What I loved about iTunes is the three pane "Genre-Artist-Album" on top of my music list. It allowed me to quickly go through my music and find that great Anouk album I was looking for. After installing iTunes 9, it was gone. And I was sad. But I found a way to get it back. Look at this screenshot (sorry, …

At work, we have two applications which connect to the same database. For all kinds of business reasons, we need to make sure that only one of the applications accesses certain data at the same time. To do this, we use a row in a table as a semaphore. While working on the locking mechanism, we had a closer look at the …

During one of my Omniplan sessions at work, I discovered that the resource leveling was acting a bit funny, where people were not planned to do any work for days. I played around with a fake planning and soon discovered the problem and several solutions to it. Imagine you have a 1-man project, with a couple of tasks. …

I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I'd share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo's. The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications …

Suppose you have a Java Swing application which you can start by typing the following on the command line: java -jar myTerrificSwingApp.jar If you want to make that application start from the Finder in OSX, there are a lot of options which range from ugly to convoluted. If you need a quick fix, here's how to do it. …

Now that the twitter hype is cooling down, and companies tart to realize that it is, in fact, just CB radio in a new asynchronous form, only the "true tweeps" still hang around. And now, it's time to t(w)inker with it. [caption id="attachment_942" align="alignright" width="150" …

I used to use Password Gorilla to store my passwords, because it can run on both Mac and Windows. Because my password database keeps growing, Password Gorilla is becomming a very slow starter, even on my new solid state disk. A few weeks ago I learned that KeePass is a much more modern application, and is available for …

If you have a Canon Ixus 80IS, like me, and you shoot video for your widescreen television at home (like me), you may want to try out this little trick. The Canon Ixus is a 4:3 camera. The video that comes out of it is almost square shaped. When you try to make a 16:9 video, you can stretch it, or crop it. Cropping is …

As you may know, I traded in my Honda Sevenfifty for a nice Triumph Speed Triple. While waiting for the bike to be delivered, I tried to fiend out how I can take my hefty 4-star ART chainlock on this bike. Apparently, nobody uses chainlocks on their bikes because I could find no information at all about transporting …

Dear Akio Morita, Lately I have some small issues with a lot of design decisions being made by the company you founded a while ago. If you look at my irritations seperately they're just small gripes of a grumpy old customer. But the increasing number of design mistakes have me worried about your user acceptance testing …