Time to update this site with a new picture. It is from our holiday in Spain. Maybe the makers of The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion where also inspired by the city of Girona? At least the atmosphere there reminded me of the game.
Update: Probably fixed my rss feed.
I seem to have broken the utf-8 support on my site, but it is now fixed. Update: again...
ᛖᚴ ᚷᛖᛏ ᛖᛏᛁ ᚧ ᚷᛚᛖᚱ ᛘᚾ ᚦᛖᛋᛋ ᚨᚧ ᚡᛖ ᚱᚧᚨ ᛋᚨᚱ
Today I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a desktop computer. I am pretty distro/desktop agnostic (see my ten year anniversary post), but since Debian Etch is a bit old for a desktop and Hardy Heron has Long Term Support (I do not want to update/fix a computer every half year!!) Ubuntu was my choice.
There are unlimited gnome improvements which I don't care about, but some things stand out for me in this release.
So thanks again for all free software developers!
Good presentation on captchas by google. See this video. The group that is headed by the prof doing the presentation should easily be able to break current current used image captchas if their statements are true...
Perhaps I like it because perfectly reflects my own opinion though ;-).
Linux and 64 bit computers are a good combination. The first linux 64 bit support dates from 1995. To be able to compile everything from source really helps supporting a platform. Windows mostly runs 32 bit programs at this moment, because proprietary software vendors (which account for most windows software) are not really fast in releasing new versions. Not all is well for linux though. Macromedia Flash is such a proprietary program of which no 64 bit player exists. Now, I do not really like flash (see also a previous entry about this, but for some reason flash is used to display movies on the web. If you think that that is weird, I agree. What has a vector renderer to do with a movie codec? The masters from youtube.com can perhaps tell you; we just have to comply.
I like to watch movies, so now I have a problem... Or not? Fortunately the flash way of bringing movies is just an container trick around a normal mpeg movie, and my favorite audio/movieplayer mplayer can play them just fine.
So if you are on debian, add contrib to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install iceweasel iceweasel-greasemonkey mozilla-mplayer (the mplayer plugin is broken for firefox in etch at this moment). Now you only need a way to let mozilla know how to feed the movies. This can be done with a simple script like Michael Sheldons's.
So finally I can be an ultrahip blagotuber and and bring you movies ;-)
Happy Christmas Everyone!
During some longer than normal train travelling I had time to rework some site bits. Permalink code is rewritten, pages are now integrated into my journal and the archive navigation is date based. Tag support is added to site and feeds
Also I added photos from an autumn week in Morocco. This trip is really recommended in october.
As promised here, I wrote a better version of the quickviewer for the vim calendar plugin. It now properly wraps around year ends.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Date::Calc;
$dir = "~/diary";
for ($i = 0; $i < 90; $i++) {
$fn = "$dir/$y/$m/$d.cal"
if(($y,$m,$d)=Add_Delta_Days(Today(),$i));
if (-f $fn) {
printf "%2d %s", $d, substr(Month_to_Text($m),0,3);
open IN, $fn; while (<IN>) {print "\t$_" if (! /^\s*$/);}
close IN;
}
}
Compared to last year's entry you could say I was far more efficient in 2005 than in 2004, but also a lot lazier. I leave it to you to assess the correctness of this statement.
Happy 2006 everyone!
In a few days, I will be on holiday in Tignes. So no e-mail will be
answered, phone probably neither. If I recover quickly ;-), I will come back to you after
February 6th.
In the past weeks I have been working on a cleanup of the NJBG site. Some people volunteered to maintain the site. Since we are talking about a youth association, this is probably a good thing.
One of the lasts hacks I did was a mailing list. Actually multiple mailing lists with a web frontend. Although it is not really solid yet, it basically works. With PHP, programming is actually too easy these days. I needed only one procmail line (to redirect the incoming mail to PHP) and about twenty lines of PHP code. That is it. After working with python for some projects, it struck me again how good the PHP documentation is. Associative arrays (called dictionaries) in python still are a small mystery for me. Where PHP has a lot of nice array_ functions, python provides me with .keys(), .items() etc. methods, which make live hard. I really prefer handling with the keys and values in the same abstraction depth. Perhaps this is the reason mailman is such a monstrous beast...
Where november was the month of moving, december was the month of party's. Today I will combine these events in giving a house-warming/new-year party. After that (hopefully) more time will be available for some good old hacking. As a reminder for myself to fix the damned end-year-bug here a shell script which shows my calendar, created with this nice vim script in a year/month/day.cal format.
dir="$HOME/diary"
nrofmonths=2
year=`date +%Y`
month=`date +%m| sed -e 's/^0//g'`
day=`date +%e`
for ((i=$month; i <= (month+nrofmonths-1); i++)); do
if [[ -d "$dir/$year/$i" ]]; then
for ((j=1; j <= 31; j++)); do
if [ "$i" -ne "$month" ] || [ "$j" -ge "$day" ];
then
bestand="$dir/$year/$i/$j.cal"
if [ -e $bestand ]; then
size=`/bin/ls -l $bestand | /bin/awk ' print $5 '`
if [ $size -gt 0 ]; then
echo -n "* `date -d "$i/$j" +%a\ %d\ %b` : "
sed -e "1!s/^/ /g" "$dir/$year/$i/$j.cal"
fi
fi
fi
done
fi
done
Happy 2005 anyone!
Some small updates on my website, most of them to do with information not being up to date and not being able to keep up to date (read: I removed some pages). I will move this month, so don't expect updates in the near-future.
***** Nagios ***** Notification Type: PROBLEM Host: jochem State: DOWN Address: jochem.pepperstream.nld-int Info: PING CRITICAL - Packet loss = 100% Date/Time: Thu Sept 30 16:38:26 CEST 2004
Yep, I left Pepperstream after some very nice years and projects there. I will miss the Pepperboys and girl...
Wrote a fully validating, caching and fast RSS 2.0 generator tonight. I used the spec from Harvard law so I am not really sure if my feed has real world value. However it looks similar to serendipity's, so it should work. Only I don't understand the difference between the different ways of encoding the description tag . Never mind, happy syndicating!
First of all, I updated the site. The layout is fixed once again
(don't ask for the reasons, they can fill the whole page). More important
is that the backend is rewritten. Because I host a lot of pages for various
organizations, groups and people
I needed a better, more dynamic framework. Also I will start to use rss aggregrators, so
the sonicbliss people can share a bit more.
Things are not all done yet. When I have time again I will change the various photo galleries I run and consolidate them. Then I can make some photo's public (nothing embarrassing of course ;-). Also the user framework will change, allowing one single login system ('to rule them all').
On a personal level: I will leave for a holiday real soon, so hopefully everything will continue to run smooth.
Not too much updates lately. I didn't write too much c++, due to my purchase
of the lovely iriver (see the picture on the left). Works under linux like a
charm and plays all of my formats
perfectly.
On the site front, there is some news. I am working on a rewrite and redesign, away from content management and in plain html. I am nowadays convinced that versioning (subversion in my case) and some small scripts (and the use of vim) will make the site much easier too handle.
Last but not least I am experimenting a bit with RSS, so all sonicbliss people can share a bit more. But I will be surprised if all this is ready before my holiday to Tanzania.
Lots of stuff happened lately. After another fight with my provider, I finally gave up and ordered my own dedicated server. (All providers in the Netherlands I've dealt with (quite a lot) have depressingly low technical skills). At this moment almost all services and sites we run are up and functional (and faster and more secure than ever).
I had a large amount of scripting to do and therefore I haven't had time to do a proper release of my mms-package. The album functionality is getting somewhere, so I plan to do this real soon now ;-). By request I have added the obligatory, but useless screenshot.
Some small updates. I use jochem@vorm.net as my primay e-mailadress nowadays. My internet provider (TU Delft) disallowed me to directly use my domain name on the world wide web, therefore you see a different (and too difficult) URL in your addressbar.
I also changed my MSN account to joch3m@vorm.net, because my previous MSN account name linked to a non-existant e-mailaddress and that confused people. On my new account, you can mail me...
Off to Paris for a few days, so be gentle with the server please.. (is this something like telling the burglar you'll be away for a week and you leave the house empty?).
Happy 2004 anyone!
I updated my server this weekend. Fedora wasn't very appealing to me, therefore I switched to Debian Woody. The internet connection of this machine was cut off by the university, because of my graduation. I now have 'excuse' account with an upstream of 128kbps, so expect things to be slower ;-(.
On the other hand, the hardware was updated, thanks to a gift (thanks, Sammy). So page rendering is faster now, but you will not notice... The irony..
Vorm.net is one year in my hands (not literally). Since I don't know if a lot of people have found something useful here (although some people e-mailed me about certain topics, which is fine), I have saved myself a lot of time typing
#ssh vorm.net
instad of the unintuitive joc1.tnw-s.tudelft.nl. So I registered the domain for another two years. Yeah...
Found another great tip today. It is generally known that I do not like (Macromedia) Flash. Most important reason for this is the abuse of Flash by a lot of 'designers' and the use of flash for irritating ads as banners. (Another reason is the availability of an open standard) for vector graphics.)
Blocking Flash is rather easy (just do not install the plugin), but sometimes not 100% satisfactory. It would be better to select on a per site basis if you want to see the Flash or not, because sometimes Flash can add value. For example for a game or a movie, made by a developer with a clue.
Now I found a solution by Jesse Ruderman which I prefer. When a page has a Flash element, it shows a small link, and when you click on the link it shows the Flash object. Easy but effective.
To do this you must have a browser which supports user stylesheets and XBL (mainly Mozilla and family).
Just add:
object[classid$=":D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"],
object[codebase*="swflash.cab"]
-moz-binding: url("http://vorm.net/flash.xml#obj");
to your userContent.css (instructions here). As you can see this loads flash.xml from my website. To speed things up, download the file and put it on your own webserver if you have one.
Finally I will put my website online. Some testing in other browsers then mozilla needs to be done, but before the
webtraffic starts, there will be some time.
Goal of this website is not
to provide a complete weblog of my life, but some basic information for those
who are interested. Also I will use this site as a startpage for myself.