#English

Adam Curry talks about RSS enclosures and automagically downloading them. I subscribed to Adam’s ‘Daily Source Code’ and the RSS feed with enclosures from ITConversations. In that way, I have something to listen to when I walk to/from my work. For downloading I use a tool from Wener Vogels, which automatically downloads new enclosures to a directory. One problem which I have is that I cannot directly download to my PDA: I have a 256 MB SD card, so it cannot hold all the files that are enclosed in the RSS feeds (and just deleting the already listened ones won’t work: they are downloaded again the next time you run the tool). [Read More]

I noticed that Google doesn’t work here anymore (for at least half an hour now, weird thing is that I don’t see any people posting ‘google doesn’t work anymore’ anywhere). But the funny thing is that they apparently have two different error-pages. I wonder why. No, the difference in the URL doesn’t matter. After I made the screenshots I noticed the difference and tried again, now ensuring that the URL stayed the same. [Read More]

Speaking of profiling in WSAD. The following error was quite funny:

I ran out of memory…. because I ran out of memory :)

BTW: WSAS was using more than 1.2 GB of memory when this error occured.

This is realy one of the weirest bugs I’ve ever seen (well, ok, the bug isn’t weird, the workaround is).

When you are in, for example, Amsterdam and you start the profiler as it is described in the <a http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246957.html?Open">WebSphere Studio Application Developer Programming Guide, you get something similar to this:

instead of http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/SG246957/img/SG246957_690_2.jpg.

But when you set your timezone to Eastern Time, everything goes fine:

Euh… ok…

According to nu.nl Vodafone has reduced their prices for UMTS today. Traffic will cost 0.50 euro/MB (I assume that their usage of Mb is ignorance). Compared to ‘normal’ traffic, this is obviously quite expensive, but this is obviously not a fair comparison. When you compare it to other types of mobile costs it is quit affordable (for example one SMS message of 160 bytes: about 23 9 8 cents). Let’s assume you’re streaming a 64 kb/s video. [Read More]

I just installed a new 160GB 7200rpm 8MB cache WD harddisk, which I bought yesterday for just 105 euro. This new harddisk brings my total storage space to about 425GB (for the 5 ‘old’ disks keeping 265 GB I paid significantly more than 150 euro…). I was just thinking about harddisk space vs. memory space. When I take a look at my history, this ratio has changed quite a lot: [Read More]

Everybody receives it. In the last few weeks my university account was functioning I received about 100 emails per day. Less than 1 of them (on average) was ‘valid’ email, the rest was spam. OK, I admit: In the 5 years I’ve used that account I did nothing to prevent spam (back in ’98 the amount of spam was not that high), but still: it shouldn’t be the case that spam completely ruins a communication channel… [Read More]

I don’t really get the point on the Google IPO. To my knowledge (but I’m just a Computer Scientist, not an economist, so shoot me), the tihng about an IPO is going public (hence the name) and getting money (but you loose your company (or at least a part of it)). Why would you do that? When you need the money (to grow, to buy other companies, to pay your debt, whatever). [Read More]

Last week I bought a new subscription for my mobile phone. Apparently, even when you call very infrequent it is cheaper to get a subscription instead of using pre-paid cards. So I switched from my T-Mobile pre-paid card (calling costs .33 euro/minute) to a Telfort subscription (90 minutes/month for 3.28 euro). To be able to still be available at my old phonenumber I thought it was a good idea to dig up my old phone and place my pre-paid card in it. [Read More]

I just watched WinFS Overview – Significant New Storage Innovation for Longhorn on MSDN TV. I must say I’m very surprised by the very dramatic changes that are made. Apparently, things like files and directories will be replaced by ‘Items’, ‘Relationships’ and ‘Libraries’. I’m not sure how people, who have been using ‘Files’ and ‘Directories’ for decades, can adept to these new things. Isn’t the change too radical? Most people (including me) aren’t even using the more high-end stuff from NTFS because they find it way too complicated. [Read More]