Everything has a reason

Sometimes I take some serious risks. Like, suddenly, I get the urge to install Ubuntu on my office’s laptop. A Dell Latitude E6500. But, there’s a Windows 7 installed, consuming the entire disk.
So, what I have to use, is the gparted disk resize functionality – something I never trust. But hey, who cares So I downloaded the live CD of Ubuntu 10.04 netbook edition (two days before Ubuntu 10.10 should be released – I tend to download ubuntu releases a couple of days before a new version is released), I put in on a USB Flash drive (so that I don’t have to install it on the harddisk) but not much success. The first time it boots great, but then I want to configure some things, install other software (not to do on a live distribution) the OS starts complaining about not enough diskspace, wireless problems and on reboot, no live os was found.

So I took the chance and installed it on the hard drive – resizing the existing NTFS partition. Installation of Ubuntu is painless – as always – and on reboot, except for the check disk that was triggered when booting back into Windows, everything went smooth and Windows 7 just kept working fine. Only with 4GB less hard drive.

In Ubuntu, I installed the NVidia drivers for the screen and after that, the boot screen (ubuntu logo) and the terminal (you know, tty1 to 6, ctrl+alt+f1) didn’t have the 1920×1200 resolution anymore, just a 640×480.
Me not want.
So I kept searching and trying, even adjusting some grub scripts (one hint said to change the “linux” and “initrd” in /etc/grub.d/10_linux to “linux16″ and “initrd16″ but that didn’t work out and besides, it’s a dirty hack.
You can configure it nicely the way it should be: adjusting /etc/default/grub. Add the lines

GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1200x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

and you’re all done. Not using the (deprecated) vga= method, just that. And run update-grub2 afterwards.
This is my working grub.cfg:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

GRUB_DEFAULT=4
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1200x32
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

Done. Now I need a way to get my intel wifi 5100 agn wireless card working. It connects, stays connected for about 30 seconds, then disconnects again, corrupting wireless Internet for everyone else that gets it’s wireless from the same router and requires the router to be rebooted… Hmm.

Edit: However, the splash screen is there for just a short amount of time. The console’s are at full resolution, so that’s ok with me, but it would of course be nice that the splash screen and moving dot’s are viewable. I should take a further look at another solution/work-around in which the author states he hates the set gfxpayload=keep solution and gives a better solution… Well, that’s for another time

At the office, a lot of people are using MS Excel. And they’re using the ability to fetch external data into Excel. This external data is read from an Oracle 10g database. Now, given the fact that we recently changed to a new Citrix environment, using Windows 2008 R2 (thus x64) servers, you can already guess: Reloading the data in Excel just won’t work.

After a little search on the Internet, I found a question about the exact same problem I have: the question for a “Solution for ORA-6413 error showing connection not open”

There’s just one answer.

Are you running a 32 bit Oracle client software on a 64 bit OS ?

It seems that this error is caused by a bug. The networking layer is unable to parse program locations that contain parenthesis in the path to the executable which is attempting to connect to Oracle, and 32 bit applications are installed in locations similar to “C:\Program Files (x86)\…” on 64 bit versions of Windows.

If that is the case, there are two solutions for this:

1) Use a version of the Oracle software that contains the fix for the bug (i.e. apply the latest available patch for the Oracle software)
2) Find the location of the application that is generating the error and relocate it to a directory without any parenthesis in the path.

Since it is a bug in the Oracle client, relocating the application to a folder without parenthesis is just a work-around. I’d go for solution 1: use a new version of the software. Luckily I still have that download from my previous Oracle troubles, on my x64 Windows 7 machine, and remembering the download took more than 30 minutes, I’m glad I can start installing immediately… Just to find out that the installer crashes as soon as it get launched.

Then I remembered.

Only a couple of days after finding a solution for my Oracle 10g troubles on Windows 7, a colleague of mine couldn’t start the installer either. What I couldn’t remember, is what the solution was. Luckily, there’s Google to show me that there’s a simple solution. Just moving the installer files to C:\ solves it and the installer works fine.

I said it before and I’ll repeat it. It IS still Windows after all…
Edit: As mentioned in the comments, it’s indeed not fair to blame the guys from Redmond. Totally agree.
And I forgot to mention that not only the installer just works after copying it to the root, the solution mentioned above did indeed work on the servers so Excel is now able to connect to the Oracle database.

As I told in the last few lines of my previous post, I had some issues installing the Oracle 10g client on my Windows 7 installation. After installing the 10g client, I immediately noticed it wouldn’t work: When opening the Microsoft ODBC Administrator, the Oracle datasource just wasn’t there. So I started to Google and the first hits I got were not very promising: 10g isn’t supported on Windows 7. It’s all over the place. Not supported. Won’t work. Why bother. One of the Oracle forum threads however shows that I had to use the 11g client. This isn’t supported either, but works at least. Better this than nothing, so I started to download the Oracle 11g 64bit client. Sure, my OS is 64 bit. 500MB. Damn.

When the download was finally finished, I installed this 11g client and noticed that indeed, the Oracle ODBC driver appeared in the ODBC manager. Hooray! So I set up the ODBC data source for the application that I tried to set up and indeed, I could choose the datasource, I selected it and … the application just crashed. Gone. Damn. As expected actually, since the software doesn’t support the 11g client. So I started to search further, noticed there was an update of the 10g client (with Vista support) so I started to download that one (another 500MB download) but I continued my search. I noticed a strange thing about another application, Powerbuilder 11, that has 11g support, but which refused to connect to the oracle database, although the 11g client was installed. It was a difficult search, but all of a sudden, I came across Google Groups where a few words were blinking.

How embarrassing. Of course! Powerbuilder didn’t say it couldn’t find the Oracle installation, it said it couldn’t load a specific DLL (a specific 64bit DLL). And that’s the reason why my 32bit installations of Oracle doesn’t appear in the ODBC manager: it only shows 64 bit ODBC drivers! So, I didn’t cancel my 64bit download of Oracle 10g, but I added two other downloads: 32bit version of the latest 10g and the 32bit version of 11g. (you can guess the filesize).

At the installation (I speak 2 hours later and a little modification later), I ran into this other problem. The installer didn’t continue since the OS version isn’t supported. It requires at most Windows 6.0 and I have Windows 6.1 (yes, Windows 7 is version 6.1). But there’s a quick and simple work-around by faking that the OS is supported. The installation worked. Powerbuilder could now connect to the Oracle database (using these 32bit data sources) but my problem on Heat was still standing: no 32bit ODBC drivers in my ODBC manager. There had to be a way to set them up. And there is. It’s called the “32bit version of the ODBC manager” which is the second hit when you enter “ODBC” in the start menu search field.

And now everything falls into place. The fact that Powerbuilder couldn’t see any of the System DSN’s, is part of the same problem: it can’t see any of the 64bit System DSN’s, but it CAN see all the 32bit System DSN’s.

So my problem is just that I installed the 64 bit version of Windows 7. If I would have installed the 32 bit version, I wouldn’t have had any problems I guess…

Running 64 bit Windows 7, my Oracle 10g problems are thus solved by

• Installing the 32 bit versions of the Oracle clients (both 10g and 11g work without a problem – so far)
• Setting up the ODBC data bases using the 32bit version of the ODBC manager (which is included by default)

It took me only three days to figure that out.

I just finished a two hour telephone call with Microsoft support. I just wanted to quickly install Windows 7 on my computer.

Problem is this “upgrade” version. You are licensed to install an upgrade version of Windows 7 when you have Windows XP installed on your computer. You find everywhere on the Internet (third party and Microsoft) that you CAN NOT upgrade your Windows XP, but you have the ability to perform a “clean install”.

So, since I knew that and since I had the option to “upgrade” my installation, I chose that option. The installer immediately warned me that this wouldn’t work, since I had a Windows XP installed, so I had to return and choose for the “clean installation”. As expected.

Installation went smoothly. There where all other Windows installations bugged you asking for advanced network options, usernames, keyboard layouts, … this Windows installation just installs. And so we come to the point where the product license had to be entered. The product license is invalid.

I retried, I entered the – signs manually (the installer inserts them automatically), I tried with capslock, without capslock… nothing helped. So I searched for the Microsoft Support number. Online and with another computer of course. The first thing I thought when I was connected with Microsoft was “OMG”. The computer voice was so low, I could hardly understand what they were saying. But, luckily for me, the support guy was understandable and in contrary to all other helpdesks, I could speak to someone almost immediately and thus without listening to some crappy music for several minutes. Microsoft support seems to know what they’re doing. They’re not suggesting “reboot your computer” and don’t answer any other run-over-a-pre-defined-list questions. Straight to the point. And while they’re waiting for their computers to search for information, they note my information so they don’t loose any time.

I had to give them my product key and this was the hardest thing to do of the entire phone call. When you spell some letters, they resemble another one, so he noted the key wrongly for three times. When he finally got it right, he could see nothing was wrong with the number, so he would redirect me to someone of technical service.

This second guy immediately knew who I was, so I didn’t have to explain everything overnew. He suggested to continue without Product Key and reinstall from the same dvd. This would be seen as an “upgrade” of a newer version and thus the key would work. I tried and indeed, that was the solution.

WTF??

So it takes twice as long to install Windows 7. So far the “fast installation”.

However, after that, Windows 7 works like a charm. So much faster than Windows XP, so much more userfriendly, faster, not only in response time but also as in “userexperience”… Overall VERY happy with the result.

And what you immediately see is that they have learned a lot from Mac OS X. A lot.
Now I only have to try to install some (old) applications. So far, everything looks good, except for the Oracle 10g client. It isn’t supported nor working on Windows 7. It seems that the v11 client isn’t supported either, but it should work. So I’m now downloading the 500MB package and will see what that’ll do…

Lieve Wann.es,

Uiteraard begrijp ik je wantrouwen ten opzichte van het nieuwe systeem, beter bekend onder de naam Mac OS X. Veranderen, zeker naar iets dat zoveel vernieuwender en zoveel meer vooruitstrevend is dan het oude vertrouwde systeem dat we al die jaren gewoon zijn, is niet altijd even gemakkelijk.

Sta me toe om je een hand te reiken en je een beetje wegwijs te maken in de onbekende wereld van de Mac. Ik ga je voorbeelden beantwoorden en je zal zien, het grootste deel van je frustratie ligt in “gewoonte” en “kennis”.

1. Een bepaalde extensie toewijzen aan een applicatie. Rechterklik (of ctrl-klik wanneer je nog een 1-knopsmuis hebt) op een bestand en kies voor “Get Info”. Ik heb mijn Mac ingesteld in het Engels, maar dat kon even goed het Nederlands zijn of het Katalaans, want zoals je weet, Mac OS X is out-of-the-box multilingual. Je krijgt het onderstaande scherm (die ik trouwens ook heb genomen met de out-of-the-box screenshot functionaliteit). Ik heb de verschillende opties dichtgeklapt om enkel de informatie over te houden die hier van belang is.
   Selecteer een andere applicatie onder “Open with:” en klik vervolgens op de knop “Change all…” die eronder staat. Je zal zien dat vanaf dan alle bestanden van dat type (niet van die extensie want Mac OS X herkent de feitelijke bestandstypes, ongeacht welke extensie ze hebben) zullen openen met het gekozen programma.
   
2. Numeriek toetsenbord heeft een komma ipv een punt. Helaas zal ik hier ook op moeten antwoorden “ja dat gebruik ik niet”. Ik werk op een laptop die bovendien een querty klavier heeft. Brengt me meteen bij een tegenargument: Bij Windows heb je de keuze tussen de layouts “US” en “US International”. Bij de eerste layout kun je geen deeltekens’s, tildes, hoedjes, accentjes… leggen op de gewenste letters, dus moet je de tweede nemen. Alleen is dit zeer frustrerend bij het programmeren omdat de " pas verschijnt na tweemaal duwen. (De eerste keer is om het deelteken in ë te kunnen maken). Bij dit probleem kan ik je niet out of the box verder helpen, want ik heb geen ervaring met wat “Belgisch” layout doet bij een klavier met nummeriek toetsenbord. Ukelele (mij ook onbekend) kan je inderdaad mogelijk verder helpen.
3. iCal doet inderdaad niet mee aan het schrijven via andere applicaties naar Google Calendar. iCal heeft daar geen andere applicaties voor nodig: die kan dat zelf. iSync kun je gebruiken om je adresboek te synchroniseren met die van GMail.
4. Sneltoetsen door vensters bladeren, dat kan op vele verschillende manieren. In de eerste plaats is er Exposé. De defaults zijn in de loop van de tijd veranderd, dus je moet even kijken hoe de instelling op jouw systeem zijn. Hiermee kun je een overzicht van alle vensters (alle openstaande of enkel die van een bepaalde applicatie) bekijken.
   Als ik me niet vergis ben je echter op zoek naar de shortcut voor windows-tab. Wel, probeer cmd-tab eens? Er bestaat een overzicht van alle default keyboard shortcuts (waaronder enkele waarbij je inderdaad minstens 2 personen nodig hebt om ze in te duwen) maar ook hier geldt: pas ze aan hoe je zelf wil!
5. Home en End bestaan inderdaad niet. Cmd+pijltje is the way to do it. Ze staan 10cm uit elkaar, akkoord, maar is het zo’n grote moeite om met je linkerduim (!) de cmd-toets in te duwen en de rechterwijsvinger op een pijltje te duwen? Akkoord, in sommige programma’s (ik denk aan Dreamweaver, ik denk aan applicaties die ports uit een windows omgeving zijn) moet je eerder Fn+pijltje duwen. Hier bestaat hier en daar inconsistentie maar dan is nog maar de vraag: ligt dat aan het OS of ligt het aan de applicatie. Op het werk gebruiken we FirstClass als e-mail client en de normale toetsencombinaties (tot zelfs ctrl+backspace of ctrl+b) werken niet zoals je zou verwachten.

Het is een feit dat je moet wennen. Het is een feit dat je je te complex denkpatroon moet laten varen en terug logisch intuïtief moet leren nadenken. Toegegeven, het is vooral wennen maar na een tijdje zul je merken dat je met een Mac (met keyboard shortcuts!) veel sneller kunt werken dan met het Windows systeem. Akkoord, ik voel me bijna even goed onder een Ubuntu systeem op een PC als op mijn Mac. Op een Mac kan ik echter alles doen wat ik ook op mijn Ubuntu systeem kan (met uitzondering dan van het hercompileren van de kernel) maar met mijn Ubuntu systeem kan ik niet meteen alles wat ik met mijn Mac kan realiseren.

Het is een kwestie van gewoonte. En van kennis. En openstaan voor. Maar dat geldt voor alles. Je moet niet aan iets nieuw beginnen wanneer je per definitie tegen bent. Hoe goed die nieuwigheid ook mag zijn, je zal altijd het negatieve blijven zien. Want oh ja, er zijn ook negatieve punten aan een Mac. Ik denk bijvoorbeeld aan het verplaatsen van een folder of een bestand. Kopieren kun je. Drag en Drop kun je. Maar knippen-en-plakken mag je vergeten.

Hopelijk ben ik je van dienst kunnen zijn.
Met vriendelijke groeten…

Every night, all over the world, hundreds of people see this
face in their dreams. If this man appears in your dreams
too, or if you have any information that can help us
identify him, please contact us.

thisman.org claims that the project started because the man was first described by the patient of a well known psychiatrist and later recognized by several patients of different psychiatrists and they want to find out who he is.

Some state they fell in love with him. To some he gave ‘em advice. I think he’s just creepy.

A well-known psychiatrist. Where did I read this before?

Sure this is another hoax, sure this is fake, however, clever found. How to know for sure? Two things.

• The text mentions a well-known psychiatrist but no name. Been there, done that.
• The website is registered by guerrigliamarketing.it, an Italian marketing company specialised that uses "a set of non-conventional communication techniques that achieves maximum visibility with minimum investment"

So be prepared and remember not to forward this when it appears in your mailbox, or this man might start chasing you in your dreams…

I ran into my first annoying bug in Snow Leopard today. Not a big deal, just annoying.
On reboot, I noticed that the volume was reset to 100%. First I thought I forgot to set the volume to a lower level, or I increased it and forgot to pull it down again.

But after rebooting twice on a short timespan, I was sure I decreased the sound level before reboot but it was still reset to 100%.
A quick Googling learned that there are two audio settings files in /Library/Preferences/Audio (com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist) that should be removed. On that forum, there are comments of Snow Leopard users that say their sound settings are reset to 0% or 25% so I guess the volume level is restored to the level at which it was before upgrading to Snow Leopard. But that’s just my guess.

Reboot and the volume stays at the same level as before the reboot.

Natuurlijk zit ik niet in Nieuw Zeeland. Als ik daar al ooit in mijn leven geraak, dan zal het niet voor in de zeer nabije toekomst zijn. Heel erg jammer. Gewoon thuis en op het werk zoals de meeste mensen, daar zit ik. En ik dacht dat dat wel duidelijk zou zijn door een slecht getrukeerde foto van een sjaal en winterjas op een exotisch strand bij de post te zetten…

Zondag hoorde ik op de radio vertellen dat Britse verzekeringsmaatschappijen aan het overwegen zijn om hogere premies door te rekenen aan mensen die actief zijn op sociale netwerksites zoals Facebook en Netlog. Reden? Sommige mensen zetten heel hun leven online, zodat inbrekers gewoon kunnen gaan Internet Shoppen om te zien wie wanneer afwezig is.

Mijn bedenkingen:

1. Facebook en Netlog zijn niet als enige gevaarlijk. Wanneer je vragen post op vakantieforums in de stijl “Hey, wij vertrekken vrijdag voor drie weken naar Nieuw Zeeland en we zouden graag wat interessante trekpleisters en gezellige restaurants willen weten…” dan ben je ook verkeerd bezig en dan ben je niet eens actief op facebook
2. De lijn moet dan doorgetrokken worden. Vrienden, buren, familie, collega’s weten evengoed wanneer je hoelang naar waar op reis bent. Je hebt geen controle over wat zij allemaal over jou online zetten. Zij moeten zelfs niet actief zijn op facebook om het aan de verkeerde mensen te kunnen doorvertellen: “Neen, ik kan nu niet komen want ik moet de brievenbus gaan leegmaken bij … want die zit voor drie weken in Nieuw Zeeland… Ja, echt he! Volgens mij is het daar ook schoon! … Ja, ik weet ook niet waar die dat geld vandaan halen…”
3. Ik heb werk! Alleen, ik heb niet het geluk om thuis te kunnen werken. Misschien moet mijn verzekeringspremie dan ook omhoog, want inbrekers kunnen daar ook meteen achter komen, zonder dat ik het op facebook zet.
4. Sarcasme alom: als ik naar de winkel ga, blijft het huis soms onbewaakt achter. Krijg ik dan de keuze om ofwel mijn verzekeringspremie naar omhoog te zien gaan ofwel te verhongeren?

En hoewel we in België nog niet zo ver zijn, ook hier is het facebook-fenomeen opgevallen bij de verzekeringsmaatschappijen. Ze wachten echter eerst het onderzoek af. Gelukkig hebben ze nog twijfels bij dat principe. Zo’n uitmelkers zijn het voorlopig dus niet.

Pittig detail: de websites van ING en Dexia zijn net dat weekend gehackt geweest…

Wees gerust. Ik ben voorlopig echt niet zo stom om te vertellen dat ik niet thuis ben, op een moment dat er niemand thuis is. Dus wanneer ik op het Internet smijt dat ik in Nieuw Zeeland zit, dan mag je er gerust van uitgaan dat dat absoluut niet zo is… Helaas, want volgens mij is het daar echt schoon…

When you don’t really know how to call something, it’s hard to find it. I tried “mail.app saved e-mail addresses” or “mail.app autosave e-mail address” and still Google gave not the required article. At least I thought.

An annoying thing about Mail is that it saves e-mail addresses to which you previously sent some mail to. It isn’t necessarily annoying, but it is when you can’t change the format. Jack Nickleback might be in your address book, but you might have replied to him while he’s sending with the nickname “Jacky Nickly 98347 <jacky @hotmail.com>” and you really don’t want that to appear in your “To:” field. You just want to send it to the format in which you specified his name in your address book. Simple and clean.

Now there is a feature – luckily – to change this, but I expected an option to change those saved passwords. It isn’t. You can go to Window > Previous Recipients and that’s the list of – d’uh – the e-mail addresses to which you have previously sent an e-mail. Bad thing is: it doesn’t show up the name with which they appear in your e-mail message. What you have to do, is remove the names from the list. They will still appear as you type, since they are in your address book and mail searches the Previous Recipients list and then the Address Book.

I found this in an article from someone who does read the manual, so I don’t have to, but it is on the Apple Support Website too.

Blogging colleagues, that’s nice. Follow their private lives or their children growing up, without even visiting them. But what happens when they try to hack their own blog together, using a lot of "cool" technologies which have more a negative than a positive influence on their productivity. We (other colleagues and I) are bashing since forever on planethofstede.be. Of course, we’re happy he finally has some kind of blog in stead of a folder containing a bunch of images, but he is still holding on to the thought that he’s a programmer and he should implement his own blog – a thought I have given up a long time ago. Using pre build software is much easier and is done by people who knows more about these things than you do.

Not only you can’t add any comments on planethofstede.be (and thus we have to use our own blogs to comment) and is the name that shows up in Google Reader <div xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xmlns:ns0=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>www.planethofstede.be</div> in stead of a human readable name, but even worse is his “photo album” that is nothing but a bunch of public accessible folders in which you have to select every photo one by one and in which you don’t have a clue what the image will look like (no thumbnails, no overview, nothing).

This phenomena has a name. Such a public accessible folder is called an Open Directory and is known on more sites than planethofstede.be. This way, there are people who have written a little javascript that allows you to open the images in such an Open Directory in a more user-friendly way. This javascript however is showing all images in full size and the images on planethofstede.be are not even scaled down, making it impossible to view the entire image at once. So I changed the script in a way that the browser will scale the image down if necessary.

Now, how can we use this script to see planethofstede.be‘s images? Quite simple. Add the script as bookmark.

1. Copy the following script entirely:
   javascript:var%20sHTML='<html><head><title>Photoviewer</title></head>\n<body%20style="background-color:#121212;font-family:tahoma,verdana,sans-serif">\n\t<div%20align="center">\n';for(x=0;x<document.links.length;x++){link=document.links[x].href.toLowerCase();if((link.indexOf('.jpg')!=-1)||(link.indexOf('.gif')!=-1)||(link.indexOf('.png')!=-1)||(link.indexOf('.bmp')!=-1)){sHTML+='\t\t<a%20href="'+document.links[x].href+'"><img%20src="'+document.links[x].href+'"%20style="border:0px;max-width:'+(document.body.clientWidth-40)+'px;width:expression(this.width>'+(document.body.clientWidth-40)+'?'+(document.body.clientWidth-40)+':true);max-height:'+(document.body.clientHeight-40)+'px;width:expression(this.width>'+(document.body.clientHeight-40)+'?'+(document.body.clientHeight-40)+':true);"/></a><div%20style="color:#fefefe;margin-bottom:30px;">'+link.substring(link.lastIndexOf('/')+1,link.lastIndexOf('.')).replace(/-/g,'%20')+'</div>\n'}}sHTML+="\t</div>\n</body></html>";document.body.innerHTML=sHTML;
2. Add a new bookmark (called Favorite in Internet Explorer) and use the script as "Location" or :
   1. If you’re using Firefox:
      • Click "Bookmarks" in the menu and choose "Organize Bookmarks".
      • In the window that appears there, right click on "Bookmarks Toolbar" or "Bookmarks Menu" and choose "New Bookmark".
      • As "Name", you can choose "Open Directory" and you paste the script (you just copied) in the "Location" field.
      • Save that bookmark.
   2. In Internet Explorer, it’s different because you don’t have a procedure to add a bookmark like this, but you can download this URL and copy it to your Favorites folder (On Windows XP, this is the folder C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Favorites). You can do the same for Firefox: download the url and drag it to the Bookmarks Manager.
3. Now, go to a folder on the planethofstede.be website – which will show you an index of images – and then Click Bookmarks > Open Directory (i.e. the bookmark you just created). The javascript will be executed and you’ll see the images one above the other.

Edit Thanks Nick (Mr planethofstede.be himself) to add the description functionality to the script. I took my chance to change the script a little more and add some more styling. The script now has a dark background and horizontal lines are separating the images and their descriptions from the next image.

Edit 2: As suggested, the horizontal lines are removed and I’m using a margin of 30px instead. I also noticed the portrait-shaped photo’s still needed scrolling as only the width was adapted, not the height. Now the height is modified if the image is too large to fit in the browser window. I also made the images clickable, so that you can click-to-view the original image. Right click and selecting "show image" would work too, but that implies two clicks and a mouse move – thus more effort