I just purchased the German version of Knockout 2 which works as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, Corel PHOTO-PAINT and Corel Painter as well as Corel Paint Shop Pro X.

So, what does it do?
It makes masking nice and easy!

Quote from the website:

(…) it lets you retain the finest image details, including hair, smoke, liquid, fire, glass and shadows. (end of quote)

And that, it does very well!

I have tried several times to separate a certain object from the background, but with the built-in functions of Paint Shop Pro, it just didn’t work without a lot of effort. With Knockout 2, it is easy as can be!

The only problem was that Paint Shop Pro X failed to import the mask after I was done with Knockout 2: it said “Plugin passed bad parameters”, and there was no mask imported.

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Suzan and I are now officially leaving Hannover to see R.E.M. live tonight in Berlin (Waldbühne)!

Tomorrow, we’re heading towards Dresden where we stay until Saturday.

We might even stop by in Leipzig on our way back.

I just tried to update XAMPP for Windows to version 1.6.7, using the installer version.

Somehow, it did not work without removing the old version first: Apache changed status to “Running”, then suddenly stopped again. There was no way I could access the admin panel. Same happened with MySQL.

After removing the old version, Apache started (as did MySQL), but clicking on “Admin…” resulted in a “500 Internal Server Error”.

Here is the (pretty simple) solution:
An old .htaccess still remained in “…/XAMPP/htdocs/xampp/” which delivered the error. Deleting it did the trick.

And here is a reminder for me:
Permalinks don’t work by default in XAMPP because ModRewrite is not loaded… open “…/XAMPP/apache/conf/httpd.conf” and remove the “#” before LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so… stupid!

Right from the beginning, I spelled this nice blogging software I use “Wordpress” with a small “p”. The more I searched the internet for blogging-related stuff, I came across the correct spelling “WordPress” with a capital “P”. That was already a long time ago. But as I had also already written a few posts that I didn’t want to change (which I wouldn’t have known how to do at that point, anyway - even if I had wanted to), I continued spelling it in the wrong way - at least, I am pretty persistent when it comes to continuity.

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As of today, WordPress 2.6 “Tyner” is available for download on wordpress.org.

It comes with

• wiki-like tracking of edits,
• a powerful “Press This!” bookmark,
• support for Google Gears,
• theme previews,
• word count,
• image captions,
• etc. pp.

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Puh, nochmal Glück gehabt!

I just recently rebooted my Windows XP after downloading the latest patches via the built-in automatic Windows Update Service when I suddenly noticed that I could not get any internet connection via Firefox any longer. Ping and tracert worked, though.

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On Saturday, 5th of July, 2008, I had my scheduled dental implant for my missing tooth “34″ that was extracted last year. Normally, I have no fear of the dentist, but this was something totally new to me, so I was quite excited when I got there.

But what can I say? I feel awesome!

After the dentist anesthetized “Area 34″ in my mouth, I had to wait a little longer, because another operation took place at the same time that seemed to last longer than expected.

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As I am still trying to make my website load faster, I thought about getting rid of some plugins - mostly those who hook into the header action to write some statistics-related stuff into the database.

Popularity Contest is really a nice plugin - but I must admit that I never really looked at the results so intensely.

I also got rid of WP-PostViews, as most stats plugins have a hitlist, anyway…

… and speaking of stats plugins: FireStats also had to go and has been replaced by CyStats.

This really had a nice impact on my database as well as on the file count.

Thanks to Tim for providing the link on how to make Gmail the default mail client in Firefox 3:

gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/power-tip-set-gmail-as-your-default.html

After you’ve done as suggested, Gmail will open up when clicking on a “mailto:”-link.

Nice!