leiden. I am not sure if this is an annual festival but I got the impression it is. This year’s theme was Rembrandt, as it is almost 400 years ago that Rembrandt was born.

When we arrived there were not many visitors yet. So we bought tickets and entered the exhibit. As we were already expected that it might be cold we brought winter coats and gloves. Alas, that proved to be insufficient. I estimated that the temperature would be only slightly below 0°C, but it was -10°C. Emma complained about the cold so we went back and bought a Rembrandt scarf in the souvenir shop. They had everything there, even Rembrandt pretzels. Although I am not sure if they had those 400 years ago :).

After entering the exhibit for the second time, this time for real, we saw that the sculptors had given meaning to the theme in a very cool (no pun intended) way. There were excerpts from Rembrandt’s paintings made with ice sculptures and impressions of the time he had lived in. And I must admit, my impression of ice sculpting was that it was a craft and not an art, but after visiting this festival I must say I am definitely wrong about that. They had given a meaning to Rembrandt’s work with their sculptures and by doing so became artists instead of craftsmen according to my definition of art.

We quickly went through the exhibit to get some hot coco and apple pie to get warm again. After which we went back for a second time. I can safely say that if you have some spare time go visit this festival. To give you a small impression a new gallery has been added. In an attempt to get you even more excited I must say that the people from Leiden are very nice. I got lots of greeting and smiles. So only that would make it worthwhile :).

Yesterday I took my 2nd degree black-belt test and I passed! It started of really well, but in the first kata (Ebo-no-kata) I timed the throw for mae-geri wrong. That always makes me think at moments that I should not think anymore. So as a result I ‘forgot’ to breathe, which caused me to be more exhausted in the end than expected.

The comments the jury gave were that they considered the Ebo-no-kata a bit to static, so this is something to work on and work with. The funny thing is that the Ebo-no-kata is something I really like to do and spend quite some time perfecting. So in getting the details right I forgot to practice how to exercise it as dynamic as possible. Oh well, it would be boring if there was nothing left to learn :).

Also my congratulations to Eric who passed for his black-belt test. He really trained hard and his exam was good to watch. He also learned me a new throw, but I don’t think I can repeat it. I even think that this throw (more a toss really) as a sport is illegal here in the Netherlands :).

Of course I owe a lot to my partners, who took the time, patience and pain to train with me for the last couple of months. So: Thanks Willem and Diana!

As soon as I have pictures I will put them on this site.

People who know me also know that I will take my 2nd degree black-belt test in jiu-jitsu this evening. So far I wasn’t in the least bit nervous, but now I am finally showing the signs:

• Doubt
• Restlessness

Fortunately for me it is not that bad. I am still having a good focused feeling. The tests will be taken somewhere between 18:00 and 21:00 this evening at the Den Edel gym in Gouda. So nine o’clock at the latest the impact of my nervousness will be known.

But whatever the result it will be a fun evening with friends and undoubtedly good results for other candidates.

Generating picture galleries proved to have a steeper learning curve than anticipated. The originals were kept and somehow the thumbnails that the gallery plugin created were 60+ KB. After some searching I found out that ImageMagick, which is used to create the thumbnails, retains the EXIF put in the photo by the camera. Since this can easily be 60 KB it means that the size of the thumbnails is always larger than 60 KB.

To fix things the originals were reduced to 60% of their original size and the EXIF data was stripped from the pictures. I used the following command:

mogrify -thumbnail 60% *.JPG

This already greatly reduced the size of the ‘originals’ without losing too much quality when viewed on a website. Since this has also stripped the EXIF data the thumbnails are now a mere 8 KB in size. This keeps the bandwidth low and makes the download of the gallery page faster.

This site has very nice examples and explanations on using the ImageMagick tools to create thumbnails.

As mentioned in a previous post we visited a Sinterklaas celebration where we took a lot of pictures. The problem was that putting them on-line using NanoBlogger was a bit cumbersome. After some investigation on the NanoBlogger Yahoo group I found that a man named Chris had written a picture gallery plugin. After contacting him about it, he was so kind as to make it available to me. As it was still in a somewhat rudimentary state and I really like to tinker, I started writing my own plugin.

It is now in a quite usable state so I am sharing this with the rest of the world. Its usage is (hopefully) quite simple:

Usage

1. Install the plugin gallery.sh in the NanoBlogger plugin directory. The plugin can be downloaded here.
2. Create a directory named galleries in the NanoBlogger image directory. Any sub-directory of galleries will be considered a gallery.
3. Place the pictures (JPG or PNG format) in the sub-directory of galleries that you created.
4. Adjust the template main_index.htm to include the variable $NB_GalleryLinks
5. Run nb -u all.

The created gallery will get the title of the sub-directory in which the pictures are stored.

These are the basics. But the plugin also gives the possibility to:

• Prepend an introductory text
• Annotate arbitrary pictures

Prepend introductory text

Create a file named intro.txt in the place the pictures are stored using nb --draft intro.txt and treat it like you would treat a regular entry for NanoBlogger. The title you set in the entry will be the title for the gallery.

Annotate pictures

Create a file named annotations.txt and put a line for each picture you want annotated using the following format:

<picture file>,<annotation>

Picture file is the local file name of the picture. Do not include paths, just use the bare file name. Everything after the comma is then considered an annotation for the picture.

To make the gallery a bit more pleasant-looking adjust your website’s style sheet. You can use this as an example.

Every year my employer organizes a visit from Saint Nicolas (Sinterklaas) for all the employees’ children. Until this year Emma didn’t really grasp the
concept of Sinterklaas, but see finally seems to have discovered it.

In this gallery you can see some pictures taken at the event.

It took me a couple of days to get these pictures on-line since I did not have a decent solution to create picture galleries for NanoBlogger. But now I have. More on that later on.