Finally moved
May 8, 2005

It has been a while since I posted on the blog, and with good reason. I was very busy moving to my new home. Two weeks ago I finally stayed here for the first time overnight, and since then I’m completely moved.

I’m still unpacking everything and trying to give everything it’s own place (never knew that I could collect that much stuff in just over a year…), so the house will be a mess the next couple of weeks. But I’m more than happy with it!

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Google Trivia
February 5, 2005

I was just browsing around a bit, and on one page I noticed something weird: an ad.

Not that noticing an ad is weird, but the content was. Well, maybe not even the content, but the link beneath the ad. It was a link to a Google search… I’m curious who placed the ad (Google itself?), and I’m even more curious why? It completely makes no sense to me. But maybe it’s just me…

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Trusting on data stored remotely
January 8, 2005

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.

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Telfort introducing HSDPA in The Netherlands
December 19, 2004

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).

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Konfabulator
November 14, 2004

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…

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Upgrade to WordPress
November 7, 2004

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:

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Memory on telephone SIM card
October 19, 2004

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.

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RSS Enclosures
August 23, 2004

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.

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Google error pages
July 28, 2004

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.

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WSAD Profiling memory
July 7, 2004

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.