HIPPO \\ Jeroen Reijn

Today I discovered a new feature in Flickr. It's called 'Your Stats' and it will display the statistics of your photos on Flickr.
You will be able to see where traffic is coming from and which photo is most popular on for instance a weekly basis.

This has been a feature I've been waiting for for a while now, since you are also not able to put traffic analyzers like Google analytics on your photo detail page. It made me discover that one of my photos was being used on a website about Mini Coopers. It was one of the photos I shot while walking around on a car show. Of course I'm proud someone would pick my shot, but I guess they should have asked since it's copyright protected. This will probably give people more insight into where their photo views are coming from.

I guess I wasn't the only one that had been waiting for something like this. I hope 2008 will bring more cool features. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:05 PM | Permalink

Wow the past weeks have flown by. I made a start with this post on the plane back from Rome to Amsterdam, but I could not find the time to finish it. So here goes:

The last two days happened so fast, I was unable to continue my daily blog writing. Day two of the Hackathon was a day of trying out and playing around more with Cococon 2.2. I continued my quest together with Jasha, while he was working on his presentation in the mean-time, with the webdav block. During the day I also attended a couple of talks on 'What to deprecate in 2.2', 'The future of Cocoon Forms and Dojo' and 'Cocoon Marketing'. These talks were held in small groups of about 12 people and were very interesting. Jeremy initially started the talk about Cocoon Forms, which attracted quite some audience. He proposed to migrate Cocoon Forms to the 1.0 release of Dojo, once it's final release is there.
At the end of the day we all went out for some nice real italian pizza and after that a good strawl around town. We got to see the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon. They are both amazing to see.

On the conference day there were a lot of good talks. Some of them I had heard before and others were completely new. Jasha did his talk about the cocoon project wizard, which received some good response from the audience. At the end of the day it was time to clean up and head home. It were 3 amazing days with lots of italian culture, good Cocoon talks andnew friends. I hope to see everybody at the next GT again. Till next year!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:09 PM | Permalink

The first day of the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 Hackathon has just ended and I have to say the it's great to be in Rome. We've been really lucky with the beautiful weather here. It's about 26 degrees Celsius,lots of sunshine and a perfect blue sky and it appears to stay that way for the next couple of days. The past 1,5 day have been great. Italy is such a wonderful country.

Our journey started on tuesday when Arthur, Jasha and I left the Hippo office around 4pm and took a cab to Schiphol airport, where we met Arje. The check-in went pretty smooth and after a while we boarded the plane. During the flight to Rome we had a great view of the Italian Alps, because of the great weather, which ended in some beautiful images.

Continue reading "Cocoon GT 2007 Day 1" »

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Hippo is an international company,so working overseas is one of the fun parts of our jobs. This tuesday for instance I went to the UK together with Wouter for a meeting at a customer. I always love traveling (except if there are any delays of course).

The past couple of months I've been working on several different projects in different cities in and outside of Netherlands. That's when I came up with the idea to show you guys where my work brings me, so I packed my tiny digital camera to bring along on this trip I took for my company. To do it in Hippo style I brought a tiny Hippo along as well, which we ordered a while ago for the ApacheCon EU 2007. Unfortunately the Hippos came in too late and we were stuck with a couple of hundred Hippos, but I'm happy too see that all our customers love the tiny little creatures.

This tuesday it was a bit rainy here in the Netherlands so I was a bit disappointed that I could not take so many outside photos, but here is one from the plane while flying above the UK.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well I'm back in the office again and my first workday is already behind me. Last friday Soraya and I came back from a 5-day trip to Barcelona, Spain. I must say I was pretty impressed by this beautiful city. It has so many amazing facets! Finally today I found some time to write a bit about it, because I would recommend a trip to this wonderful city to anyone.

There is one famous person you can't get around in Barcelona: Antoni Gaudi. You will find a lot of places in and around Barcelona that were created by or inspired on the work of this famous architect.

During our stay we visited two of the most well known Gaudi attractions: The Sagrada Familia and Park Güell. Before I left for Spain, I heard a lot about the Sagrada, but seeing it in real life is much more impressive. It's really an amazing work of art and according to the audio-guide they expect it to be finished in about 20 years. The started building around 1900 or so, so you can imagine it's hard to estimate. I can understand why, because it's so full of detail that when you look away and look at it again you will see new things that you had not seen the first time. We were very lucky that day, because the sun was shining like it was May or June and the colored windows gave this nice atmosphere inside the cathedral.

Next up was Parc Güell. Parc Güell is not just another ordinary city park, but again this piece of Barcelona was designed by Gaudi. It has some very impressive mosaic statues,benches and buildings and together with the sunshine this was a real treat.

Next to the cultural activities, my girlfriend also noticed that Barcelona is a great place to go shopping, as we spent an entire day going in and out of stores. The Barcelona shopping district really is huge, so if you tend to go shopping be sure to bring a big bag of money.

On the last day of our visit we also went into the old part of Barcelona which contains small and characteristic streets, gardens and squares. The atmosphere here was great and we ended up at a local antiques market. Barcelona is really a great place to visit and the people are very friendly. We really liked it, so we already talked about going back one day.

An photo impression of our stay in Barcelona can be found on my Flickr page.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:10 PM | Permalink

After a bit more then 200 photos and more then 4000 views, I've upgraded to a Flickr Pro account today. I have a lot more photos coming up since Soraya and I just came back from a 5 day visit to Barcelona (Spain). Before I left,I bought another 2GB memory card, with the consequence that I also shot more photos, so it will take some time to process them all.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:40 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I faced the storm to go buy my new portrait lens. I bought the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II for only 89 euro's, which I've heard a lot of good stories about. It's one of the cheapest Canon lenses, but the image quality seems to be a lot better then the default kit lens.

Since the store was closed between 6 and 7, I had to walk around facing the heavy storm. I wished I had my camera with me, because the wind made some exceptional scenes. People almost flying by and trees trying to keep standing in the heavy wind.

That made me come up with the idea of doing photography during the ApacheCon. I know that there are a couple Apache people that like their camera's and love taking pictures, looking at the pictures of Arje and Andrew when they were at the ApacheCon in Austin Texas and my experience with the Cocoon GT. I guess it would be cool if we could do something similar in Amsterdam during the ApacheCon Europe.

I wonder if there would be any interest in that..

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:23 PM | Permalink

Well this weekend I went on a wild chase for the Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM zoom lens. I looked around on several pricewatch websites to get this lens as cheap as possible, but ended up with nothing after a Saturday cruising around Amsterdam. It seemed the lens was out of stock in every shop and they did not know when it would arrive at the store again, since Canon seemed to have had some delivery problems with this lens for the entire year.

I figured this would happen, especially at the end of the year, since the lens was one of the items in the cashback book coming with my Canon eos 350D. So back at home I was not giving up and called in Google. I ended up at the DigitalWareHouse, which was located in Haarlem. They did not have live stock on their webshop, so I just send them an email. Sunday afternoon I got a reply saying that they still had it in stock, so I reserved the lens I picked it up the same day. They guys at the DWH was very friendly and knew a lot about the lens. I would recommend the shop to everyone driving by Haarlem.

Here is one of my first shots. It's not that impressive, since it was taken behind glass and the light was very bad at the end of the day, as it was going to rain. The image is best viewed large, so you can see the details on the bird. The great thing about this lens is the Image Stabilizer. It's really great when you zoom in a lot. Any small movement is corrected by the IS. If you are thinking of buying a zoom lens: save the extra money for the IS lens, because it's really worth it!

Looking at the size of my camera with the lens attached I feel a bit like a paparazzi. :-)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Happy things are happening over at Flickr.com. It seems they are in the Christmas mood!
They've created a Christmas Gift Certificate card, but even better:

Your recipients will get unlimited uploads — the two gigabyte monthly limit is no more (yep, pro users have no limits on how many photos they can upload)! At the same time, we've upped the limit for free account members as well, from 20MB per month up to 100MB (yep, five times more)!

I was planning to upgrade soon, since I plan to make more use of my 350D then before, but having the 100MB upload for now is great!

One other note is that you can now attach notes on Flickr with the text ‘ho ho ho beard’ or ‘ho ho ho hat’. It will give you the nice Santa beard or hat :-)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:46 AM | Permalink

By accident I stumpled upon the new geotagging feature in Flickr today. I was amazed how easy it was to add a location to for instance a set of photos. Processing single pictures will take more time, but for vacation pictures or occasional travel photos, this is a great feature since you will take a lot of pictures in the same place. It all happens in the Organizer and you can also see other peoples photos on the same map. This is a great improvement.

Keep up the good work Flickr!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:27 AM | Permalink

I've returned from my trip to Marmaris (Turkye) where Soraya and I spend our summer vacation this year. Turkye is a beautifull country with some great culture and an interesting history. The temperature was really nice with an average of 33 C and we had a full week of sunshine.

My main goal was to relax as much as possible, since I've been extremely busy at the office for the past 6 months. I can actually say that I got some real rest. I loved reading a book outside in the sun and taking an occasional dive in the pool. It was great having no computer around. Just me and my girlfriend and some piece and quiet. For some more impressions of my trip to Marmaris checkout the set at Flickr.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:53 PM | Permalink

Google has been busy as always. Creating new features, new application and thinking of innovative solutions. Recently they released Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, this is another web 2.0 application. It looks a little like Flickr, but has a real Google feeling to it.

Web Albums is free to use if you have an Google/Gmail account. The new Picasa version with the Web Albums feature is currently Windows only. Each Picasa Web Albums account comes with 250MB of free storage space, or room to post and share approximately 1,000 wallpaper-sized photos (at 1600 pixels each). Of course there is also an account with more space for a small fee.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:14 AM | Permalink

After trying out the Macro function of my EOS 350D I was very pleased with the result of a picture with a spider hanging in it's web. I have the say that the EOS 350D takes really great pictures. The standard tools coming with the camera are nice, but since I heard some many good things about Googles Picasa I wanted to give it a try.

As always with Google products the user interface is clean and simple. Picasa has a lot of usefull functionalities. It's Organise functionality is IMO a lot beter then the one that's coming with the camera. Also in the edit screen they have this function called: "I 'm feeling lucky". It automagically adjusts the contrast and color and I was very pleased with the result!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:52 PM | Permalink

Last friday I was witnessing two people beeing deeply in love. My sister married her boyfriend that day, who she has been dating for the past 5 (or is it 6) years. Since I was one of the masters of ceremony it has been a very busy, but wonderfull day that ended with a big party! Everybody had a lot of fun. I wish them all the luck in the world and I hope they will remain happy together.

More impressions of this day can be found here.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:56 AM | Permalink

After 3 years of having fun with my old Canon A70, I felt the urge to step up to the next level. So yesterday I went out to find myself a nice Canon EOS 350D. Of course SLR camera's are a completely different level, but I think i'm up for the chalange.
I'm getting more and more interested in photography, so I want to improve my skills. With a wedding and the ApacheCon coming up I can really give it a go. I'll be posting some pictures on my Flickr account soon, so be sure to check that out.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:14 AM | Permalink

Last week I went to the Apenheul in Apeldoorn. The Apenheul is a zoo mainly for monkeys. Some of the smaller monkeys are free to walk among the visitors in some areas. This gives you a great opportunity to make some nice pictures!

For more pictures check out my photo album at Flickr.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:57 AM | Permalink