#English

Zef talks about the difference between webapps and ‘normal’ apps. One interesting statement that he makes:

They have stored your data more redundantly and safely than you’ll ever be able to (within reason). Having lost my e-mails and data by a hard-disk crash (or faulty Linux installation) several times, I no longer trust singular storage of data. Companies like Google have these facilities.

Personally, I’d prefer to store important data such as mail myself. Although it is true that a company such as Google will probably make better backups than I, I prefer to make my own backups… In that way, I’m the one to blame when something terribly goes wrong.

I just read in the Computable that Telfort (one of the telcos in The Netherlands) will start rolling out an UMTS network using Huawei equipment, as the first one in europe. A few months ago, Telfort said that the in the current state UMTS is worthless and that until the arrival of HSDPA with its 8-10MBit bandwidth, it doesn’t make sense using it and that they will use EDGE instead. At that time I wrote that the CEO of Telfort was overestimating the speed of HSDPA and I didn’t understand why he made that statement (but that it made sense to use EDGE as a temporary solution).

While half the world is talking about Konfabulator, I don’t really see why. Ok, it looks good (ok, even better: great!), but what about the usefulness? My desktop is hidden by the programs I run all the time, so I don’t see the nice clock on the background anyway. Another thing that I disliked was that it wasn’t linked to Outlook. Sure, I’d like to see my to-do list, but no, I don’t want to keep two to-do lists…

Today, I updated my weblog to WordPress. Mainly because I am really tired of having to manually delete spam-comments, and I hope that WordPress can handle these better than b2. The upgrading process was quite simple: downloading the .zip, unzipping, inserting the database connection settings, uploading everything, pointing to an URL, pressing next a few times, and that was that.

After that, I tried to import my b2 posts. This should be as simple as opening a certain URL, but for some reason that didn’t work too well. All I got were some MySQL errors. But fortunately, because WordPress is an continuation of b2 the database structure is really similar. The following SQL queries did the trick:

Gizmodo talks about a SIM card with 256 MB of memory on it, and they like it.

I wonder why. I can imagine that a SIM with storage-space for 20 phone numbers and 5 SMSes is lacking space (although, it would be large enough for me :)), but what to do with 256 MB of space? With something like 1 MB one can store a huge amount of phone numbers and SMSes, even ignoring the fact that these items can of course also be saved on onboard memory in the phone itself.

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). So I use the tool to download the MP3’s to a harddisk and then manually copy them onto my PDA (and at the same time, deleting the old files). Not completely automated, but workable.

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. After a few refreshes both errors apeared.

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:

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).