YadaYadaYada.nl

What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger...

And hopefully it does this time, again... :-(

Tuning Cacti with the spine poller - The Solution

I've been working on tuning Cacti for a while now. In november I switched from the php poller to the spine poller which greatly improved poller times. But I ran into a nasty bug. Well, yesterday I found the solution for the bug AND have some more information about how to tune Cacti resonably well.

Here's the story:

When I switched from the PHP poller to the Spine poller, my polltimes where half of what they used to be:

cmd.php:
10/28/2008 12:57:26 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:144.3996 Method:cmd.php Processes:2 Threads:N/A Hosts:185 HostsPerProcess:93 DataSources:4031 RRDsProcessed:2823

Spine (Threads = 1, PHP Script Servers = 1, Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes: 1):
10/28/2008 01:01:18 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:76.9179 Method:spine Processes:2 Threads:1 Hosts:185 HostsPerProcess:93 DataSources:4031 RRDsProcessed:2820

Then I tuned a little:

Spine (Threads = 15, PHP Script Servers = 2, Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes: 1):
10/31/2008 10:15:49 AM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:48.1659 Method:spine Processes:2 Threads:15 Hosts:181 HostsPerProcess:91 DataSources:3922 RRDsProcessed:2788

And then ... I tried to increase the maximum concurrent poller processes to make optimal use of the cores I had in that system. The recommended value is "cores*2" and as the system had 4 cores, I tuned this to 6. (I wanted to reserve 2 cores for the nightly export.)
And things got really ugly:

04/14/2009 11:50:12 AM - SPINE: Poller[0] ERROR: A database insert failed! Error:'1062', ...

Ok. That's bad is it?

Well, actually it isn't. It took me 3 days to find the solution because there is next to nothing known about this particular issue. The most probable cause for this is an incorrectly configured cron. There's your regular crontab (crontab -e) AND there's /etc/cron.d/cacti. If you have both, you're in trouble and WILL experience the same issue.

But actually it turned out that Cacti's concurrent poller processed work by giving each poller a set of devices/hosts to poll. Poor-man's loadbalancing, but still, it works. UNLESS you have some local scripts running, not assigned to any real device/host. And that's exactly what I had. Live datasources, for custom-built scripts, not assigned (via the Cacti GUI) to any host but still running every 5 minutes. The bug is this, as Cacti doesn't have a clue to what host/device it belongs, it will simply assign it to ALL processes and thus will run every single script with exactly the same parameters multiple times. (As many times as you have running concurrent spine processes.)

And that caused the collissions we experienced both at work and at home in my Cacti test environment. (I use my home Cacti extensively to test and try Cacti, if I break it no real harm is done so it's a pretty safe environment to try things out.)

The bug actually wasn't that obvious as we only experienced it with custom-built scripts (not with the Cacti built-in's), ONLY with the Spine poller (and not with the php poller), ONLY when spawning multiple Spine processes (and not with multiple php pollers) and the output of our scripts and the Cacti builtin's was exactly the same.

So there's the solution for this. Simply create a fake device, with no SNMP check, no ping check, no templates, no nothing, and assign all your scripts (datasources) not directly belonging to any real host to this. At work we use the "Local Scripts" device for this now and low and behold, we now have a proper working Spine.

Spine (Threads = 15, PHP Script Servers = 2, Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes = 6)
04/24/2009 01:26:00 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:58.8970 Method:spine Processes:6 Threads:15 Hosts:309 HostsPerProcess:52 DataSources:7489 RRDsProcessed:5083

Compare this to the values mentioned above, and see that we have almost doubled our hosts and datasources, but are doing it in 2/3rd of the time we needed before.

Ok. That's good :-)

The sysload went from ~1 to ~6, that's ok for a 4-core server.

There's little more to tuning Cacti though. If you want to experience even lower polltimes, there are some steps you can take.

The first and best is to install the Cacti Plugin Architecture (you will need to upgrade Cacti for this) and install the Cacti Boost plugin.

Next to that you can add indexes to certain tables, as they seem to be absent in the Cacti database. There's a well written bug report AND solution about this on bugs.cacti.net.

Yet another way of improving performance is simply running Cacti with very fast local storage, think 15KRPM RAID10 SAS disks. Accessing the rrd files seem to be a bottleneck because it does lots of updates on them.

Keep your database locally as well and tune MySQL and PHP. (Give it lots of memory and room to breathe.)

Run on the fastest possible hardware you can afford. It really DOES make a difference between running on a 8 CPU Xeon and an Athlon XP1200+.

Some other hints and tips might be found here:
[HOWTO] Cacti's setup for really BIG environments
Distributed Cacti (search for adesimone's Cacti Cluster experiences and zipfile)

So far I have succesfully installed the plugin architecture and configured the Boost plugin. On my test environment this didn't give me any extra performance BUT my local Cacti is running in a VPS with just 512MBytes of memory, on pretty low-end hardware (Athlon XP1200+). Boost will cache lots of information and therefore needs LOADS of memory. (Think 1-3GByte for Boost alone...)

BTW Beware, upgrading Cacti to a recent version with the plugin architecture and boost seems pretty trivial, but there's a fair chance you'll break things. So please prepare it on a test environment first, READ the documents and howto's, make backups of both your database and Cacti directories (web and rrd files) and preferably do it in a change window. You WILL lose some data, but if you do it properly it won't be more then an hour or so.

2009 has ended, it's 2010 now

Today we reached 60 members.
We had that amount in mind for the end of 2009 (Q4), not for Q1 and definitely not for 200902.

According to rsp this means 2009 has ended, and it's officially 2010 now.
So now you know. :-)

Our goal for 201001 is 100 members, members already are placing bets on reaching 100 members before 201007 (wietse), 201009 (Murf), and 256 members before 201101 (aquatix).

Or was that 200907, 200909 and 201001? ;-P

Anyway, we'll celebrate it with a few beers!

Cheers!

The entire Soleus Community

Ok, to be honest, this is a 1:1 copy of the blog I just posted on our community site, but I'm really happy with this result and just want to share this cheerful moment with the entire world. :-)

And for those of you who like a nice graph, here it is, though it's a bit rough, not really official, etc, etc, etc, etc. yet:

Moving my stuff to the new server...

Last sunday we where busy finally pushing our three-servers-and-one-switch into the DCG datacenter in Amsterdam. Months of preparation and finally the day came, my home is a little quieter now and DCG a little noisier. (Really, a HP Proliant DL580 makes enough noise that even if you're walking in the dc, if the thing starts, it still scares the shit out of you...)

So here we are now. The new Soleus setup is in the dc and our entire community stood up to help us with migrating all VPS-es to the new setup. It's going pretty smoothly. Of course you run into some trouble, we had some major issues with the Intel driver doing jumboframes, almost killing our poor iSCSI machine with sysloads of over 18 and we just found out that the kernel we use lacks support of ext3 so we where running on ext2 all the time. But those really are minor issues, nothing is broken, almost everything works as expected and the migration team just works its arse off to get all migrations done in time. (The deadline is somewhere mid feb. max.)

Today I migrated myself as well. To an entire new VPS. I shared a CentOS VPS with one of my fellow founders for almost a year but somewhere halfway I dediced I wanted my own, private VPS again, running on nothing less then Debian5 (Lenny). Well, moving your stuff from CentOS to Debian is quite doable, but I made some stupid mistake copying some data to my new server so I was little busy fixing file and directory permissions and stuff, next to getting back my old and trusted MovableType version stoneage-minus-a-few-decades.

Anyway, everything should be working now. My gallery, my blog and my wiki, even my CV should be there. If you see any irregularities, please let me know. :)

I'll go on assisting the CoreTeam the next few days and then it's off for me, after the migration I'm no longer part of the Soleus CoreTeam as I will use my precious time and endless efforts as the chairman, spokesperson and PR Team of the community. I get to keep root though, but I'm just not allowed to use it anymore, unless there is an emergency. ;-)

Cheers!

Murf

Happy birthday dear Soleus, happy birthday to you...

It's official.

Today it's been a year ago that we turned on our x345 in EUNetworks, never to be turned off again.

Hostingcommunity Soleus, our little project to do offer "Community-driven Virtual Private Servers and more..." has finally reached the age of exactly one year.

It has grown from just an idea about how community based VPS hosting should be done (somewhere around 2006) to what it is now, an incredibly fast growing community with currently ~25 members in just the first year and upgrading from a single IBM x345 to a tripple machine and own switch setup in the next 2 weeks or so.

RIPE has given us a very special present for our birthday... A /24. That means that from now on 94.142.246.0/24 (254 public IP adresses) is ours to keep and that we have plenty of room to grow the upcoming 2 years or so.

Time for a little party tomorrow with most of our current members and then on the move again, realizing our plans for 2009 and further. Which means, more members, more hardware, more services, more promotion and who knows, going international? Another /24?

Delft

Walking on the soil of the city you where born, with your dad and the girl you love the most.

Listening to the stories of your dad, who knows all these little things about the town. Telling about it's famous history, and the way he was involved by restaurating lots of bits of it.

Silently enjoying the bells of the churches, brining back sweet memories of waking up on sunday mornings at his home.

Dreaming away about how it must have been to be you dad, growing up and already working on the old church when he was just seventeen.

It's so funny that a city you've never really lived in, brings such a peace of mind, such a sense of happyness, if you simply walk through it's ancient streets listening to the stories of the street.

It's hard to describe what it really does to you, if you walk through a town, of all the places you have ever been, that you can call "your town". Where you can say that "your roots" are there, and no-where else. And that of all the places in the world, this is where you want to be, eventually.

Delft. I'm still amazed what this peacefull little town, right in the centre of the most crowded and rushed part of the Netherlands, the randstad, does to me...

Hostingcommunity Soleus - Our first real exposure

Today we had our first real public exposure of our Hostingcommunity Soleus at the NLLGG and BSD Community Day. Basically having a couple of enthousiastic members there, a slideshow (look for the NLLGG Slideshow) we have the feeling that is was quite a succes. To be honest, I'm madly proud of the bunch who made this all possible, those sharing the same vision I have for the last couple of years...

So I'm celebrating, with a few beers, our first real exposure to the outside world. And for those who'd like to know what it looked like, well, I made a few pics as well...

And if you're interested in who we are and what we do, well, feel free to join our IRC channel on irc.oftc.net, we're on #soleus.

Cheers!

Murf

The sense of supporting free music

... Free music where the artist meant to make his music free meanwhile supporting the artist by paying for his hard work without bluntly copying it without this intend or permission. Sometimes the the artist just likes some sort of an income or return of any kind.

That's how it should work and who are you to deny him. There is no sense in what you essentially could describe as stealing music. Sure, technically it's not stealing but just copying, the original is still there, unharmed. This is perfectly legal in the country I live, The Netherlands, but my personal opinion is that its simply not ethical.

There are tons of artists who don't mind giving away their efforts to make you happy with their pleasant tones. But sometimes they'd demand a little in return.

Here's a small example. I already blogged about Zofka. I heard 1 song on SomaFM's Secret Agent channel and the same day I decided that I'd buy the cd with the song on it, and at random another just to see if they'd made more music I like. So I ordered "Bikini" and "Bad Girls", straight from their own webshop.

Actually a few funny things happened by then. Not only did I recieve a personal email from Zofka straight away, I also got my CD's shipped within 3 days from Switzerland and even better, I had a small email conversation with Michael. The conversation was about free music and online radiostations. I told Michael that I was very happy that SomaFM broadcasted their song, essentially without SomaFM I wouldn't have heard of Zofka, ever. He told me that he was a really big fan of SomaFM as well, but that they where in some financial trouble.

And that's where this little story goes to. Zofka loves free music. Heck, you can download their albums from their website, for what YOU think it's worth. (Yes, that has been done before, but I'm not sure who was first, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead or Zofka.) But here's another deal. You can download 2 of their albums, including artwork, in high-quality MP3 (196kbps) essentially for free, if you must. But the deal is that you support SomaFM with a donation you think is fair. Just to keep them online.

Ain't that a great deal? Yes this costs you some money, but it's good-karma money. In this way you can essentially support free music, for a small fee.

Ok, here's the beef:
Zofka - Chocolat
Zofka - Nice

And if you like those albums, you can still support Zofka by buying their hardcopy CD's, or downloading the rest for what you think it's worth it via their online shop.

But for now, just support SomaFM. They have a special page for this. And please let me know what you've done and how you like this idea. In my turn I promised Michael not only to support SomaFM (which I will do with a montly donation) but to blog about this and keep him informed about the feedback on this blog as well, if any.

Cheers and happy listening!

Harmen

For the first time in my life...

For all things there needs to be a first time. Tonight I had my first serious presentation, EVER. And even something about a subject quite close to me. Soleus.nu, the VPS association I'm chairman of.

14 slides of mainly just what we do, and a little techtalk.
And instead of the 8 ppl I expected there were 18 of them. And a beamer. So there was plenty of room to get a little nervous.

Ah well, I have the feeling that I actually did it quite well. It took much longer then I expected (but I forgot to look at my watch to time it), there where more questions than I expected, but the public (a local Linux User Group called PLUG) seemed to be quite enthousiastic about our idea's and I have the slight feeling that we just might get a few new members directly from this group or because they'll spread the word, in the near and far future.

Yep, there's a lot to learn for me here. Maybe I talked a little too much. The slides where not perfect and really, there's room for improvement. But on the other hand, my enthousiasm and sidesteps worked. And I really enjoyed beeing there, talking to the people, talking about our vision, our ideas, our ideologies. Maybe, this is just something I CAN do pretty well. Maybe, this is why I became chairman.

Time for a little beer, a little relaxing and some smooth tones of Zofka's album Bikini. The song called Parole in particular, as THIS was the song playing in my car going to and from the PLUG meeting and is for now associated with this little personal succes.

Tuning Cacti with the spine poller - MySQL Error 1062

If you get Cacti errors like this:
11/11/2008 11:30:05 AM - SPINE: Poller[0] ERROR: A database insert failed! Error:'1062',

Then it just might be that you've tuned Cacti with the Spine poller a little wrong. It seems to be that errors like these are because of 2 spine processes running at the same time. Error 1062 simply means "duplicate entry".

For now it looks like the most optimal (NOT the fasted, but fast and error-free) settings for Spine are now:

Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes: 1
Maximum Threads per Process: 15
Number of PHP Script Servers: 2

And it still had pretty good runtimes. (Remember, the entire cycle NEEDS to stay within the 300 seconds limit if you poll every 5 minutes, or things will go wrong, horribly).

With a single spine process:
11/11/2008 03:26:09 PM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:67.8073 Method:spine Processes:1 Threads:15 Hosts:200 HostsPerProcess:200 DataSources:5066 RRDsProcessed:3360

With 2 spine processes (AND the MySQL errors):
11/11/2008 11:41:00 AM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:58.4055 Method:spine Processes:2 Threads:15 Hosts:195 HostsPerProcess:98 DataSources:4970 RRDsProcessed:3256

So the polltime will be a little longer, but you're sure you don't get possible data corruption. The fun part is, the MySQL errors won't occur every single run. It just happens occasionally. In this particular case somewhere between once every hour and every 10 minutes. But not at regular intervals.

Today I tried to figure out what the exact problem was. As far as the Cacti documentation goes, the recommended value for the concurrent poller processes is CPU's*2. And as soon as you use more then one poller process, low and behold, you get the same errors again:

04/14/2009 11:50:12 AM - SPINE: Poller[0] ERROR: A database insert failed! Error:'1062', SQL Fragment:'INSERT INTO poller_output (local_data_id, rrd_name, time, output) VALUES (1278,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:hensema Channel:#alcohol Ircops:0 Ops:2 Halfops:0 Voices:0 Normal:7 Total:9 Words:1837 Lines:274'),(1280,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:tweakers Channel:#fok Ircops:0 Ops:5 Halfops:0 Voices:0 Normal:74 Total:79 Words:202676 Lines:29302'),(1281,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:silverspeed Channel:#wicca Ircops:0 Ops:5 Halfops:0 Voices:0 Normal:7 Total:12 Words:5875 Lines:803'),(1282,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:oftcnet Channel:#linux.nl Ircops:0 Ops:0 Halfops:0 Voices:0 Normal:61 Total:61 Words:174044 Lines:19038'),(1284,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:im Channel:&bitlbee Ircops:0 Ops:2 Halfops:0 Voices:19 Normal:17 Total:38 Words:70446 Lines:10963'),(1285,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:ircnet Channel:#ne2000 Ircops:0 Ops:6 Halfops:0 Voices:0 Normal:20 Total:26 Words:5740 Lines:803'),(1286,'','2009-04-14 11:50:04','Server:oftcnet Channel:#soleus Ircops:0 Ops:11 Halfops:0 Voices:1 Normal:28

At the moment I can't really lay my finger on it. The only remotely usable hint you get is that you might have a duplicate cron job. Which is not the cause.

Something odd though, it seems that it ONLY happens with custom-built scripts and not with Cacti's built-ins like "diskfree.sh" and "unix_users.pl" and other scripts. There's absolutely no difference in the results from diskfree.sh (a standard script) and irc_usercountchanact.sh, a custom script.

[harmen@disan:/usr/share/cacti/site/scripts]$ bash diskfree.sh /
megabytes:4356876 percent:44[harmen@disan:/usr/share/cacti/site/scripts]$

[harmen@disan:/usr/share/cacti/site/scripts]$ ./irc_usercountchanact.sh oftcnet \#soleus
Server:oftcnet Channel:#soleus Ircops:0 Ops:11 Halfops:0 Voices:1 Normal:28 Total:40 Words:21038 Lines:3035[harmen@disan:/usr/share/cacti/site/scripts]$

The only difference is that the execution time of the last is a little longer, but it's only a few seconds.

A bit sad, as simply pushing the "Maximum Concurrent Poller Processes" from 1 to 4 (on a production server with 4 CPU's) dramatically dropped the poller time from ~150 seconds to ~60 seconds:

04/14/2009 09:52:31 AM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:150.2337 Method:spine Processes:1 Threads:15 Hosts:315 HostsPerProcess:315 DataSources:7558 RRDsProcessed:4850

04/14/2009 11:06:02 AM - SYSTEM STATS: Time:60.5336 Method:spine Processes:4 Threads:32 Hosts:315 HostsPerProcess:79 DataSources:7558 RRDsProcessed:4864

Anyone any clue? I'm lost now. (There's not much info on this particular issue on the internet. A few posts on the Cacti forum, with no solution, and this one, on my own blog...) :-)

Finally found the solution. It's blogged in a new blog entry, together with some more pointers and tuning experiences. ;-)

You can find it here...

BTW Comments closed for this article, if you have remarks, comments, hints, tips and tricks, please comment on the new article...

Cheers,

Murf

Zofka - Parfum Vanille

A perfect song to wake up with if you're in luck with a happy hangover (Arthur - Happy Hangover).
Or just to enjoy during a hot steamy night with just someone.

Zofka - Parfum Vanille

I hope you're as thrilled as I am with the loungy, sweaty, steamy combination of the perfectly played lead accordeon, and Zofka's dreamy french voice. Accordeon is where music started for me 24 years ago, and I still can just totally loose myself into songs like this, where it just NEEDS to be there...

For the second time I'm glad that Soma FM's Secret Spies channel ripped 28 EUR out of my pocket for 2 CD's of Zofka. (Hopefully it doesn't take that long to get the stuff delivered from Zwitserland.)

Just to be complete, they've got a website as well: Zofka.tv

Enjoy.

[20081113]
Believe it or not, just at the day I wanted to thank them for their almost immediate email, I got both CD's by airmail in my mailbox. And I can assure you that it was well worth the 28 EUR spent though I only listened to Bikini tonight. Most of the songs are the chanson kinda songs, but really, you just can't sit still on your chair while "Parole" is playing. And that's just one of the perfect examples. I'm quite sure next month there will be another order from me, to get their other 2 cd's. So here we go:

!zofka++

14 months and still no glory

For some odd reason I was thinking about the past, just 14 odd months ago: It was the sad day my previous band deciced to "let me go".

Though optimistic at that time, thinking I'd get a band within weeks, maybe months, and be on stage again by the end of 2008, now 2008 IS nearing it's end, and the only thing I did was some jamming sessions with a couple of collegues... So somehow I'm just doing something terribly wrong. My bass is still in my room, only one power-on switch away, but it makes no sense of playing my bass with no real goal any other then just practising. At times I think I might just have to let to the dream, of beeing on stage ever again, but at times I'm just very very eager to play again, in a band, for real. I really love my job as a sysadmin and general nerd, I really love what I do next to it (my VPS association Soleus), but still I'm missing the excitement of standing in front of a rough 100 people, beeing the back-center of attention of the crowd. (Because after all, beeing a bassist is a comfortable background position, but you're still very there. And as an accordeonist, which I am also, the notes you're playing are just dominating the whole scene...)

Ah well, it's just, that I had to write down, that I still miss the excitement of the stage. Again. And that I'll hope that someday, somehow, some serious people will enter my life and that I'll be on that stage again, doing what I love... Making music...

Auto-creating a pisg (irc stats) config file

I'm quite active on IRC, and I'm quite lazy. But I do like stats. A lot of stats. So I tried to find a way to auto-build my pisg configuration file in a way that it builds it's config file based on the channels in my irclogs directory.

Well, it's still in very early development, it's ugly, it can be done much better, but it's there. And it works for me. It runs every night at 5am, builds a pisg config file, backups some files and builds the index file to present it all on the internet. If all runs allright, it should look something like this: http://stats.murf.nl/irc/

Enough chatter.

The scripts involved:
makeconfig.sh (builds the pisg config)
makeindex.sh (builds the html indexfiles)
mb.sh (helper program to make backups)

The cronjob involved:

0 5 * * * cd /home/harmen/WWW/stats/irc ; /home/harmen/WWW/stats/irc/makeconfig.sh; /home/harmen/WWW/stats/irc/pisg ; /home/harmen/WWW/stats/irc/makeindex.sh

I think all scripts are pretty self-explanatory, if you know some bash. But be very careful, there are a lot of assumptions in it (using irssi for example). Test it. Change some variables. Best case it doesn't work in your environment out of the box. (I know it won't.) Worst case it will eat your harddrive, your girlfriends, and your bosses.

Just be careful.

Cacti Polling Statistics

Today I stumbled upon a very usefull Cacti template:

Polling Statistics cacti 0.8.6g based (mysql)
http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=9272

As it's mandatory to keep your polling cycle well below your graph interval (normally 5 minutes) it's good to keep a close eye on your Cacti polling statistics.

Funny part is, if you run the MySQL query yourself, you get errors because the column does not exist. Somehow the author managed to get the thing working without the need for the column. I might try to figure out what the column should look like and add it with a statement like "ALTER TABLE contacts ADD email VARCHAR(60) AFTER name;" as mentioned on http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/378/add-a-column-to-an-existing-mysql-table/

But for now it seems to give pretty valid graphs...

638,359 lines, 4,259,599 words

The past few days I've been busy creating some IRC statistics from all the channels I've ever been on every network I've ever seen. It turned out that I was the most active user with 638,359 lines and 4,259,599 words. Yes, that's more then 4 million words, in about 7 years (since 2001). I was most active between 18h and 23h (where I wrote 297,198 lines) and had around 125 different names.

Ok, the stats are a bit biased, they're only from the channels I was actually in (I used my own irc logs for this), while I was away quite some time and had a few times where I actually disconnected, not leaving my irc session alive. But still these are quite impressive numbers.

On the other hand, if you compare it to some other fella, it's actually not that impressive, he wrote a total of 239,583 lines (1,168,608 words) in a single channel I was in, all by himself. (To make it even more impressive, he/she wrote 352.375 lines, 1.678.392 words in the one channel and it's successor, all by the time I was there, since august 2004) The strange part is that there where just a few channels where I actually ended on number 1. So apparently I just chatted a LOT in just a few channels...

Still, it's quite funny that if you analyze your own logs, you'll end up on the number one most active person on IRC. I'm just not sure if I should be terribly happy with that, as there still is a quite huge difference of 274,158 lines, 2,524,761 words between me and the number 2...

Hyves "kwekker" on your jabber client (bitlbee)

For my own reference mainly...

Add the Hyves Kwekker to your Bitlbee (settings are the same for any jabber client):

account add jabber username@hyves.nl password 85.17.99.185:5222

The server might change ocasionally, so change that accordingly with:

account set 8/server 85.17.99.185

And if the server is incorrect again, just wireshark it with a working Kwekker client (windows-only) and do a displayfilter "tcp contains hyv" and chat a little to the first innocent victim available.

[EDIT 20081020]
For some reason the 185 seems to be inoperatable. Thanks to BugBlue we found out that you can use "chatslave.hyves.org" as well, which has 38 IP's assigned to it. At the moment a lot of normally online Hyvers seem to be offline, so I'm not sure if the Hyves/Jabber connection is terribly reliable right now. Hyves just might have changed things...

no-www.org

Q: What is Class B?
A: Class B is currently the optimal no-www compliance level. This classification helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.

Ok, this is my rant. For years I've my sites configured to be a proper no-www Class B. You type the address with www, you get a redirect permanent, and you're at the address without www. Quite silently actually. Quite friendly. Why? Because I think it's proper behaviour (personally I think class C is WAY to anal), and I'm lazy. I don't like to type in www.google.com, google.com is mor then sufficient and it works, perfectly.

But a lot of 2008 nitwits screw it up, completely, in many different ways. Check http://spido.nl/ vs http://www.spido.nl/. Imagine, you're a tourist, looking for the major Rotterdam boating-company Spido, you try spido.nl, and all you get is "this domain is hosted by MASC Software". Really, I couldn't care less who the site hosts.

Or try canon.nl vs www.canon.nl. Even worse, you just don't get a page at all, just your browser telling you that there canon.nl doesn't like you at all. "The connection was refused when attempting to contact canon.nl." Very professional, if you're a big badass multinational, and screw up like this. (BTW canon.com works as expected.)

But even if companies get the idea of the lack of need for www, they screw up in a different way. Try ziggo.nl and then click on the secure site to fill in a response form. ("Klantenservice" -> "Stel je vraag via het Contactformulier") You get redirected to https://ziggo.nl/klantenservice/contact/formulier and guess what, the SSL cert is invalid for that domain. It's not for the version with www however.

I just don't get it. You're loosing customers this way, or at least annoy them. Because they have to guess what went wrong (and not everybody knows about the difference between www. and no www.), or have to google. They just might leave and go to the competitor. www is deprecated. And I can't tell you better than the guys of no-www.org. Down, at the bottom of the page, written on august 14 2003. 5 years later aparently it's still necessairy to spread the word...

Party time! (2008 edition)

Hello everybody!

As I'll turn 31 on september 26th and Anne will turn 27 on september 27th (doesn't that sound cool?), we'll have a little party here in our 12th floor appartement in Zeist on saturday the 27th.

If you think you're invited, you probably are. :-)

We try to have the elderly swept out by 8pm and the party ends somewhere when we all fall asleep. (But after certain hours we have to keep the noise down a little. We do have quite "sensitive" neighbours and we try not to have them or the police over at 3am.)

Smoking is allowed, but only on the balcony. (Which is 4x1.5 meters, so there should be plenty of room for you nicotine addicts.)

For the people who can't return home afterwards, we'll have limited space for some air matrasses. (In fact, we do have a double mattress, but you have to bring your own sleeping bag with you. No guarantee that it's still available if you come.)

If you'd like to come, please let us know via a comment on this blog, so that we can at least provide enough food and drinks. Please tell us if you're planning to sleep over and if you drink alcohol or prefer any (other) kind of beverages. We can't fullfill everbody's wishes, but we'll try to take care of special needs and desires.

Of course feel free to take your husband, wife, spouse, lover or simply your [girl|boy]friend with you. Just don't invite your entire family.

Our address can be found on the usual places but it's quite close to this.

If you think of gifts, there's not much on my mind really. My wishlist is quite outdated and constantly changing so if you really feel the urge to get something off that list, please ask beforehand. I think the goold ol' envelope will just do, or simply some high-quality alcohol. If it comes to alcohol I prefer (Belgian) beers (Rochefort 10 for example), single-malt Irish or Scotch whisk(e)y, a good vodka (no Smirnoff please) or other quality drink.

Of course if you have questions you can always ask, either via MSN (murf@murf.nl), Hyves, mail, or irc (Murf at most networks).

Cheers,

Harmen (and Anne)

np: Ketil Bjørnstad - Refugees At The Rich Man's Gate

At one time they were like ghosts disembarking at night and hidden in the mountains by the time of dawn revealed their footprints on the beach

"If you saw our lives there
you'd understand why
We have nothing"

Dumping clients 200 metres offshore
Fifty-nine illegal migrants feared drowned off Spain
Some ten thousand illegal immigrants
were caught in the first five months of the year

Thirteen bodies lined up on the beach
People are still coming
They are so desperate

Ketil Bjørnstad, I never heard of him before, untill a couple of days ago I heard a track on SomaFM from the album "Seafarer's Song" and I was totally lost. (Actually SomaFM played "Ketil Bj Arnstad", but thanks to Habbie I found out that the guy was actually called "Bjørnstad") This was awesome. And it wasn't even this track but "He struggled to the surface" from the same album. I ordered the CD, after listening to some 30 second snippets. The cd came in and since then it's stuck in my iPod. It was well worth the 20 EUR spent on it.

Ketil Bjørnstad, a strange mixture of some Björk, some The Corrs, some Alanis Morisette, some folk and a lot of their own sound. The sound you probably only get if you live in Norway between the fjords. So mystical, so dramatic. They call it jazz. But probably just because we like to label music. I just like to call it nothing, because word's can't really describe the kind of music. And I just wanted to share a little of this with you. Just 2 songs. If you want the rest, do the artist a favour and just buy the CD. Even though 20 EUR is a lot of money for a CD from 2004 and a lot of that will get lost somewhere on the way from your wallet to the artists, the artist still gets part of it. And in this case, they really deserve it. More of this please!

For "Refugees At The Rich Man's Gate", play it LOUD! Next to the beautifull lyrics, there's a really sweet bassline in it, a screaming voice, a beautifull instrumental part. The song lasts for a whopping 6 minutes and 22 seconds, the whole album (containing no less than 17 songs) plays a full hour, 19 minutes an 42 seconds.

Refugees At The Rich Man's Gate

He Struggled To The Surface

Digging, digging, digging... And confronting myself with my own past...

This blog will be a tad personal. I warn you. If you don't like it, just skip it. Thnx.

Today I went a little further with the digging in my past. This day it meant driving to Maastricht, where I had an appointment with my mom anyway, patching my "Where I've been list" with correct years, and driving past a few locations where some mixed memories lay.

Actually, I can't really find the rights words right now, but let's say that it was both terribly frightening and incredibly heartwarming. (Yes I mentioned those words before.) Well, I'll just try. I just HAVE to put down something.

We started visiting "Emmaus Haertelstein", the community for homeless people my mom and I lived for a while. (By choice (of my mom, not me), not by need, thank you.) It's really funny that most people we met regocnized me after 15 years. Heart warming and incredible. It's good to see that some things just never change. It's good to see that people just never change.

Then we went to my old primairy school. A funny place. Had both a hard and great time there. Though I was quite well accepted, it still was very strange for the kids from a village school to have a total foreigner (a "hollender" as they call it there) dropped into their little community.

After that (and some food) I dropped my mom off at a friend and decided it was time to confront myself a little more with what has been. So I went to my old technical school, St. Josef ("Sint Joep" as my classmates called it), my 2nd highschool in Maastricht. Actually a terrible place. It belonged partly to an "internaat" for kids who where kicked or taken out of their homes because their parents couldn't handle them, but still was a public school. I still remember the nasty bits and pieces. And the good ones. One of the things I learned there that even the bigges bullies had a tiny heart and where actually REALLY friendly when you spoke to them in small groups where they dropped their guards. The "internaat" was still there, the school looked like it wasn't used for a while but somehow the signs tell you that it still is in active use. It was frightening, terribly. I stood a meter on the "schoolplein". Just beeing there. It's hard to describe...

After a small trip through the "Bergerstraat" where my big highschool crush lived I ended at my first highschool in Maastricht, the Sint Maartens College. A lot less confronting, much less frightening actually. I got mainly good memories laying down there. And even after 18 years everything just looked the same. And I still remember where we sat down, where a girl smoked and everybody didn't like it, what it was like there. And how I suddenly dissapeared to the Technical School, a thing my mom never should have allowed, EVER.

Well, that's it, I think. No real need for more details. Most of them are in my head anyway. As live images. As live movies. I took a LOT of pictures. Will try to put sensible comments on them. Have fun and don't hesitate to dig around a little with me.

Time for beer.

Insane Bass Video's

I just wanted to share some totally cool YouTube music fragments with you. Related? Yes. The common thing between them is that they're all bass-crazy... (And yes, some of them actually do have some video. But it's the sound it's all about.)

Primus - To defy the laws of tradition (Radio Jam)
Les is playing as if it isn't hard at all. But is is! His drummer and guitarist hardly can keep up with him...

WOW! Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten
14 minutes and 41 seconds of pure musical porn!

Victor Wooten, Stanley Clarke, & Les Claypool bass solo

Morphine - Cure for Pain

Victor Wooten- Bass Day 2001
Watch the very very end, and then start part 2...

Victor Wooten Bass Day 2001 Part 2
A TOTALLY detuned bass...

New SIM card, online again!

Today I recieved my new SIM card and activated it right away. That means that after beeing unreachable on my private phone for almost a full week, I can be reached again at the number those of you need to know, know. :-)

Wow, now I have to carry around 2 mobile phones, both with internet. How about that for redundancy... \0/

Changing GSM operators (loosing my new SIM card)

Today I switched from Orange to Hi. And I was happy that I finally got rid of the really utterly worthless Orange network. But as always, when I wanted to change SIM cards, I realized that I had absolutely NO idea where I left my new Hi SIM card. :-(

So, I'm trying to get a new one as soon as possible, but I might be unreachable for a short while. Sorry!

gpw - windows password generator

gpw

gpw is a secure password generator for windows

Actually I was just looking for pwgen-for-windows, but the windows-port misses some features like "pronouncable passwords" which doesn't make your passwords weak, but sure makes them more memorable. (Which is quite handy if you have to actually REMEMBER your passwords.) Actually, pwgen-for-windows doesn't look like pwgen at all as it misses ALL the features the Unix version has.

gpw just does the job, secure, like you're used to from the Unix pwgen

Digging in your past

It's both incredibly heart warming and terribly frightening. It brings back memories you know. :-)

(And certainly there ARE memories you don't want to be brought back, but it might just be worth it because there are a LOT of memories you actually DO want to be brought back.)

Pictures of HAL2001

For those interested, I've put my pictures of HAL2001 online again. The place where they where online originally had ceased to excist (I took it offline a few years ago), and after finding the CD with the original images I though it would be nice to put them on a place where people can view them again.

Have fun :-)

Dension GW100 VW Radio to Ipod

If you bought a Dension GW100 to attach your iPod to your stock VW built-in radio, you might be surprised that the controls from the radio are quite non-optimal. Or more, you need to have a degree in rocket science to work with it, and then still it's fairly^wtotally unusable.

However, there is a poor-man's solution which actually works perfectly. Because what your dealer might not tell you but Dension will, the GW100 has a regular AUX input (3.5mm jack) next to the iPod input. And while spending just a few euro's and 5 minutes at the dealer (to remove the radio for a minute or 2) you have your very own omni-input in your car which works just perfectly with you iPod. Put the iPod in a universal phone dock in your car, and you're done. It might not look great, it sure is very functional. :) (And quite usable without the phone dock, even for your passengers on the backseat in your car if you have a 3 meter cable. Perhaps an idea to play a record-guessing game with them?)

Mike, it's amazing, you can just use your iPod as you would regulary if you are listening it via your headphones. You can even attach ANY device with a standard headphones or line-out to it. And ALL that for just a few euro's. (But of course you need the quite expensive, around 200 EUR, GW100 for this...)

0 - The wheels, they have arrived :)

And day Zero has finally arrived... It's here. And it's great. It does *BROARRR* if you hit the gas.

It might not be the most beautifull car in the world, nor the fastest, but I'm certainly extremely happy whith my new toy. :) (And it sure was well worth the countdown...)

Under the Curtains:

The Front:

The Back:

HDR - just because it looks cool

Just because I ran into it by accident and it looks SO extremely cool:

HDR on Wikipedia

The Biggest Building in HDR on Flickr

Thnx Burne :)

Soleus - a little something about our VPS association ("vereniging")

After almost 5 months of operation I thought it was time to write a little article about the VPS (Virtual Private Server) association ("vereniging") I'm involved in, Soleus.

Soleus is a group of *nix enthousiasts, nerds if you like, all professionally involved with *nix and with a deep passion for *nix and a need. A need for a (virtual) server 24/7 online in a proper datacenter with a reliable power supply and network connections.

But Soleus is a little more than that. You can get a VPS on every corner of the internet for the same or less as we provide it and still don't get the same as you get with us. Because with us you get the chance to be involved in a group of people who like to share, exchange knowlege and build on Soleus together. Actually, the community we started is quite active and grows quite fast and has the will to grow further in the future. (We expanded from 3 members in januari this year to 8 at the time of writing.)

At the moment we have 3 core members and 5 regular members, our current server has a limit of around 12 members with their own VPS-ses and little more if some people like to share a VPS. For sure we will expand to a second server as soon as there is need (and money) for it.

We don't do Windows, we don't do MacOS-X (unless you can find an image which works under Xen), but we do every flavour of Unix you like as long as it's capable of running under Xen.

And what do you get, next to a nice community? Well, just what you get almost anywhere. 25GByte of storage, 512Mb memory (you pay for that yourself but we'll provide it), 400GByte datatraphic per month (shared with all of us). We do overbook a little on our harddisks if needed (U300 SCSI disks are NOT cheap), but fair chance you won't fill your full 25GByte. We even do monitoring and backups for you if you like. (Well, we DO monitor the server and we DO monitor the services-hosts, but monitoring and backup up the internals of your VPS is of course entirely optional.) And yes we do ask a nominal fee for all that, running hardware costs money, we can't do anything about it.

And our hardware? Not the worst you can get. At the moment we're running on a IBM x-Series 345 running with 2 dual-core Xeon 2.4GHz CPU's and 6GByte of memory in total. (The 6GByte will be 8GByte within a week or so, to accommodate our newest member and provide room for a few members more.)

And what if you don't want a VPS? Well, no problem, we still have a shared-environment which you can use and get root on. In that case you don't pay for the memory (we already provided the shared-VPS with 512MByte) and you share the VPS with others.

Oh yes, we do expect a little in return from you. We are a community. So it's more or less expected that you are willing to be active in the community and help us setting up the server and infrastructure.
We do have a nice Solathon within a couple of months where we'll all get together and basically hack all weekend long to fix all last bits on our server, change lots of things we're not entirely happy with right now and get ready for the future. But that's just the start. This is definetely not a project we'll end within a year or 2, we plan to stay alive for the next decade, or two, at least.

Interested? Just drop me a note on harmen@murf.nl or join our irc channel #soleus on oftcnet. (irc.oftc.net)

Cheers!

Harmen

8

Eight ... (days to go)

Dualscreen Ati Radeon X300 on xorg 1.4

Yesterday I decided to clean out all the gutter from the Linux install of my notebook and just reinstall the whole thing instead of just upgrade it from Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). And with reinstalling you ALWAYS run into trouble...

The first trouble I had was configuring X the proper way, dual-screen. After some fiddling I finally got a very simple, straight-forward and WORKING xorg.conf, which, of course,
you can download here. :-)

Cheers!

2008/05/08 08:55

— Harmen P. de Ruiter 2008/05/08 08:55

... editing a wiki page.
Not as good as a job starting at 03:53:53 but still pretty cool ;-P

Deleting comment spam from your gallery2

Tonight I found out that one of my 2 Gallery's was spammed, majorly, with almost 10.000 comments spams. :-( So sad that I don't even know when the comment spam started and so sad that spammers even won't leave your gallery alone. But it's even worse that there is no proper way to remove your comment spams as there is in the MovableType instance I'm using. Aparently there only seems to be one way, directly via MySQL.

It took me about 45 minutes of repeating the sequence over and over again, every time adjusting the keywords, and hopefully I didn't delete any non-spam comments. If so, I'm terribly sorry but I had to do this as soon as I found out. Spam is a major issue and google-spam via these ways is a nasty thing. (But at least the gallery still works...)

Time for beer.

Aparently there was a bot active right NOW:
Posted by Guest on Sun 04 May 2008 00:56:28 CEST (91.121.143.168)

So I disabled commenting on the gallery. Sad that you can't even allow comments on your gallery these days without anti-spam measures and carefully looking at your comments every now and then...

/me wants

/me wants

cat /proc/meminfo

harmen@cirrus:~$ uname -a
Linux cirrus 2.6.24-16-generic #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:23:42 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
harmen@cirrus:~$ date
Fri May 2 15:51:53 CEST 2008
harmen@cirrus:~$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal
MemTotal: 2049024 kB
harmen@cirrus:~$ sudo reboot

*Fiddle, fiddle* *Rattle* *unpack*

harmen@cirrus:~$ date
Fri May 2 16:05:18 CEST 2008
harmen@cirrus:~$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal
MemTotal: 3615528 kB

Hmmmmmm! :-(

harmen@cirrus:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-server
harmen@cirrus:~$ sudo reboot

harmen@cirrus:~$ date
Fri May 2 17:11:08 CEST 2008
harmen@cirrus:~$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal
MemTotal: 8232060 kB

:-)

So there IS a solution for running with more then 4GByte of memory under Kubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). Install linux-server, and THAT particular kernel has the bigmem/PAE extentions in it.

It's just hard to find that out...

03:53:53

03:53:53

It's always a nice coincidence when a job starts at such a pretty time. (Too bad the date is just an ugly 20080429.)

The kvm dillemma

Hello! Anybody there? I'm in bare need of some help...

At the time of writing I get pretty annoyed and frustrated by the fact that I need, want, like, whatever, a solution for a specific problem but seem unable to find one. The goal is to have a workstation OS installed on my PC and on top of that have some virtual workstations running several tasks not possible under the host-OS.

Well, after a great deal of asking around I decided to go for kvm. Kernel-Based Virtual Machine. Which looks really really cool and in fact it is, I even got an OpenSolaris working on it quite easily. But there is one thing which is absolutely lacking in it, USB support. The support is there, but is as far as I know no easy way of hot-plugging USB devices into the host, making them available for the guest. That functionality is mandatory to me.

So I decided to try VirtualBox. But no, no descent USB support as wel... At least not in the Open Source edition of it. (And I don't like to pay for it.)

Xen then? Same issues as kvm... USB support exists, but you have to fool around with lsusb and the manufacturer-ID and product-ID's of your usb device the same way as you have to do it under kvm. That's NOT user-friendly.

Vmware? Hell yeah, everybody tells you that that will work perfectly. And I found out that it actually is capable of using raw-images. (I like raw-images because in case of emergency I can just mount them via the loopback device on my host-os, change whatever I need to change, unmount the stuff and run the guest without the guest running in to trouble because I screwed up it's diskimage.) But, I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Hero) and there is no "commercial" repository for it and the 7.10 repository isn't working. So no apt-get install vmware-server there. Doing it from source is possible but you WILL run into all sorts of trouble, needing patches and some dead chickens to get it running properly.

I just don't like that. Fooling around with patches is fun for testing things, but not for something you'd like to run in a production environment. (After all, my workstation's vm's are just that, production. I want to have a really really stable base and do my testing and experimenting inside those vm's as THEY can be easily replaced and my host is not.)

So there I am. Pretty much stuck and in badly need of a solution.

What I basically need is:
- a virtual machine solution preferably running on Linux (Kubuntu 8.04)
- guests running at (near-)native speed
- capable of running all sorts of unmodified guest-OS-ses including but not limited to Windows XP, Linux and BSD
- capable of descent USB support (hot-plugging and removing USB devices via an intuitive interface)
- capable of bridged and routed networking
- capable of using raw disk-images (NO proprietry format please)
- easily installable, upgradable and maintanable
- preferably Open Source

Actually, I probably just want a good shell around kvm/qemu (don't care if it's ncurses or X-based) which just gives me a good, intuitive way of adding and removing USB devices, storage, disk-images, network-interfaces, etc, etc, etc. In other words, make kvm usable for more then just (headless-)servers...

Anyone? Please?

[EDIT 20080428]
It seems that there actually IS a solution. At the time of writing I'm fooling around with VirtualBox CS (Closed Source) edition under Windows, installed a virtual Kubuntu 8.04 on it and *HOORAY!*, sound and shared-clipboard work out-of-the-box. It doesn't make use of raw-images but there seems to be a fair workaround for that. (In fact, working with an offset is the way you mount raw kvm images as well, so no real difference there except from the offset value.)

But, when it comes to USB, there is a minor issue. I AM able to add a USB device plugged into the host and it nicely dissapears from the host and is somewhat visible in the guest:

root@harmen-laptop:/proc/bus/usb# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0781:5408 SanDisk Corp.

But mind the "somewhat", because it's yet impossible to actually USE the USB device, and if you look at the syslog you see bad things happening:

Apr 28 13:28:12 harmen-laptop kernel: [ 1226.635952] scsi 5:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery

So close, but no sigar. Yet.
But at least there seem to be some light at the end of the pitch-dark tunnel.

No I don't like to use software which is "free for personal-use" as there is always a fair chance that suddenly they decide to charge for the next upgrade and you either pay or are stuck with a deprecated piece of software. But on the other hand, I don't mind paying for software if it's fair-priced and if I decide to use this AND they decide to charge say 100 EUR for it, I might even ask my employer to buy a licence for me as I use this on a daily basis. And the fact that the company who owns VirtualBox is Sun Microsystems, there is a fair chance that VirtualBox is here to stay...

[EDIT 20080504]
Finally! Succes!
It took a few days and actually I'm kinda ashamed that the solution for getting it to work was really dead-easy.

At the end it turned out to be a matter of a really simple, straight-forward howto and last but not least, selecting the right virtual network adaptor. That means NOT the PCNet but the Intel PRO/1000. The last took me a full days of googling, wiresharking, asking on #linux.nl, #fifo and all sorts and at the end finding the easiest solution possible, selecting the right virtual NIC as mentioned on THIS forumpost.

The drivers you need are just the standard "PRO2KXP.exe" drivers from Intel. It's an 11.5MByte download from the Intel site, but that package contains all drivers needed for getting the thing to work properly.

USB supported works as well, after adding the lines mentioned in the howto to rc.local. There is probably an easier way but hey, it works after the reboot-test. :-)

Oh, forgot to mention the help of JK in this, he pointed me to a blog and a script he wrote. And I think that script will work perfectly if you're in a non-dhcp environment and the fact that it didn't work in my setup at all aparently had nothing to do with his script. :-) Just needed to point that out. It might be a handy script for you as well in the future.

So finally it works. Now I can start USING the darn thing... :-)

[EDIT 20080504 a little bit later]
I've just tested the USB support with my Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX (yes, that's a REAL webcam), and it WORKS! Out of the box. Even with USB2. So it looks promising and I have the feeling that VirtualBox was the right choice after all. It's not perfect, it's not extremely fast, but it works well. You still might need lsusb to find out WHAT usb device you can plugin, but then you can just select the device from a pulldown menu. :-)

How to sanitize your mp3 collection

It was a tedious task of about 4 weeks, but tonight I finally finished sanityzing my mp3 collection which I've neclected for years and years. That means that I re-ripped my entire CD collection to 196kbps vbr mp3's (ok, I missed a few cd's, but those are just copies of copies and will be added later), and after that I weeded my way through around 10G of mp3's, ogg's and wav's, most of them not really sane.

So it was an incredible amount of work. 4 weeks, almost every single evening filled with ripping and retagging. The final result is a fairly sane collection of 13,491 mp3 files, good for 67.2G of data and 968 hours, 34 minutes and 5 seconds of music.

Most of them have Album Art where available, all of them are tagged but I can't guarantee that they're all sane and 100% correct. At least I know that all have the song-title correctly in the id3 tag and that they have at least the tags "Unknown Artist", "(Single)", "Various Artists" tags. I'm also sure that the file-format of every single file is "// - - - .mp3"

It's now just a matter of pushing the entire load of mp3's to my iPod, so that I have instant access to all my mp3's.

But how is it done? I've used several tools for the entire project. Unfortunately I had to stick to windows as I found out that there where no really sane tools available under Linux to do this task. As the task consisted of several parts I had to use several tools. The tools I used are:

Exact Audio Copy, the best ripper available for windows, and it's completely FREE! Yes, it uses LAME encoder as it's encoding back-end but it has a nice, very usable graphical front-end and you can easily rip 100 cd's and then let LAME do the encoding over night. (If you have enough disk-space to store 100 cd's of raw WAV files, around 70G.) I've used this tool for years now and really, I can't think of anything better suitable for the job of ripping cd's than EAC.

MediaMonkey for retagging, reorganizing, renaming, transcoding (I can't use .ogg on my iPod so I transcoded ALL files to .mp3), sanitizing, dupe-checking, adding album-art and all the other hard work. I used this tool so much that I bought a licence for it. Next to beeing a great tool for reorganizing your files, and updating your mp3 player (it takes almost any mp3 player available, not just iPods) it's also a pretty doable mediaplayer. (And yes it works better than iTunes for a lot of things.) The only feature I'm really missing is a feature to add video's to your iPod and transcoding them into something usefull.

Floola another tool to reorganize your mp3's. I used this tool at first, but I figured out that it really isn't stable and usable enough for doing the hard work. However, I will use this tool in the future as this tool is able to do the video part. The good thing about Floola is that you can store it on your iPod and run it straight from it. It doesn't need a local database on your harddisk nor does it need to be installed for proper operation. Just run it straight from your iPod mounted as a USB Mass Storage device.

Unix Services for Windows as all my mp3's are stored on a Linux server in our boiler-room and Samba is a little slow, I decided to go for the nfs-way. Unix Tools for Windows can do exactly that, give you a way to make a proper nfs-mount on your Windows system. It can do an awfull lot more, including giving you a full ksh-shell, but I'd rather use other tools like Cygwin or Uwin for that.

And that was about it. I tried to use some other tools but none of them worked as the tools I mentioned above.

I did use some websites though, because MediaMonkey can't find all the album-art on it's own (it uses the Amazon.com website for importing it's album-art and not all albums are available there). So there are a few websites I like to mention for getting the needed album-art and sometimes the track numbers and other additional information:

DiscOgs

MusicMeter

Amazon.com

Albumart.org

And that was about it. Within something like 4 hours (copying file 236 of 13491 now, at a rate of around 1 per second) I should have a filled iPod with all my music on it and should be able to boot to Linux again for the first time in a month and have time for other projects again... Finally. :-)

...
3 days later
...

And after 3 attempts, a corrupted filesystem on my iPod, a chkdsk F: and some other horror, the last attemt finally succeeded. It probably took a mere 6 hours to complete (but I wasn't there to time it), but the result is well worth all the efford:

That must be the daystar...

Just one of my all-time favourites of UserFriendly.

Is it a feature, or is it a bug?

This morning I found out that my iPod doesn't see the difference between the album "Greatest Hits" from one artist and "Greatest Hits" from another. So after a nice intro of Aerosmith, I was smashed into some song of Robbie Williams.

Is it a feature, or is it a bug?

Testing GPRS on a Nokia 6110 Navigator

Testing Vodafone GPRS on my brand new Nokia 6110 Navigator:
(No, no HSDPA, will check that later when my M800 is back from repair, the N6110 only does Edge. But 35KByte/s and a latency of ~200ms os really not bad and actually better than I expected.)

C:\>ping electron.soleus.nu

Pinging electron.soleus.nu [195.85.225.224] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 195.85.225.224: bytes=32 time=228ms TTL=48
Reply from 195.85.225.224: bytes=32 time=209ms TTL=48
Reply from 195.85.225.224: bytes=32 time=198ms TTL=48
Reply from 195.85.225.224: bytes=32 time=196ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 195.85.225.224:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 196ms, Maximum = 228ms, Average = 207ms

C:\>wget http://murf.nl/1M.bin
--20:23:23-- http://murf.nl:80/1M.bin
=> `1M.bin'
Connecting to murf.nl:80... connected!
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1,048,576 [application/octet-stream]

0K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 4%]
50K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 9%]
100K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 14%]
150K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 19%]
200K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 24%]
250K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 29%]
300K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 34%]
350K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 39%]
400K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 43%]
450K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 48%]
500K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 53%]
550K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 58%]
600K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 63%]
650K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 68%]
700K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 73%]
750K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 78%]
800K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 83%]
850K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 87%]
900K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 92%]
950K -> .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... [ 97%]
1000K -> .......... .......... .... [100%]

20:23:54 (35.31 KB/s) - `1M.bin' saved [1048576/1048576]

C:\>

And thanks to Robert Webbe it was really al jiffy to set up. :-) Thanks Robert!

Don't forget to check out his main website, he has TONNES of easy to use information about how to set up wireless connections on your mobile phone.

Oh, and by now I should be part of the Fifo Blogroll as well. :-)

Primus - To defy the laws of tradition (Radio Jam)

If I could EVER play like this...
(Look at Lez' fingers. That's beyond normal.)

Test My Typing Speed

Checking my typing speed (for fun, not for profit):

Raw CPM: 472 Corrected CPM: 454 WPM: 91 Time left: 0

Your score: 454 CPM (that is 91 WPM)

In reality, you typed 472 CPM, but you made 2 mistakes (out of 72 words), which were not counted in the corrected CPM score.

Your mistakes were:
* Instead of "ontvangen", you typed "ontvanten".
* Instead of "huilen", you typed "huilene".
I advise you to take a 2 minute break now.

And that was totally unprepared, just typing my arse off with a glass of wine already in my stomach. So it SHOULD be doable to do 500+. YAY!

Oh, want to challenge me?
First drink a glass of wine on an empty stomach, then have some food, and within 15 minutes after this, do the test:

Typing Speed Test by Juerd

And you can type on it...

It's cool. It's groovy. It's shiny. It's hot. It's spiffy. It's red. It glows. It's expensive. And I wanted to have this for the past 3-4 years, from the moment I saw the first introduction of it somewhere in a magazine. Oh yeah, and you can type on it.

What is it?
It's the GoLan I.Tech Virtual Laser Keyboard!

Want to see it?

My first-impression and tryout photo's...
Someone else's review and photo's...

Ain't she sweet? With full keyboard support I can actually start screen and vim on my pda right now. And if I re-pair it, on almost any device which can make use of bluetooth keyboards... No it's not advisable to try blind-typing with 10 fingers on it, you simply can't. And no you can't use it in very bright sunlight. (You won't see the red keyboard and probably the detection-layer will fail as well.) But hell this is some shiny toy to have!

Oh, yeah, if you decide to buy it. Do so. But don't forget to buy a cheap-ass USA to Europe converter somewhere in a store near you. Because though it has a world-adaptor with it, the plug is the USA-type. (I managed to fix this with sawing of a piece of the rim of a cheap-ass convertor. But be carefull with those solutions, don't hurt yourself.)

On another year

Well, it needs to dawn a little. Nervous like hell before. Without any good reason. The only reason beeing having some really bad experiences with things like this before.

But no hassle, no remarks, some new goodies and within a mere 2 months a lovely blue set of new wheels. I can stay, at least another year. :-)

And now, some well-deserved Glen Deveron 10yo.

*sweet*

Friday morning 5.45am, waiting for the bus...

It's really not too bad. Waiting for the bus at 5.45, updating your blog while listening to "De Dijk" :-) It's friday after all and I'm fairly awake for this time of the day. And hey! I'll be back home celebrating my weekend while most of you will still have to work for an hour...

Cheers,
Murf

A phone is a pda is a phone is ... reviewing the Glofiish M800

Last week I got my new toy. A wonderfull toy. The toy which should be able to toss out at least one device in my pockets AND add functionality I at least very much enjoy. So I got myself a Glofiish M800 Windows Mobile 6 PDA/Phone/Minicomputer. It has a 640x800 screen, lots of internal memory and has all the wireless connection possibillities you'll ever need in at least the next 2 years.

But, after a few days I figured out that the machine really has it limitations. It's darn slow. Really, my old Palm IIIc will outperform this thing by all means. Even while it runs on a fraction of the speed the phone does and only has a 320x200 screen. But well, that's not too bad. What truly IS bad is that the phone in-built applications are completely worthless. It really IS Windows, the Mobile version. A bare Windows is an OS, with some marginally usable applications like notepad, calc and outlook express. And this PDA/Phone has just that. A crippled version of Internet Explorer, some borked version of Outlook (you can NOT tell it where your sent messages will be stored, just THAT they will be stored, in the Sent box, locally on your phone) and most of the applications don't really make use of the 640x480 screen.
There is no way you really can set all font-sized to a sensible size (aka SMALL, really darn SMALL, did I tell you I like it TINY?) Next to that the built-in agenda is broken by design.

There is no way you can assign icons to your appointments and you can not view the text of the appointment in the week-view without clicking on the darn appointment. There goes your quick overview. DateBook6 REALLY is the better solution for this, in fact it's near-to-perfect, but it runs on Palm OS, not on Windows Mobile.

And then there is the "window manager". You can't cascade menu's, it's really hard to create your own, you can't scale down the icons in it's application launcher, you can't set the titles easy, you can't set the font-sizes and no you really can't add tabs to organize it all a little bit.

But there are things you can. Really. I installed PocketPutty and it works, for straight ssh-sessions. It actually works great. You can even set the font-size to something really really small and therefore usable. (You can actually get 80x25 into that tiny screen.) But, nothing is perfect, the built-in keyboard doesn't have a ctrl nor an escape key. So vim or screen or anything serious on unix is ... you guessed it right, next to impossible.

Then there is zsirc, same thing, wonderfull font-sizes, and it works. But you can't save more than one irc-server. It doesn't have an identd. And it can't connect to more than one irc-server. (So bitlbee is out of the question if you want to join a regular irc server as well.)

So here we are, I've got this wonderfull phone, and I really like it despite it's disadvantages (and I didn't even mention the chipping-off paint, after 2 hours, and the fact that it's still windows so it can crash and the volume control is somewhat uneasy to work with). The keyboard is actually quite usable, the screen is bright and clear. The sound quality good. Route66 runs on it REALLY well. (Yes it has a SirfStar III built-in GPS.) And for the applications who are able to use it properly (ssh, irc) the 640x480 screen is a blessing. And if you want to connect to anything wireless, on the maximum speed possible, this really IS your phone. But keep in mind that because it IS a Windows Mobile phone you'll start searching, screaming and kicking for usable applications for it.

And that's the point where I'm at right now. There are some functionalities I'm really looking for and can't find so far:

- a PROPER GUI replacement/launcher, preferably Palm-like but better
- an email programm, something like a pocket version of FireFox would be awesome
- a well-designed ssh/telnet client WITH the possibillity to emulate control, escape and other keys
- a better irc client than zsirc (or is it szirc) which can save multiple server-setups
- a datebook (DateBook 6 for Windows Mobile, PLEASE!)
- a proper contact-manager
- synchronisation software who will sync with anything, other mobile phones (my Nokia), windows, linux, etc, and will use plaintext files wherever possible

And probably tons of other software I'd really love to use, have on my Palm, but didn't even dare looking for so far as at the moment even my core needs aren't fully met.

But, after all this misery, do I want to go back to my Palm IIIc? NO! NO WAY! Yes DateBook6 is 100.000 times better and I really NEED a proper replacement for that so I can toss away the built-in piece of crap. And YES I do miss a lot of core thingies. But my IIIc can't even properly talk to my Nokia phone, doesn't do wireless, has no navigation software running on it, has no GPS and is not capable of making it's own wireless connections. It's not a phone, it's an organiser. And a very good one, but lacking the stuff I really love today. Because after all, it really IS handy to have a portable google-station which can navigate you from A to B and where you can easily SMS with and even ring people the old-fashioned way.

So no, I will not dump this PDA/Phone/Thingie and run back to my Palm IIIc, but hell yeah do I need to find some applications FAST, otherwise this piece of machine will be nothing more than a toy-with-a-phone-and-a-GPS instead of something I will use on a daily basis and can't live without.

Funny Fact: I tossed out my IIIc hapily so I'd gain some pocket-space, but I got a shiny iPod Classic 160G in return. (Which is roughly the same size as my beloved IIIc.) So the amount of storage space needed in my pockets remained the same. I can just do more with it...

When you are sure a script is just an ugly hack, used on 100.000's of systems all over the world...

Sometimes reading scripts by accident is quite funny. Yesterday I read the run-mozilla.sh and found this:

## This script is a hack. It's brute force. It's horrible.
## It doesn't use Artificial Intelligence. It doesn't use Virtual Reality.
## It's not perl. It's not python. It probably won't work unchanged on
## the "other" thousands of unices. But it worksforme. --ramiro

So now you know. At least on AIX 5.3L the run-mozilla.sh script is a dirty hack. :-) (Haven't checked it on Linux, it might even be the same script...) Imagine, this particular script, running on 100.000's of machines, up to 64 CPU's or even more. While even the author tells you it's just a dirty hack... To the author that MUST feel somewhat funny...

Never get used to the view

For the 150th day (and the 150.000.000'th time) I'm looking at the view from our appartment on the 12th floor. And somehow I have the feeling that I will never get used to it, and never ever want to give it up. Ok, unless it's because I get the chance to move to the 24'th floor of some building somewhere.

There is something magical about views like this. I used to be afraid of heights, but still my moment of piece, while living in Rotterdam near the Euromast, was going up the full 200 meters of the Euromast and enjoy the view. I spent hours and hours there.

Now it's just a mere 40 meters, but still the view amazes me. There's nothing to see, just static ligts. But still it's totally macigal. It gives some ease of mind, the broadness of the view. The sole fact that the horizon is some 25 odd km's away. That the world looks so small from up here.

Unfortunately you can't really capture the view with a camera. It shows just lights. Not the feeling of beeing up here, looking out of the window, drinking some beer and listening to some music. But anyway, here's a very faint idea about what it looks like...

And if you want to enjoy this view in persona, ah well, just drop by. ;-P

Gallery.murf.nl

For several years I have a gallery with some less or more interesting pictures about my everyday and not-so-everyday life. But it's funny that however those images are WAY bigger then the more-or-less static HTML pages on this site, the traphic is just a fraction of it. :-)

Time to make my gallery just a little more populair I guess. I'm walking around with my digicam every day, shooting pictures whenever I like it. Storing them on my server... But what's the use if no-one is ever looking at them?

Ah well, this blogpost just might help...
A little...

Jailtime.org - less is more (the missing of the cron)

We, the soleus.nu admins, make use of the images of Jailtime.org. They're trimmed-down Xen disk-images. You can use them almost out of the box, just tell it where it's diskimages is and off you go. The good thing is, they're absolutely as skinny as possible. Anything more stripped out of it and your distro will simly stop working.

But sometimes I think they're just a little bit TOO skinny. Because:

[root@electron /]# crontab -e
-bash: crontab: command not found

Yep, no crontab, no cron. So you do a quick "yum install vixie-cron" and think you're there. No, not yet, as your cron.daily isn't working because there is no /etc/crontab, how convenient. :-)

But of course, there's a quick solution for that (quick after you took 5 minutes to google WHAT rpm actually contains the darn default crontabs):

[root@electron /]# yum install crontabs

Et voila, a very WORKING /etc/crontab AND the necessairy run-parts and other tools to get the crontab and /etc/cron.* actually WORKING.

Testink teh new servert

It seems that I have just migrated my blog to our new server. And actually it went fairly painless. Yes if you do an export of the database you don't take the permissions with you as they are stored in they mysql database, and yes things will go wrong, but all in all it was just a matter of getting apache up 'n running, and then:

[harmen@regina:~/WWW]$ mysqldump -u root -p --add-drop-table --add-locks --all --lock-tables mt_yadayadayada > mt_yadayadayada.sql

tarring and scp-ing the whole encilada to the new host and then:

mysql> grant all on mt_yadayadayada.* to 'mt'@'localhost' identified by 'myverysecretunknownpassword';

Oh, ok, and my installation specifically (because the banner is actually a php script):

[harmen@electron:~/]$ sudo yum install php-gd

And after that, everything looks good. :-) Ok, another beer and then, tomorrow, moving the rest of my stuff. I'm getting the hang of it now...

[15 minutes later]
Things DID NOT go as expected... Unfortunately the captha's where dependant on GD.pm, so I had to install that one as well:

[harmen@electron:~/]$ sudo yum install perl-GD

And of course something was dependant on the existence (and writability) of /usr/home, which is a bsd-ism. Because I'm too darn lazy to fix this the right way, I decided just to add a symlink to /home from /usr and it seems to be happy now.

So it's time for another beer and some testing. (And actually, that's the ONLY reason why I wrote this, for my own reference and testing the migration.) Cheers!

Performance tweaking BackupPC on a Xen host

I'm having some serious trouble with BackupPC's performance. It's not uncommon for an incremental backup of a mere 150G to run for more then 24 hours. I never really made some efford about troubleshooting the thing as I didn't really care. The backups run unattended anyway. But now I'm looking for solutions.

For your information, my BackupPC instance is running on an Debian Etch Xen host, with an nfs mount for it's data directory. The data directory is a set of dedicated 500G md (raid1) disks and the BackupPC host is the only host with access to this disk.

Well, there are some performance tweaks on the website as adding '--checksum-seed=32761' to the rsync arguments. As far as I know that doesn't help very much. But I haven't measured it exactly. What did help was adding more memory, it runs on 512M now instead of 256, you really don't want the thing to swap itself to eternity.

But today I realized it might be my NFS throughput who is the troublemaker:
(/data/backuppc is the nfs-mount, / is of course just / but is still a diskimage laying on another set of 500G md RAID1 disks)

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=/dev/zero of=100M.txt bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 22.2977 seconds, 4.7 MB/s

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/100M.txt bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.62194 seconds, 64.6 MB/s

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=100M.txt of=/dev/null
204800+0 records in
204800+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 43.9823 seconds, 2.4 MB/s

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=/100M.txt of=/dev/null
204800+0 records in
204800+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.43787 seconds, 72.9 MB/s

Then I tried to increase the the socket input queue http://www.linuxdocs.org/HOWTOs/NFS-HOWTO/performance.html

[root@simplicity:/etc]# echo 262144 > /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default
[root@simplicity:/etc]# echo 262144 > /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max

Oh wonder, that seems to help quite some. While, as far as I can see, nothing is really running on the system I see my throughputs doubled:

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=/dev/zero of=100M.txt bs=1M count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 9.89876 seconds, 10.6 MB/s

[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]# dd if=100M.txt of=/dev/null
204800+0 records in
204800+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 11.734 seconds, 8.9 MB/s
[root@vacdepot:/data/backuppc]#

Even while running 4-6 backups simultaneously. So who knows, this MIGHT just be a solution. Though still 10M/s is a pretty nasty throughput. Especially when you want to backup a lot of data and write a lot of hardlinks to disk.

But one day I might find some more NFS performance tweaks to optimize throughput. Or I decide to assign the raw disk to the BackupPC wm, as that definetely WILL solve the performance problems IF and only IF they are because of the crappy disk throughput. But I rather wont, I like the idea of having no access to physical disks for my vm's.

IDSSYDHT - Dismantling BlueTrek Mini

For anyone who wants to know if a BlueTrek Mini BT GSM headset can and will survive a washing machine for the full 1.5 hours it takes to do the laundry: No it won't.

Well, if it's broken already there's not much to save right? And because I was curious how this tiny little thingy looks on the inside (it's just 8 grams heavy and half the size of the average sigarette ligther) anyway I decided to take it apart. Because this WILL do irriversable damage to the little thing, it makes no sense doing this on a working device. But as I told you I already had a broken one...

So that's why:
I did so, so you don't have to... - Dismantling a BlueTrek Mini

2008

Well, so far for 2007. It's over. It has passed and we're in 2008 now. So, what should I do, write something about the past year, or something about the upcoming one. Or should I just write nothing at all?

Well, maybe I should just do both. 2007 was a year of changes. Celebrated my first newyear with my current girlfriend, moved to a nice appartement in Zeist with her, changed my surname from my moms to my dads and I changed jobs from one of the "hardest" companies in the netherlands to one of the "coolest". And that was about it, 2007 in a few words.

So what will 2008 bring? Well, at first I will change servers. Due to certain circumstances I decided to leave the Regina team and start a new team, operating under the name Soleus. Less captains, stricter rules and hosted as a team at coloclue, an organisation of geeks, for geeks, giving them the opportunity to have a private colocated server for an affordable price.

Next to that we'll start the year with a couple of days in Gent, Belgium. Just to ease our minds and see some more of the world we live in. Then my dad will marry to his new girlfriend in january, and for the cultural part, we already have tickets for Nightwish, Eline Vere and Herman Finkers and have plans to visit PinkPop.

Furthermore I have some good intentions (?) for 2008 and while some people say you should keep them secret because it might bring bad luck, I'd rather post them online. Why not. It might even help fulfilling them.

So here we go:
* Visit more cultural stuff, musea, movies, festivals, etc.
* Find myself a new band and play on stage before the end of the year
* Read more (there are tonnes of books I have and haven't read yet, and tonnes of books I don't have and want to read)
* Climb more (I do indoor rock-climbing, and should do it least every week)
* Reduce my debts as far as possible
* Get some more professional certificates (LPI*, RHC*, ITIL, etc.)
* Have heaps of fun and professional enjoyment at my current employer
* Get my life better organized
* Sell my appartment in Enschede (not really a good intention as well as something I should just do)
* Be more social to friends and family and spend more time with them

And that's about it. Shouldn't be to hard, right? :-) Well, 2008 starts today, and at least the cultural part starts tomorrow. I switched my phone off in 2007, so people couln't bug me for some social chit chat, but I'll switch it on today so that at least that good intention doesn't go down the drain straight away.

Cheers!

Wanted: a WORKING Ati Radeon X1300 DH setup

Because I couldn't create one in a mere 8 hours. What a waste of time... And I'm really in badly need of it, as my 2nd screen is kinda useless without it.

Gfx: Ati Radeon X1300 DualHead
OS: Kubuntu (4.10)
WM: KDE
Monitor: 1600x1200 + 1280x1024 flatscreens
Config: included

Download file

What I want? Just the regular dual-head setup. So 2 screens, NOT mirrored, with 2 taskbars and applications interchangable between the 2 of them. (Ok, I could live with 1 taskbar, as long as I can push around applications...) With a big virtual resolution of 1280x1024+1600x1200

Ah well, you get my drift. :-)

Geeks DO have charisma!

I was at the NLUUG 25th anniversary Autumn Conference this year. Mostly because it's just good to meet some people you haven't seen in years and to see some speakers you won't be able to see otherwise. (And, with this 25th anniversary, they really got the creme de la creme from the Unix world all together.)

I've seen a lot and learned a lot. But one of the, for those not part of the Unix Universum, more unexpected things I've learned, is that geeks, nerds, however you may call them really CAN and DO have charisma. At least some of them.

If any of you out there really do think computer nerds are just a bunch of freaks with no social skills whatsoever and the charisma of the average potato, well, just have a bit of fun at one of the Unix conferences and try to see if you can go to one of Bjarne Stroustrup's (C++), David Korn's (Korn Shell) or Whitfield Diffie's (Heilmann/Diffie Algorithm) talks. And maybe, just maybe, you have to adjust your opinion about computer people in general and Unix people specifically. Really, we're not all socially inept geeks, at least not all of us...

Monday Morning: fun with oneliners

Well, it's monday today. And I've been nerding not enough this weekend. So I felt pretty much like making the it up on monday, with the extra that on monday (and tuesday, and wednesday, and of course the rest of the week as well) I actually get paid for it.

Given an input file "list.txt" which looks like:

host1.domain.org
host2.domain.org
host3.domain.org

You can do some more or less fancy stuff (1) with that.

# Looking up the IP addresses for the hosts:
[murf@box:~/]$ while read HOST; do host $HOST; done < list.txt

# Make a wikified table from it:
[murf@box:~/]$ while read HOST; do host $HOST; done < list.txt | sed 's/\(.*\).\(domain.org\) has address \(.*\)/| [[Doc:Server:\1 | \1]] || \2 || \3 || \?\? ||\
|-/'

(Mind the ENTER afer the ||, they ARE important as you want the |-'s on a separate line.)

# Feeding the stuff to a web-browser and retrieving the nagios statuspage from it, dumping the textified-output in a textfile:
[murf@box:~]$ while read HOST; do HOST=$(echo ${HOST} | sed 's/\(.*\).domain.org/\1/'); links2 -dump http://nagiosbox/cgi-bin/nagios/status.cgi?host=$HOST; done < list.txt

Of course the file listing was on it's turn extracted from a long-listing of symlinks to the hosts which I've could've transformed into a list of servers by using yet another awk/sed/vim/whatever regexp, but at that time I wasn't fully awake yet so I decided to use the block-select-mode (ctrl+v) in vim just to truncate the first collumns. And of course, at the end of the day, I know that I could've done it all in just one moderately large oneliner, make it all more efficient, correct, etc, etc, etc. But hey, it's almost 4pm, I'm too lazy to redo it all just for the sake of geekiness...

(1) Depending on your own nerdiness...

BTW It actually all started when I needed a regular expression with some temporary memory storage. Which I knew I'd done before. After that I just felt like doing the rest I had to do the right way. Not just by brute force vimming, but slightly more intelligent and efficient. It's good practice not making it not too easy for you but challence yourself and practice, practice, practice. After all, practice makes perfect.

Climbing as the perfect sport for nerds

For those interested in what a nerd like me does when he wants to do some physical activities:

I climb. Indoors. Once a week on tuesday but I try to expand this to tuesday and thursday.

I've done a 130 and 60 meter wall outdoors in Australia. But usually I prefer the indoor thingie. It's better doable in the Netherlands anyway and as I take this sport pretty seriously, it's pretty comfortable if you have 2 climbing walls quite close to where you live.

I usually climb 5a/b/c (French system, correct me if I'm wrong) and try to reach the magical 6a/b/c within a year or 2. (Believe me, the difference between 5a and 6a is HUGE.) There is a nice reference table on Wikipedia

Well, actually, the main thing why I really wrote this thing, is that I'd like some expansion of our climbing group. Especially because I want to start climbing 2 times a week and once in a while in the weekends as well, it'd be great if there where some more people to hook up with. Our current group is round about 8 climbers (M/F) and hey, why not add some extra.

You can find me at one of these spots:
Klimmuur Utrecht

Rocksteady

On tuesdays we usually do the "Klimmuur Utrecht" in Utrecht, and on thursdays we might go to Bussum for "Rocksteady".

So if you're interested, just drop me a note and we might end up chasing eachother up and down the wall.

PS Yes, the subject is "perfect sport for nerds", and imho it is. It's technical, it's physical, you have to use your brain and climbing really is 40% a mental challenge, 40% technique and just 20% pure power. Last time I went to Utrecht there even was a guy with an "OpenBSD" shirt. I just didn't dare to talk to him and ask him what he did for a living. But it's quite obvious... Right?

Cheers,

Harmen

Firefox, Thunderbird & Vim as external editor

For a while I was looking for some plugins to use vim as an external editor for my browser (FireFox) and GUI email program (Thunderbird). Under Linux of course.

Well, it took a few minutes but I found 2 extentions who, with the right shellscript (uh, minimal wrapper) do exactly that. Giving you the opportunity to exit your emails and weblogs and stuff with your favourite editor.

For Thunderbird there is the External Editor on Globs For FireFox there is the It's All Text plugin.

After installing those the way you're used to, just point them both to the minimal wrapper script I use:

[harmen@pjotr:~/bin]$ vim openvim.sh
#!/bin/sh
pterm +ls -e vim $1

That's it. Really, that's all there is. Ok, I have to figure out how to tell vim automatically that I'm editing Wikipedia-format files, but because I'm too lasy for that, I'll stick with the:

:setf Wikipedia

Or the other lazy and dirty method (if you don't mind Mediawiki Syntax Hilighting in ALL your web-edit forms:

[harmen@pjotr:~/bin]$ vim openvim.sh
#!/bin/sh
pterm +ls -e vim -c "setf Wikipedia" $1 # REALLY dirty, REALLY really dirty

Some other usefull links:
Iat and Gvim

Wikipedia Vim syntax file

And yes, of course, to test it all, this was edited with my favourite editor, vim. The console-version that is...

Pterm font size and other default stuff

I use Linux, and for some odd reason the best xterm I could find the past couple of years is the PuTTY derivate pterm. Yes PuTTY runs natively on Linux and yes you can apt-get it if you're on a Debian-based distro. (I personally prefer Kubuntu.)

But one thing annoyed me for quite a while. While the default font-size was pretty allright on my 1680x1050 17" notebook screen, it kinda sucked on the 19" 1600x1200 I'm working on right now. It annoyed me before, anything not as tiny as 1680x1050 on 17" is pretty rotten. (Well, no, for me it's pretty rotten, I love really tiny fonts.)

So I started looking how to change the font and font-size. Nothing. You can change the font with -fn but there is no list of usable fonts and you can't change the font size whatsoever.

Today, by mere accident, I found the solution. (After trying different terms like Terminal, aterm, xterm, rxvt, etc, etc, etc.) It's dead simple. Just start Putty (the graphical version of pterm) and change anything you like, and save it in the Default profile. Then start your pterm and VOILA, it's set up the way you like.

Of course you can as well edit your .putty/sessions/Default Settings by hand. The line that does all the magic for me is this one:

Font=-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed-*-*-90-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1

And yes, that's tiny. But a) you can cram a LOT of xterms in your screen, b) it keeps people from trying to eavesdrop on you :-)

my irssi theme - now officially on the irssi website

I'm an irssi user. I know some other irc-clients but none of them I like so much as irssi. Can't live, well, don't want to chat without it.

A couple of years ago I decided to create my own theme, as I didn't like the available themes at all. I needed a cleaner theme, with a black background, and some pastel colours. As soon as the new irssi version came out I decided to mail the theme to the irssi developers so that they could put it on their themespage.

Nothing happened. For quite a while. Around a year or 2. 20051211 to be precise, according to the In-Reply-To header. But today I got a message, out of the blue:

Dear Harmen,

Geert Hauwaerts.

You can get the theme from the official Irssi Themes Page. (Look for the Murf theme by Harmen.) Or you can download it directly via this link.

Hope you all like it :-)

I considder myself .. a Delftian

For those who read this blog (Hi Themba!) and don't understand a bit of all the dutch mumba jumba here, I'll try to write a little piece in english again. Well, nothing special really, but I wanted to blog about just one little thing. It's something which goes like this:

I was born in Delft as H.P. de Ruiter.
When I turned 5 my mom chanced my surname to hers, de Jonge.
My mom named me Harmen. My dad Pleun. Remember the latter.
At that moment I'm linked with both my first name and my surname to my mom, not quite common right?

25 years later I decided to reverse it all and change my surname back to de Ruiter. My first name stays the same and my second name, Pleun, well, that that name really ties me to my dads family. My dads grandfather from his mom's side, was called Pleundert Bouwman, though he'd loathed that name and always called himself Piet.

So here we are now. 30 years later after I was born I'm living in Zeist (that's where my mom was born and where part of my moms family used to live), with a first name given by my mom, with a surname and second name from my dad, and with strong feelings for the place I was born. Because after all, I still considder myself a Delftian...

Cancelled - 21st june, Putten (yes, we're playing again!)

And just a few weeks after our first (and very succesfull) gig in Dieren, we (me and my rockband Cancelled) are doing it again. This time in Grand Cafe 't Trefpunt in Putten at Thursday the 21st of June.

The show starts around 10pm and we try to finish around midnight. We got some nice new songs to play, and of course the main part of our gig will be our own songs.

Check out our website and agenda at http://www.cancelled-online.nl/ and of course this blog as I'll post any updates as soon as possible.

[20070605]
I just put my own pictures of our gig in Dieren online. (And some other photo's of our hours and hours of rehersal...)

Enjoy!

Homesick to Ireland

"Honey, I'm homesick, to Ireland..."
"That doesn't surprise me. I wouldn't be terribly wondered if you'd go back..."

Well, maybe I should...

That Linux thingie, I can use that!

"Love, if I buy myself a laptop, you're not forcing me to use that Linux thingie on it, right?"
"No love, I promise you I'll just install Windows on it, that'll be better for you..."

Couple of weeks later...

"Love! That what is running on your work laptop, is that that Linux what you're always working with?"
"Yes my dear, that's Linux..."
"Ooooh, that doesn't look complicated, I can use that! And it's all legal?"
"Euhuh!"
"I think I wouldn't have trouble with it running on my laptop..."

See, if even my girlfriend, (a not-really-computer-savvy historian), is able to use Linux as a desktop, we might get there. Sometimes...

NOTE:
Though personally I think Linux still has a LONG way to go and is not ready for the home-desktop yet. Business desktops, sure thing, that's a controlled environment and the demands are just different. But at home you want to plug in your whatever-device and use it straight away. And as I found out yesterday with my BlueTooth USB dongle and Nokia E-50 cellphone, Linux still has a LONG way to go. So with my GPS puck as there is no real navigation software available and getting the damn thing to work takes hours.

Though I wouldn't miss my Dell Latitude D810 with Kubuntu desktop it for my daily work. It makes no sense doing stuff on Unix servers from a Windows workstation. Had a colleague doing that once, a network engineer, and he sucked, badly... (And left the company within months.)

Rule to perfection

First rule to perfection:

Try to be less perfect...

Cross platform scripting horror (mb, a simple backup script)

Having computers as both a hobby and as a job can and will be frustrating at times. You remember those nights when you want to fix a simple bug in one script, meanwhile find a bug in another script, fix that, and 3 hours later realize that you don't really want to fix the first bug anymore, at all but you DID end up with a perfectly fixed, cross-platform, uh, was-once-a-oneliner? Do you remember?

39 lines, 132 words, 770 characters and all it does is making a backup of a file, or a directory, with the time the file or directory last changed (mtime) in it's name so you can safely edit the contents and know when the last time was you edited the file.

But it DOES happen to work on FreeBSD and Linux... (And really, so far there seems to be no way to do it with just one universal command so that you can skip the entire "case" clause, but as always there are 1000's of ways to do it differently, on both platforms.)

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# make a backup of a file with the mtime in the name

esac

Nothing beats...

They say you choose your friends and get your family. Yet nothing beats the love and care you can get from the latter. As they will, no matter what, always be your relatives. And therefore will always be there.

Well, let's just say that this is my way of saying thanks, to my father, his girlfriend, my brother and my sister for just beeing who they are, my one and true family.

Switching phone numbers - Goodbye Telfort, Hello Orange

After years of struggle with Telfort and their service deparment I deciced to change to Orange. For a reason, they have a quite good priceplan for "unlimited" calls and SMS-es to fixed phones and Orange cellphones and as I want to call more and irc less (or, well, at least call more), AND my girlfriend has Orange this seemed the best solution for me.

As I can't get rid of Telfort before november and you can only transport your old phone number within 3 months of it's end-date I got a new phone number. That number is so nice and easy to remember that I decided to KEEP it and simply destroy my old phone number when my Telfort abbo expires.

For the next couple of months both numbers will work, but the old one WILL be terminated eventually. No I won't publish my new cellphone number here on my blog (let's just say that it contains a lot of 8's and a nice sequence) but just if you want the new number, please let me know.

Cheers,

Harmen

I just looooooooove saturday shopping sprees!

Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdb[1] sda[0]
488386496 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[================>....] resync = 80.1% (391286784/488386496) finish=44.8min speed=36120K/sec

md0 : active raid1 hde[0] hdg[1]
78150656 blocks [2/2] [UU]

Looks almost the same eh? Even better, the latter looks bigger then the first. But look, look closer, and count the digits. And then think that the blocks are 1M. Yes it's right. :-) I bought some hot new hardware today. Well, I'll dump the pictures soon. It's sweet. And it's a lot. And it's worth 600 odd EURO's. And I'm very very pleased with it...

harmen@simplicity:~$ dmesg | grep SAMSUNG
Vendor: ATA Model: SAMSUNG HD501LJ Rev: CR10
Vendor: ATA Model: SAMSUNG HD501LJ Rev: CR10

And yes, that's definetely not the ONLY thing I bought today ;-P (An external, slimline DVD +- RW USB drive is one of the other nitty gritty nifty cool stuffies I bought.) And some DVD's. And a universal remote control. And a SATA enclosure. And some games. And 2 mice. And pads. (Mousepads!) And some screws. And some empty mini dvd's.

And a present for my niece.

And some bread.

And butter.

I just looooooooove saturday shopping sprees!

Paula Bean

Why do I feel like Paula Bean, sometimes?

Give up on alcohol

Last night I got moderately drunk.
For the first time in 3 odd weeks.
I didn't really like it.

This morning I woke up.
No real hangover, just a bit queezy.
I really don't like it.

Ah, maybe I just should give up on alcohol...

Black hole

Quite funny that after the birth, the red giant and the white dwarf there is always the black hole...

3 januari 2007, goodbye Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail, by far my most favourite email program for years, only to be replaced by mutt and Thunderbird simply because there was no linux version available. It's probably the first free software I've actually paid for. I was just waiting for the Linux version so I could trash my Thunderbird and use mutt for cli use. I even used Mercury/32 as local mta for a while. The last version was totally crap, I heard. I've never used it because I don't do windows anymore. (Well, a bit, for some browsing and gaming.)

But unfortunately David Harris decided to pull the plug. Entirely. No more Pegasus Mail. No more Mercury/32. The reason: funding. According to the site Pegasus Mail went bankrupt. Dead. Ceased. Because some people forgot that even developers sometimes have to eat and can't just live on air. Free closed sourced looks like a concept which doesnt work. At least it didn't for David Harris.

Silently I hope that David will reveal his sources so some other people can and will write a Pegasus/NG, for both windows *and* linux. With David as a team-lead. On a regular job but still with his baby to maintain. Pegasus Mail has been around for years. 10, 15, I really don't know but it's been around since I've set foot on the internet and even before. It deserves to stay a little longer.

Amongst many, there is one big question yet unanswered: How am I going to learn my mom another email program...

Equality

Sometimes you just meet someone and you know that it is more special than anyting ever before. Without willing to insult or degenerate whatever was and happened before. Sometimes you just realize that no matter what it was and how it felt before, this was what they meant. This was, how scary and new and insecure it might be, how it should be and should've ever been. It's a bit scary that just this single girl happened to turn my life upside down, within little more than a month, and give me what I need at the moment I needed it, a relationship with one central and very important word: equality

Please let her stay for a while. Because this might just be what I need right now. How confusing it might be.

The bass and the band

Well, sometimes just everything seems to go right at the same time. And while I'm hapily living my life with much less internet than before, that really DOES mean that I'm doing other things with my life right now. (And that doesn't mean watching a lot of tv. Because tv sucks. It really does.)

No, as you could've read I was looking for a band, just because playing the bass guitar on your on is nice but kinda boring. It's just not a solo instrument. It needs a band. And a band needs a bass guitar. It took me little over 5 weeks to get this far. Missed 3 auditions and just had the 2nd. For some odd reason they where as happy with me as I was with them. They really found my weak spot as the told me things like that I was doing really really well, improve very very fast, know how to "houd maat", and they seemded to be kinda impressed with the fact that after a mere week of practising they didn't have to instruct me like the last time and I just played along with them.

In other words, it seems that I do have a band now, and that band does have a bass player. With a bit of luck this means that I'll be on stage, playing for a 100 odd ppl the 21st of januari. That date might be shifted a month or so but that's totally dependant on other things.

You can't really imagine how happy I feel right now. As if christmas was a little early today. I think at the moment there is really nothing more to wish for me. I found a girl who I really really like (and yet she's not officially my girlfriend, yet...), my job is awesome (doing really really cool stuff for the first time in my life) and just after 2,5 months of playing bass guitar I wedged myself into a band who have exactly the same ambitions as I have (playing on stage, 10 times a year) and just to their own stuff. (They do play rock covers, but are working really hard on their own material and even the covers are played the way they like them.)

Well, TIFN, time to celebrate it with a good glass of a 12yo The Glenlivet. I deserved it. Really...

Bringing people together

Bringing people together is like nuclear fusion.
Put some very energetic particles close to eachother and they start to glow.
Bring them even closer and they become radient.
Bring them too close and they become unstable and explode.
It's all a matter of carefully pushing it to it's limits,
without pushing it too far...

Terriblific Monday Mornings

Having your alarm clock set at 6am, beeing way too tired, dozing off and pushing that snooze-button many many times, really getting up at 7am, beeing terribly slow and finally departing at 8.15am is a bit of a nasty start of your monday. Getting that one traffic jam that never happens on the way to work definetely makes it worse.

But well, there are weekends where no matter what happens on monday morning, you really just don't care. Can I have more of these terriblific monday mornings, please? :-)

f*ck, stupid retarded FILESYSTEM!

C:\hdj>pscp carrot@127.0.0.1:/opt/devsvn1.img f:\
Using keyboard-interactive authentication.
Password:
devsvn1.img | 4194280 kB | 782.8 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 99%Assertion failed: actuallen <= len, file ..\pscp.c, line 1522

C:\hdj>

Why is it that you ALWAYS find out TOO late that the filesystem you're using on your target disk is stupid, ancient and RETARDED. And WHY is it that applications really can't handle this properly? And WHY is it that you findi this out AFTER copying almost 4G of data over the net with a whopping 782K/s? And WHY did this happen the 2nd time this week?

It must be Murfy's Law :-(

[NOTE]
It turned out to be not only a limitation of the FAT32 filesystem but also a limitation of pscp, the putty-windows-scp programm.

[NOTE2]
After almost 3 years of blogging I just noticed the following:
Total Posts: 555 | Total Comments: 990 | Total Authors: 1
I just might celebrate the 666th post on this blog, within a year, as I don't post that often lately 'cause of different (offline!) things on my mind.

Big fire in Emmeloord. // My 12GByte of fame.

Well, today I had my 12GByte of fame, and raising. I'm working as a contractor at Marktplaats.nl, in the village of Emmeloord. Today at 11am we saw some thick black smoke passing by and yes there it was, a major fire almost next door at the Deen Group polyesther factory. (You can imagine, polyesther DOES burn, and quite intense as well.)

As I liturally ALWAYS have my camera with me I decided to go upstairs (together with 10 collegues) and shoot some pictures and 2 movies. I mailed them to nu.nl and De Stentor, two dutch news sites. The last one linking to the temporary directory where I whacked my images :-) And there I got my 12GByte of fame, in a mere 3 hours. At the time of writing not all images are online but the important ones are. Though they ARE resampled as my 3MPix images and movies where pushing my traffic up a little bit too fast. :-) But do read the readme file first...

Zire 71? Zire 72...

It's a bit sad, that after you decided you really needed a PDA, you are in such a hurry that you don't compare, don't think and don't review before you buy. So there I am, stuck with a very nice Zire 71 while all I needed was a Zire 72.

It seems such a small improvement, but the Zire 72 has bluetooth, and the Zire 72 has a regular mini-usb connector, and the Zire 72 has a Java VM so Opera runs on it. Which makes all I need much easier and cheaper. Yes I do want TomTom navigation, and I don't want to fiddle around with universal connectors as I have 4 mini-usb cables ready at hand, and I do want to have that very nice virtual laser keyboard.

So off we go, on the hunt again. My Zire 71 is for sale and I'm looking for an affordable Zire 72 in return. A bit of a loss, but the frustration of just not having wat I want is worse than just a couple of euro's. And yes there are even better devices, with WiFi, GSM and all the shit, but that'd mean that I have to spend yet another extra amount of money which I really don't want to spend right now. With the Zire 72 and a data pack (GPRS/Edge) from my mobile phone provider I could do my internet stuff in the train, listen to my mp3's and navigate to my destination without the hassle of all special connectors.

VMWare frustrations - vmware-server-console with a blank screen

As I'm a fulltime nerd now I'm working with virtualisation as well. And virtualisation means vmware if you want to run virtually any OS and be not dependant on host-os aware guests like XEN. XEN is beautifull, fast and versatile but you NEED a guest-os who is aware of the fact that it's running on a XEN host. The same for User Mode Linux (UML). VMWare doesn't have all that, it just runs virtually any guest OS. The price is that it's not open source and it's a bit resource hungry.

But you will run into trouble. The main issue I had was that I couldn't get my vmware-server-console to run on my Ubuntu laptop. The rest of the installation trouble where quite straight forward (basically just apt-getting all stuff the installer is complaining about and rerunning the installer). But there was one issue which seemed to be unsolvable. I could start my virtual machines perfectly but I got the nasty error "Failed to initialize mouse-keyboard-screen" and got a blank screen.

I suspected every thing, missing modules, dead graphics and of course the error message you get when starting the vmware server console from a terminal was a bit scary as well:

[dejonge@einhell ~]$ vmware -v
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)

But all that seemed to be totally unrelated despite all howto's and solution on the internet. Because the real solution was this:
[dejonge@einhell ~]$ echo xkeymap.usekeycodeMap = \"TRUE\" >> .vmware/preferences

Life is soooooo simple, sometimes. But it takes a genious to make it that way.

Moved, Internet and really really tired

Well, not much to tell I'm afraid. Nothing really interesting that is for those not personally involved with me. (And those who are already know.) But, I've moved successfully to Soesterberg. I DO have internet at home now. (Really, I never ever wanted to have cable internet and now I have because it was cheap and had a 500K+ upstrream.) I DO have a bass-guitar. I DO have a sweet little basement with some servers. (Yes I'm a geek, again, and now for real.) I DO have a frige and everything is in place. More or less as I'm still in lack of a "salontafel" and a decent office chair. As well in lack of tons of tiny stuff. My wishlist for my housewarming party will be endless.

Ah well, like I said, there's nothing to tell really. It's just been EXTREMELY busy the past weeks and I'm tired beyond tiredness. But I DO enjoy this new life, my new job (I can nerd 40 hours a week and a little bore) and well, the girl upstairs who'll move in next week (we share the bathrooms) and well, basically just beeing able to say that I'm at home and that my friends are only a couple of hours driving away. I missed it. Stupidly enough I was getting attached to people easer, sooner and deeper. Meanwhile enjoying it, it wrecked me as well. Now all that is over and I can just come home and visit some friends. Friends who I know for years, not days.

Home sweet home - moving to Soesterberg

Back in The Netherlands, homeless for a couple of days. It's the way it goes. But not a bother, I wouldn't be Murf if I wasn't as lucky as I was unlucky so when 100 things go wrong, 100 things go right as well.

And so it went, tomorrow I'll move to a very nice 50m2 shared-bathroom-own-kitchen place in Soesterberg. Yes, that's right, just about 300 meters from the Soeterberg Airforce Base runway. Well, at least nobody 'll complain if I put my bass amp on full :-)

Heep Heep Hooray!

And then, suddeny, I turned 29! (Though I just feel a day older.)

So it means a party. A double-tripple party even. First here today in the pub with my local friends and some strangers, then saturday in The Netherlands with all my friends. But it will be a double-tripple party as I said, because both times I'll celebrate not only my birtday but my new job and my departure from Ireland and return to The Netherlands as well.

Not 2x3 times the booz, my stomach wouldn't take that, but at least 2x3 times the fun. :-)

Just some things to achieve

- get tattoo or piercing (always wanted to, don't have the guts, yet)
- get certifications (RHCE or equivalent, and now for real)
- learn instrument (guitar / bass, I already play accordeon)
- climb rocks and walls (I don't meditate, I climb rocks. It works better.)
- dive again (in water you know, with tanks, and get my drysuit-cert)
- learn icelandic (no clue why, it's just cool, Iceland rocks)
- meet friends and family often (DUH! Haven't seen 'm in 6 months.)

Just some things I want to achieve in the near future. But best of all:

Be Happy!

Ok, I already achieved that one. But it can always be better. :-)

From the moon to the world and back to where I belong

Sometimes things go faster than you can imagine. Sometimes you have to make decisions which you previously didn't want to make but after making them they still feel better than any of the alternatives would feel.

So there I am, flying back to the Netherlands the 28th of september. Not flying back to Ireland. Millions of experiences, tens of beautifull people, even some friends to keep. At the end it made me much richer than I was before. I needed this step. And now, now the unfortunate thing happened, it was time to go review what would be next.

If at that moment they ask you for a job you'd really like and you know that you can and will be happy in the town you where born, it might not be bad to take that decision and return home. Home is where my bed is, but home is also where my friends are. Now I'll unite them again.

And I feel happy.

Looking for L^ha new Job

Unfortunately my Irish adventure got a premature end.

If anybody likes to employ a Murf, preferably somewhere on planet Earth and hopefully soon, please let me know. I'm available.

vim the right thing

If you're working on some software.
And working on it for days.
At the edge of killing yourself, and the software.

If you really can't figure out what's wrong.
Because the change you made is for sure the right one.

Do yourself a favour,
and make sure,
before you make a total idiot out of yourself,
the configfile your editing,
IS THE F*CKING RIGHT ONE!

Do you cook? (Selling Murf.)

My hostel's landlady's mom this weekend tried to sell me, again, to the girls in the hostel. (She tries every single week, to every single single girl in the hostel.) She really tries, and tells them girls that I clean the kitchen every night, am very nice, very tidy, very intelligent and tons of other stuff but best of all that I Can Cook (tm). (The latter not entirely untrue though in my personal opinion it's usually somewhere between "hmmm, could've done better" and "not too bad but...")

Normally I just blush, try to hide, and then try have a bit uneasy chat with the girls. But this time I had a sligtly different response, responding: "Well, yes, I can cook, more or less, but I'm actually looking for a girl who can cook BETTER than me so that I don't end up doing it every night."

Anyone?

PS:
(Not that I would mind cooking every night, after all, it IS a hobby of me and involves all I like as it's an intelligent job and best of all you need all your senses and creativity for it.)

PS/2:
Of course no response on my response, aparently they couldn't cook or they where just not interested in taking me home anyhow. (The latter making way more sense then the first.)

A weekend where...

- A weekend where just before it started I scored 4% higher on a test than a collegue. (68% vs 64%)
- A weekend where a bouncer asked my ID, blushed and said "sorry" when looking at it and finding out I'm really almost 29. (While a 23yo girl could pass straight a way because "she looked old enough".)
- A weekend where I cooked 2 of my best dishes in the past year, maybe even 2 or 3. (And this time NOT to impress a girl, well, at least none physically around.)
- A weekend where on friday I got a phone call from the Netherlands. (/me like!)
- A weekend where everybody was too tired to go to the pub on saturday, and I ended up with yet another phone call from another friend from the Netherlands. (Really, not a punishmend, haven't spoken to her in whatever months.)
- A weekend where I made a reservation for another hostel and the girl asked if I'd been in Cork for a while, as she noticed the Cork accent. (Yes, the CORK accent, not even the Irish! /me like!)
- A weekend where I had to stay sober because I was on call. (And yes I did, I had a whopping 3 drinks, in total, in 2 days.)
- A weekend where my geekishness showed up by buying a tiny watch-band-mounted compass and yet another Victorinox pocket knife. (The latter with the key-feature of having a tiny LED light built-in.)
- A weekend where I finally had the guts to ask a girl working in the hostel if she wanted to join us to the pub. (Simply because: The more the merrier.)
- A weekend where I got woken up by my own cellphone, ringing 10 times, at 4am, because some IDIOT dialed the wrong number. (The person was polite enough to say sorry after I texted why the f*ck he/she was ringing me in the middle of the night.)
- A weekend where there was nothing worth viewing in the cinema. (AGAIN! For the 4th or so week in a row.)
- A weekend where a French girl asked my age (after making a remark about my current lifestile like "well, when you get older you always have the time to settle"), a German girl (knowing) grinned "Guess!", the French girl stumbled "21,23", and after I tossed my passport on the table the French girl responded with nothing more than *EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!* (You had to be there, it was too darn funny.)

A monday where I'm back in the office, in the famous Irish weather (pouring down), eating my breakfast and knowing that before I can celebrate my birthday, I still have to work my ass off for the next 14 days and 21 hours. (For a variety of reasons, not all known by all of you.)

Birtday Party - 30 september 2006

Well, as expected I'll give a not-so-small birthday party at the 30th of september. In the Netherlands that is, anybody who's here (Cork, Ireland) the 26th of september is of course very invited to have a couple of Guinness' in some local pub.

Actually, if you DO have the chance to come to Cork, please do so. But if not, give me a yell. The party will be at one of my friends' place somewhere in the centre of the Netherlands on the evening/night of september 30th / october 1st. As we have quite some mutual friends, wanted to celebrate our birthdays at the same day and she has a perfect location it was simply the best solution. It'll be good, that's for sure. But I don't want to overcrowd her house so unfortunately I can't invite every single one of those who want to come.

For those not capable or willing to travel there, give me a yell as well, as I'll be in The Netherlands for 6 days and so far I only got 3 things planned. (Actually one, officially, but I've got 2 appointments dangling. Although they might be partially combinable in multiple ways.)

PS I *am* looking for some accomodation. So far only 1 night is covered, but there are still 5 left...

Cheers,

Murf

Shy by nature

Some people tend to think I'm not a shy person. That's a bit odd because by nature I am, I'm just not in every situation and in a lot of situations I master to mask it. But I can assure you that by nature I am definetely a shy person.

I had a discussion about that, more then once time this week and I just wonder. Because I might be wrong. Are you a shy person if you get shy by default but in certain situations manage to mask it to a great amount? Are you a shy person if new people enter the room and your first reaction is hiding in your book? Even if people who know you a little bit better tend to think about you as beeing a very open and extrovert person? Or is ist that you can only be named "shy" if you're shy all the time?

I think what you call a shy person is a person who's first reaction is beeing shy. A person who's reaction, driven in the corner or in unknown and uncontrollable situations, is shyness. That that same person might overcome his shyness in other situations or mask it by bravoury in certain circumstances is not really relevant. The opposite is true as well, a very extrovert person might be shy occasionally, but you'd call that person extrovert by nature not shy. Of course not all shy people get shy in similar situations but it might just be true that there is a fair overlap in the kind of situations shy persons get shy.

If you get queezy and uncomfortable if you run into situations where you for example meet a girl who you're really interested in. Your default reaction might be running away, though your mind sometimes convices you not to and you stay and try to make a clumsy move. Or making a phonecall, too many things can go wrong there. Either the person is busy, doesn't want to talk to you, you dial the wrong number, etc. Non-shy people don't give a shit and just do it, shy people simply refuse unless they really have to.

To get back to me, I can assure you, nothing is what it looks. Even if I look extrovert, if you know me better, you should know that by nature I'm a shy and very closed person. I just don't show it all the time.

Sad yet thankfull

And yet, another person, great, weird, interesting, sweet, cute.

3 days and then goodbye. To be never seen again.

Out of hundreds I've seen come and go, there will always be those few who I'll remember. Not forever but for some time at last. Feel sad I didn't have more time with them, yet thankfull that the time we had was a rememorable one.

If god exists...

If god exists, he's a sadistic creature with a wicked sense of humor :-(

BTW als er iemand nog een Murf zoekt (zie http://murf.nl/cv.html), dan heel graag een mailtje naar harmen@murf.nl. Let's not hope so, maar het zou zomaar opeens nodig kunnen zijn.

And yet, for those who are in for some discussion:
The weblog of one of my friends.

Spreadshirt.com - I am not a terrorist

Just for fun I ordered THIS t-shirt. Not to be worn if you fly to the USA, maybe not to be worn at any airport at all, but it still is a hell of a great shirt if you're in to something little controversial.

And oh, the text is, according to the website (and I damn hope they're right):
"I am not a terrorist". In arabic, that is.

Insert Big Smile Here

1 comedy club, 1 hurling game, 2 comedians, 3 nights, ~20 Guinness, 1 t-shirt, 1 Rebel Red, some Heineken and an unnumerable amount of pubs and great people.

Cork has lost their finals but for me it was just one of those weekends.
:-) [Insert Very Big Smile Here] :-)

backup PuTTY (and other) registry entries

On a blog I found this handy one-liner to backup your PuTTY configuration:
regedit /e PuTTY.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham

But, as I use Cygwin and a shellscript to backup my important data in a more or less regular way, that doesn't work. But, there is a workaround which works in Cygwin as well:
cmd.exe \/C "regedit /e c:\\Windows\\Temp\\RegFiles\\PuTTY.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham"

I'm not aware of a better way then abusing cmd.exe, as there are no tools inside cygwin who can do the same as regedit /e, but if I'm wrong please let me know.

PS dealing with special characters in your registry entries? Use the carrot to escape them:
cmd.exe \/C "regedit /e c:\\Windows\\Temp\\RegFiles\\TXMouse.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\^\TXMouse"

UnIx?

Thursday morning, just cleaning up some bits and pieces:

bash-2.05# ls
-p Netcool
bash-2.05# du -hs -- -p
1K -p
bash-2.05# cd -- -p
bash-2.05# ls
bash-2.05# cd ..
bash-2.05# rm -r -- -p
bash-2.05# ls
Netcool

bash-2.05# ls -lad O*
drwxr-xr-x 5 root other 512 Aug 31 09:46 OMNIbus
drwxr-xr-x 3 root other 512 Jan 30 2006 Omnibus

Aparently someone did *not* really get the hang of Unix systems...
*sigh*

Wake up and smell the coffee!

On the edge of confirming it all with just this post; Sometimes there are things I just don't get. One blog, one person gets bullied for beeing and writing too emotional, while blogs containing the same amount of emotional and sometimes private content, other people sharing parts of their lives in an equal public way, are beeing left alone.

Sometimes, and I'm not talking about the bullying of this blog alone, I really get sick of the intolerance of people in general. People with different opinions, with different views of life, with different experiences, with different lives, different intelligence, hence the word "different"; they might not share your opinions.

Those people get laughed about, virtually tossed out of the communities they once thought they belonged to and they one thought where really tolerant. But aparently they're not. Aparently they're as short-minded as most communities. The people inside tend to *think* they are so open-minded, so tolerant and so wise. But they're not. They have this nice illusion to think they're so world-wise but aparently no-one had the chance to shatter the 3-foot-thick concrete wall in front of they're eyes.

Well people, wake up and smell the coffee. There is an entire world out there which is different then yours. Filled with people with different opinions, with different minds, with different experiences. They might not always be better nor less than yours, not even equal, they're just different. Just because they're the opinions of other human beeings.

Are you blind or just afraid to see? Is it too much to ask for just a little respect? Do you really want to believe that YOUR confined view is the best? That you're all so smart, so world-wise, so intelligent?

Really, think again.

Games, Games, Games: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTDX)

"Harmen!? What are you doing up so late? Don't you have to work tomorrow?"
"Euh, yes I do, but you know, *eeerh*, something with certain computergames and very addictive..."

That was a 2-line conversation with the landlady of my hostel yesterday evening at 11pm. "I'll regret this tomorrow, I know." I thought. And yes did I regret it this morning when my alarm clock went off at 6.30am while I finally found my bed around 1am that very morning. (I had to peel myself of my laptop not to play 'till the wee hours.)

Well, I could write a long story, a really long story, but the game we're talking about (and beware, don't scream at me that I didn't warn you) is THIS:
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe

It's the Open (free) and enhanced version of a game many of you know and probably played for days, weeks and months. It is really darn addictive. If you're in to SIM games. I'm not, not really, I'm not into any game in particular but there are just 2 or 3 games I like to play every once in a while. This is one of them. I play them for days, sometimes weeks, then get sick of them and toss them away not to look at them for months.

Of course, since you actually have to BUY the original game to play the Open version of it you need either a very good shop or some website where you can download it. I wouldn't thought of it myself, or of the entire game, untill I read THIS article on a friend's weblog. Read, and see how you can quite easily get the original TTDX files so you can play the game.

Thanks Rick, for destroying my well-deserved night of sleep.

Where did al the crazy people go?

Yes, where did they go? A couple of weeks ago I remember going to the pub, almost every night. The nights I didn't go where just because I was too darn tired and HAD to be fresh for work the next day. (It's not always partytime here, really, I got to study and work hard for my job.) I remember ending up in the garden, in the middle of the night, drunk, with sweet French girls talking about life, universe and everything. I remember crazy talks with people from all over the world, with just at that moment one universal goal: Having an awfull lot of fun together.

But for some odd reason, they dissappeared. Not all of them, Paolo is still here and he is definetely one of the crazy people. But he's got a job as a night porter right now so when I want to go out, he simply has to work. I was talking with him yesterday, about all this. We both miss it and them terribly. It seems autumn has entered Ireland, and the crazy summer is over. Can anyone please pull open a can of crazy people and send them to our hostel in Cork, Ireland so that we can forget about autumn and get that hyperactive crazy summer feeling again, where you never come home late but always early, where you have totally drunk conversations with the most beautifull and crazy people in the world, where you flirt your ass off with anything female and pretty (and vice versa), where you suddenly end up in highly intelligent conversations about life, the universe and everything with total strangers who you'll never see again?

Can we just PLEASE have our crazy people back, so that we can have some fun here in our wet and cold Ireland?

Spotted Dick!?

Heinz has some very good stuff like Tomato Ketchup, the slowest in the world. They even have a pretty decent Sponge Pudding in a can. But try to explain to a couple of French girls without making a total fool out of your self (or, as we say it in Dutch, "zonder voor lul te staan") that Sponge Pudding named "Spotted Dick" is a bit euh, strange...

Bloody annoyingly different

A lot of times I'm telling that I love Ireland so much because things are just a little different here. Less stressfull. Less organized. So yes, I love it here. But sometimes this Irish behaviour also implies some less handy things. I already told that the bank is open only during office hours and you can't get a weekly pass for the train any earlier than the sunday before.

But this morning I realized something else, for the 10th time. Maintenance. As in, the lack of maintenance. Take this little story, there are 4 coca cola vending machines at the railway station. Very nice to pick a bottle or 2 if you need some extra sugar that day. But 80% of the time at least 2 of them are either out of order (with sign) or not working (without sign), the other 20% of the time all of them are either sold out or not working at all (with or without sign). Today I though I was lucky, having my NCO exams 1,5 weeks earlier then expected I really needed some extra sugar in my blood and found 1 of the 4 machines in working order. No sign of disorder and it was even filled to the top. So I tossed in my small money. (Really, that's my excuse of using those expensive machines, to get rid of all the 10ect and 20ect coins in my wallet. The stuff left over after ordering another pint of Guinness at the bar.) I choose A1, for a 50cc bottle of Coke and immediatly my coins dropped in the change-bucket. WHAT!? Then I looked, and I looked closer (remember, I was still half asleep) and realized that indeed the machine was full. For some unknown reason the collecting belt was loaded with 30 bottles of Sprite, therefore not working at all. And there is nothing they will do about it, because the railway personell politely will tell you that the machine is not theirs so they're not responsible for them.

Meanwhile that same personell arrives at the platform gate while the train arrives (normally they're there 5 minutes earlier and 5 of them ignoring the passengers entirely before suddenly one of them sees the train coming and starts doing his job), opens the gate for the arriving passengers and THEN opens the gate for the departing passengers. Leaving people frowning and annoyed.

Things are differently over here, most things are different in a good sende, but some things are just bloody annoyingly different.

Europeans look older than they are?

Tuesday night, in a pub in Cork.

2 Canadian girls (Girl A & Girl B), 1 Italian boy, 1 Murf, some other crowd.

Girl A to Italian : "All you europeans look so much older than you are!"
Murf to Girl A : "Really? How old do you think I am?"
Girl A : "24"
Girl B : "26"
Murf : "Well, I'm 28, almost 29, so sorry but point proven wrong!"
Girl A: *mumble* "But that's because I'm so bad in guessing ages..."

Riiiiiiight...

I hate mondays

3.53am, almost time to go home.

Really, I HATE MONDAYS!

MUST SEE: The Wind That Shakes The Barley

It's not very often that I get out of a movie theatre, and notice that I and the people I went with are just staring blankly the first 5 minutes before saying a word to eachother.
It's not very often that I get out of a movie theatre, and that I have the feeling beeing hit and run over by a train, 3 times.
It's not very often that I get out of a movie theatre, and have the feeling that what I've just seen must've been one of the best motion pictures so far in my life.

It's THIS movie, The Wind That Shakes The Barley who'd done all that yesterday. And more. If you're in Ireland it's a must-see, if you're not, it's a must-see anyway. Telling about the Irish War of Independance in 1919, about the IRA, about the gruelling deeds the English as well as the Irish did to eachother. It's a story about a family torn apart. About torture. About love. About Ireland. Sometimes hard to follow because of the thick Irish accent, sometimes just gruelling because of the torture, sometimes heartwarming because of the love between people, but at any time a movie which makes you think, makes you feel, touches you.

There is a fair chance you'll walk out of the theatre completely silent, as we did. It's not a hollywood blockbuster, it's not "nice", but sure it will DO something with you. Enjoy. (PS Make sure you'll turn the subtitles off, even if you're not able the follow the entire movie. You'll miss more of it reading subtitles not watching at where it really happens.)

28 looking 22

It ain't easy, beeing 28, looking like 22.
It might be a compliment, yes.
And I might feel and act like 'm 22, yes.
But the shock people get realizing you're just a "tad" older then expected.
Well trust me, that is NOT nice.

Blogging without a computer

There is a certain problem with blogging when you don't have access to the internet 24/7, or even worse, only on weekdays between 8 and 6. You'd have the most vibrant idea's for blogposts, the most thrilling threads in your head, but drunk and sober, but there is no way you can blog them right at the moment you have the inspiration.

That's why this weblog might be a bit boring at times, as I can't blog all day during work and even if I could, work is not the place where I'd get the most inspiration to blog. It's an office after all. The exciting bits of my life happen off-hours. In the middle of the night when drunk, right when I wake up when fuzzy from the night before, during the day sitting in the sun. I could write it all down in a diary and blog it the next time I'm online but that seems so odd ad I'd have way too much chance to reformulate every single sentence. Rethink it, not blog the way I like blogging, which is just doing it straigt from my mind with just my fingers typing at the speed of thought. (Though sometimes it's very nice to do some proper research, form a true and well-defended opinion and THEN blog.)

Any suggestions?

MY social life

Sometimes people wonder if I don't have a social life here in Ireland. (Or more, why I was willing to give up my social life for the sake of a job.) Well, I can tell you, I do have a social life, and a very thriving one as well. Maybe it's not what you people at home considder a social life, with many long-term friends but it's definetely a social life. My social life is with people from all over the world. Great people, beautifull people, cute people, interesting people, odd people, annoying people, ugly people, boring people, average people. Just people. Guys and girls like me and you, most of them just travelling around, some looking for a job, but almost every single one of them beeing the social kind, who just like to have a great party with new friends-for-a-week. (Or a forthnight, or a day, or just a couple of hours.)

To be honest, I'm quite happy with that kind of social life. As I of course do miss my friends at home I can't excactly say I'm lonely here. Maybe you should just have a look at the August 2006 album, somewhere hidden in my gallery under "Travel". At the time of writing (august 8th) that is just about last weekend, and sure you'll see we had a great time together. Even better, by now I already know that at least 3 people will return to my hostel on thursday and we'll have an Italian party then with pizza, beer and of course a lot of Italians. I also know that there is a fair chance we end up in some local pub on friday and saturday. (And, as I have an important test on monday, I won't be in the pub on sunday, well, I might not, but I might just be able to withstand the temptation.)

Good, that cleared my throat. Time for a cup of tea and some email-checking-stuff to catch up with my friends in The Netherlands.

The Schizophrenic Clinic and the Sharpshooter Course

On a not-so-weary thursday morning, joking around about life, the universe and everything while trying to delay the time we REALLY had to start working, a collegue and I came up with an ideal business modell.

We'd claim some land, call it independant and make a law that it's legal to shoot ill people. Then we put a building there, with one entrance called "Schizophrenic Clinic" and the other one "Sharpshooter Course". The sharpshooters cure the schizophrenics by shooting them while the 2nd person in their heads is active. The knife cuts on both sides, the sharpshooters learn how to shoot live targets, really killing people, the schizophrenics are cured from their disease.

Of course we'd have a funeral home and a cemetary next door and make some extra money out of that providing services for the ones needed. A pub nearby wouldn't do any harm, both for the families of the now dead but cured people and the sharpshooter trainees.

And there you have it. A bit of a harsh way of curing people, maybe a little illegal, probably very controversial, but nevertheless a working modell. Of course IF you find people crazy enough willing to be cured this way and sharpshooter-trainees willing to train on real people.

Not moving together

While everybody seems to be moving out and start living together with his or hers spouse, I feel a little alienized again. Living in a hostel ("jeugdherberg" in Dutch), age 28, single and no plans of getting anything private or living together with whoever the girl of my dreams may be for the next 3-5 years. (That is, unless they kick me out of the company.)

Ah well, maybe I should just say "been there, done that, now doing it differently". And who knows, it might just be that all those people doing what I did when I was 22, will do the same as I'm doing now at age 28. Maybe the world isn't so odd after all.

1st april - 1st august

Yesterday, without really paying too much attention to it, it's been exactly 4 months ago since I emigrated to the wicked little country called Ireland. 4.2-million inhabitants (5.9 including Northern Ireland), 84,412 Km2. Twice the size (41,526 Km2), less than 1/3rd the population of my home-country, The Netherlands.

Life is good on this side of the channel. We have Guinness and it's just a 1h40m flight from Amsterdam, doable for round a bout a 100 EUR round-trip if you're lucky. Ireland, less stressfull, more Irish. Here we even have something they call "Irish Time", which is a very flexible measure of time. 20 minutes Irish Time can mean anything between 10 and 40 minutes, usually the latter. The pace is just slower. And I'm enjoying it. The Netherlands is good, I really love it there and there is a fair chance I will return, within a year or 3-5, but so far working and living in Ireland meanwhile flying across the world to do a bit of work meanwhile making English my 2nd language and socializing with all cultures and nationalities really floats my boat.

Cheers!

Eire - just a 4 day holiday

1 car, 2 people, 2 passes, 2 minor skids, 4 days, 4 hostels, 1000 photo's and a shitload of tiny windy roads with an insane speed-limit of 100Km/h combined with the most awesome views I can imagine.

Ireland has it all, we've just discovered parts of the west-coast, the Dingle Peninsula, the Cliffs of Moher, County Kerry and everything in between. It's been amazing. I expected a lot, I got even more.

Well, a picture tells more than a thousands words they say. 1000 pictures should tell more than a 1000,000 words. I won't even start. Just see for yourself at Murf's Photo's and Kuess' Photo's and you might understand why I really don't mind living in this country. (Ok, I must admit, coincidence and Guinness are the TRUE reasons but it just sounds nicer if you say you moved to a country because of the envorinment other than just because you got a job there...)

You call that coincidence?

The first Dutch girl,
in my hostel,
in a month,
in my room,
in my bunk-bed,
from Fryslan,
so I could already practise my Dutch yesterday,
while today,
a Dutch friend of mine will visit me for 4 days.

And you call THAT coincidence!?

What good is and what's not...

Sometimes I wonder, ain't it all a matter of need and that your body automatically tells you what's good for it and what not, even if it seems unhealthy from the outside?

Let me explain this, sometimes people are craving for a cigarette, it IS unhealthy so they say but wouldn't it be unhealthier if people would NOT give in to that need and not smoke, feeling unhappy at that moment and therefore jeopardizing their internal systems because "unhappyness" is not healthy either?

This may sound a little strange and as it is "proven" that cigarettes cause cancer you'd say "No, idiot, smoking is NOT good for you so giving in to the urge to smoke a cigarette can never be healthy". But wait a minute, there are 90 year olds who drink and smoke every day and die happily and healthy. On the contrary, there are people who never drank, never smoked, never did anything unhealthy and die at the age of 65, cause unknown.

Sure, if you are an adrenaline addict there IS a chance that something goes horribly wrong and you die way before it's supposed to be your time. While skydiving your parachute might fail, sure thing that you WILL die from that. (Though there are people who survided a several-hundred-feet-drop) But that is a fairly small chance and skydiving itself is not at all unhealthy, nor is bungy jumping, base diving, SCUBA diving, rock-climbing and flying ultralights.

I might as well be that your body is perfectly capable of telling you what's right and wrong at that particular moment. As we all know the brain is much stronger than you'd expect. People can extend their lives by years just because they don't want to die. Other people die straight after the diagnose "cancer" because they give up. If you are craving for vegetables, it's well possible that you have a lack of vitamins. If you're craving for something sweet or salty, you body might need some extra energy for the moment. Maybe this also goes up for "known" unhealthy things like drinking and smoking as we, beeing the stupid creatures we are, just might not really know what is healthy and what's not. Despite years and years of study, we as the human race have understood maybe 1% of what is really going on. Maybe, just maybe, despite all studies, we should listen more to our own body instead of all the fairy tales in science books...

PS: I still don't smoke, (gave up 3 months ago), not because it's unhealthy, but just because it suddenly tasted bad, I feel better not to AND most girls don't like smoking guys.

Alienized

Alienized, by one of your own sub-cultures...

*autch*

It's all about the people...

A collegue offered me a room for a couple of months in his house. I refused politely. I am to attached to my backpacker-style accomodation. But why? I'll tell you:

Just yesterday, when I got home, cooked, had a great conversation with a mom and daughter from South Africa about life and the differences between Dutch and Afrikaans, heard an American guy yell "it is TRUE!" when we talked about the fact dat Americans use the word "fuck" a lot, had a nice talk with a spanish guy about the different languages in Spain and The Netherlands and meanwhile looked straight into the eyes of one of the most gorgeous girls I've seen the past whatever monts...

Just then, I re-realized why I don't want to get stuck in a boring hotel or in someone's private place.

It's all about the people!

Overseas pigs

When I talk to Americans, they think they're fellow citizens beave rude and ignorant, "really American" as they call it themselves, outside their own habitat.

When I talk to Ozzies, they tend to say the same. That everyone thinks Ozzies are so pollite and layd-back, but that in reality they behave like pigs.

When I think about my own species, the Dutchies, I think the same. The few close encounters I had with Dutchies were not exactly pleasant. (The occasional exception left alone.)

What is it that when you talk to more or less whatever person from more or less a random country in the world, they tend to talk about their fellow citizens as behaving rude outside AND inside their own country? This can't be true. If everyone was behaving rude, why would the Dutchies have such a good name abroad? Why would everybody think that Dutchies are really a nice, sweet and pollite kind? And why would I think opposite? Same for Ozzies.

Though I must admit, the American girl was right, a lot of Yankees *do* behave like pigs overseas. A friend of a girl I met told her "We're American, they hate us anyway, so why should we behave correctly if they already despise us?" Yeah, why should you try to change the preconception about Americans, created by hopefully the minority of them. The few rotten apples always screw it for the rest. It works the same way everytime. Someone with a bad experience tells it to 10 people, while someone with a good experience only tells 3. It's a very old rule but valid for a lot of things.

14 minutes, 30 seconds

* Wake Up at 7.00am sharp
* Wee
* Shower
* Wash Hair
* Brush Teeth
* Shave
* Dress
* Leave Hostel
* Walk to Railway Station
* Be 15 minutes and 30 seconds early for the 7.30 train

Not bad, eh?

(Next time I'll go for the 13m30s record...)

The test

Tonight I dreamed about going to 3rd grade of highschool, with a 9 as an average. I was so happy with that, though not entirely satisfied as I didn't pass with an average 10. But in reality, I never made it to 3rd grade as due to some flaws in the Dutch systems, I never got the chance to go back into the school system after I dropped out for personal reasons.

Within a couple of weeks I'll have a 3-day test to become certified for a certain software package. Stupidity is that I'm already nervous, after my highschool and drivers licence I never failed a single test in my life. Even in the event that I took the training, did nothing for 2 months and clicked through the exam in 30 minutes instead of an hour, I still passed. Let's hope this test will be the same, 4 weeks of intense training and creating a beatiful demo-setup (after all, at the end this software is used in environments with 1000's of nodes and with base prices of at least 3 times my yearly salary), then passing the 80% passmark and get certified. For the first time in 5 years again.

Training basic regular expressions

Really, I like my job. One moment you're doing cool stuff in the USA, the other moment you're asked to assist with a training about Unix. As I'm reasonably famliar with Unix and I really like working with people they only had to ask me once. Though the training was only meant for 1 person, I managed to do a descent job and in fact train the trainer. Wich is very satisfying and makes me feel just a little more confident about my own Unix knowledge as well increase it as one of the best ways to learn stuff is teaching it.

But today I got stuck, somewhere at the end of the day. After 2 days of explaining about licence structures, filesystems, vi methods and shellscripts. I wanted my collegue to write a little more advanced regexp and it was doable to find the first part but I got stuck at the replacement part. The replacements I wanted to make looked something like this: (whereby --> is of course the string it should be replaced with)

echo "Now $LVARA" --> echo "Now \$LVARA"
echo "Now $LVARB" --> echo "Now \$LVARB"
echo "Now $GVARA" --> echo "Now \$GVARA"
echo "Now $GVARB" --> echo "Now \$GVARB"

But, leaving the part below as it is:

$LVARA
$LVARB
$GVARA
$GVARB

No chance, you can not search for a string starting with either L or G and replacing it with the letter found, as you only want to put a \ in front of the $ and leave the rest in tact. Well suddenly I realized that I read on a piece of paper that you can actually store the found string and use it later on in your regexp and exactly THAT was the solution to this problem. The moment I realized this I wrote one fine regexp on the whiteboard:

:1,$ s/\$\([GL]\)VAR\([AB]\)\"/\\\$\1VAR\2\"/g

That finished my day, satisfied after all...

I'm not like them, I'm a traveller

I'm used to live in hotels and travel by car or airplane all over the world. Done that for months somewhere in 2000, been doing that since april 1st for my current employer and will continue doing this for the next 3-5 years unless they kick me out. Maybe even more if I keep enjoying this and during that time I probably will call "home" the place where I sleep. It seems like pure luxury and it is, everything is arranged, submerged in luxury, you don't have to worry about unclean beds, privacy, food, whatsoever.

BUT, as odd as it may sound, I'm not that kind of guy. I really can enjoy the organized and sophisticated upper-class hotel life but it was a big relief for me to travel by Greyhound and not airplane from Atlanta to Miami and spend a couple of days on airports, with friends and now in a sweet little hostel downtown Cork.

After all, I'm a backpacker. The reason I'm doing this job is because I'm a traveller in the first place and a techie in the second. I'm definetely not the best techie in the world, but I AM a techie who wants to travel and likes to see odd and interesting places. Meet people. Tell stories, listen to other stories of fellow travellers. You don't meet those people in airplanes and hotels, if you get the chance to talk to people at all. Most of them are subdued in their own worlds, don't want to talk to strangers and look as if they thing their travelling is a thing they have to do, not a thing they like.

I'm different. I just love to travel, I really don't mind spening 18 hours in a bus, sleeping on airports, and sacrifycing privacy sleeping in a 4-bed dorm. That's where you hear the stories, meet interesting people, socialize. Backpackers are a very social kind, they are away from home for a while and it seems that most of them are really willing to meet strangers, talk to them and share their stories. Have a couple of beers with new friends who you might never see again. You hardly ever exchange email addresses because it makes no sense, you meet new people every day. But you do share a great time together for a while untill you all go your own way again.

I heard a story about a guy who had a girlfriend for a while. They stayed 2 weeks together and suddenly in the morning she took off, leaving nothing more than a note with "I'm gone. I love you. We'll keep in touch." They both went their own way and every now and then they decided to meet again, travel around together, have a great time, share their passion for eachother and the travelling, and then again split and do it all over again. It may sound strange but that is the true spirit of travelling. I've met 100's of people, have contact with very few of them, but I do keep all good and bad memories about them, try to remember all passionate stories they told, the intimate moments we had, cherish the fact that I as a traveller have the chance to live this life.

I might be an stranger in the world of travellers, I'm probably the best paid traveller in the entire hostel, getting paid for travelling around the globe while using my other passion (computers) to make some money. For most of them it's a (working) holiday, so I'm in a way very different than my fellow roommates. But I DO share the same passion they do and feel really really small when I hear THEIR stories of places I've never heard of, things I've never experienced, people I've never met.

There is definetely a lot of world to explore for me and hopefully I get the change to do it. Both paid and while on holiday. But preferably staying on places where I get the chance to meet people like me, backpackers, travellers, no business people. They're boring. They suck. I guess I'm just not like them.

Nothing to tell...

I went from Atlanta to Cobh via Miami, New York, Amsterdam, Makkum, Leeuwarden, Delft, Leeuwarden, Amsterdam and Cork (in THAT order) and I have tons of stories to tell. Though yet, I don't have any. Exhausted and actually feeling kinda lost. Strangely, for some unknown reason Ireland does feel a bit like coming home. I think it's time for Guinness, and a good night of well-deserved sleep.

Cheers!

I'll miss you guys...

I really hoped that I wasn't going to say it ever again. I'm a consultant, travelling around the world is my job, my life, my everything. Even my resume has a line saying "÷ Very fond of travelling far and often, meeting new and interesting people and discovering new and interesting places". That DOES mean that I'm not planning to get attached to anyone, anytime, anywhere. You just can't do that.

But aparently I do. I really enjoyed working with this bunch and hope I'll meet them again sooner or later and have a beer together. It's been a truly great experience and I learned a lot over here. Sad it had to end a tad too soon. So despite my plan not to, I will say it:

I'll miss you guys!

Going home... Tomorrow!

For those who care, a new travel schedule:

Atlanta to Miami, Greyhound USA

-------------Trip to MIAMI ARPT, FL-------------
06/22/06 10:35am GLI-5381 * Depart ATLANTA ARPT, GA
06/22/06 11:59am GLI-5381 * Arrive MACON, GA
06/22/06 03:10pm GLI-1107 * Depart MACON, GA
06/22/06 11:40pm GLI-1107 * Arrive ORLANDO, FL
06/23/06 12:45am GLI-0513 * Depart ORLANDO, FL
06/23/06 06:00am GLI-0513 * Arrive MIAMI, FL
06/23/06 06:20am GLI-3709 * Depart MIAMI, FL
06/23/06 06:30am GLI-3709 * Arrive MIAMI ARPT, FL
Note: * denotes Carrier and Bus Schedule Number.
GLI: GREYHOUND LINES, INC.

Miami to Amsterdam - Continental Airlines

4 CO 44H 23JUN 5*MIAEWR HK1 1310 1627
5 CO 102X 23JUN 5 EWRAMS*HK1 1715 0700 24JUN 6

Amsterdam to Cork - Aer Lingus

AER LINGUS EI 841 N/ECONOMY CLASS CONFIRMED
DEP AMSTERDAM WED 28JUN06 10.00AM
ARR CORK WED 28JUN06 10.40AM

And YES I'll be in the Netherlands from saturday morning 7am 'till wednesday very very early. (Flight out is at 10am but it's Schiphol so there is no last-15-minute-hop-in as you have in Cork.) I will try to visit as many friends as possible but keep in mind that I'll be a bit fuzzy saturday after travelling 48 hours straight and that I do have to commence work on wednesday. But as my friend Jeroen gives a 10.000 day party a month later I'll do anything to be there for at least the weekend. Just don't be dissapointed if I don't have time to visit you, 4 days sounds like a lot but it's really over in a jiffy.

Well, gotta move on, got tons of things to arrange before the shuttle will pick me up tomorrow morning at 8.30am and my long journey begins...

Regina on the move...

As I'm not working for Luna.nl anymore we decided to move regina, the server where this website and a couple of others are running on. Next friday she'll be taken from the datacentre in Rotterdam to a datacentre in Amsterdam where she'll arrive on saturday.

It basically means that ALL services, websites, my email, msn, etc, etc, will be shut down by friday and it'll take at least 24 hours before everything will be up and running again as the IP addresses will change as well. Planning is to be back somewhere saturday afternoon if all goes well. Let's just hope for the the best...

Fell in love with Eire

Tonight I was sifting through some pictures of Ireland, just to show people what Ireland looks like. And for the first time since weeks I just felt I missed Ireland as well. It's so Un-Netherlands. The bank is open from 10am - 4pm, you havev bank-holidays where the whole country has a day off. They barely know about gaspipes and use coal to heat their houses. The train runs on diesel engines. If something gets stolen you go to the Garda and they call you by your first name and write some stuff on a blank paper. In fact, anyone is know primarily by his/hers firstname, not his family name. Every official thing, streetname, placename, etc is mentioned in English, AND in Gaelic. You hop into a fancy restaurant in your baggy pants and they don't even notice. And last but not least they have this really cool accent which I'd love to adopt.

I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to live in Ireland, just because too many of my friends live in the Netherlands. Butt hell yeah did I fall in love with that odd country called Eire.

It's like...

It's like getting the order to design and build the Empire State building with nothing more than the knowledge of how to use Microsoft Paint and without knowing what a building looks like ... within a month.

Or flying a Boeing 747, while all you know is how to drive a car.

But hey, I'm cool, I'll manage this! :-))

There are days...

- First I got almost run over by a car while crossing the street (10cm lady! It was REALLY darn close...)

- Then I got a fight with the MARTA gates, my pass didn't work well (as usual) and I almost got stuck between the gates. (Nearly bit the head off the guard, I was just do darn annoyed.)

- Then the MARTA train passed by without stopping, leaving me yet another 10 minutes at the station

- Then I broke a molar in half (while another tooth still gives me a hard time 2x a day)

- Then I almost got stuck between the elevator doors

- Then I got to the dentist where it took them 2 hours to make 2 x-rays (they f*cked up 10 times)

- Because of that I missed my 4pm meeting

- Then they told me what the restoration of the molar and the root canal treatment would cost: a whopping $1300.-

Really, there are days where you should've stayed in bed.

And yes, good thing happened as well:
- I finally got my badge after 2 months (FREEDOM!)
- The personell at the dentist was quite friendly.
- I had a nice chat with a collegue
But unfortunately the bad things way overweighted the good things today. And I wasn't feeling very happy anyway. I'll have a good conversation with my bottle of Corona and some left-over chinese from yesterday.

... utterly depressed ...

And I for the x-th time I cried...

Because of utter lonelyness. Because I want to go home. Because I'm losing my friends. Because everyone seems to be happy with their lives BUT me. Because... Well, just because I feel like shit and even though I should be happy my stay is extended yet another week (more if I didn't HAVE to go home the 22nd of july) at this very moment I can only desire to, well, I don't know.

It's just not fun if for the x-th time your C++ book is laying in front of you and you just don't feel good enough to pick it up. Which makes you feel even more worthless because you hate yourself for beeing such a lazy moron. I needs some time to get used to, I started to feel extremely happy the last couple of weeks, started to enjoy living, working and studying here. But for now, I just have a mere moment of complete sadness. It'll pass by, I know, soon, but that doesn't mean these moments are not extremely real and annoying.

FFS I have the job I've been dreaming of for ages, I've got the gddmn privilege to actually live in a hotel and afford basically whatever I like, I'm homeless yet well paid, I get the chance to fool around with computers which still is what I not even like but just what I do, I got a lovely girlfriend back home who still stays with me despite me being more away then the average seaman, I still seem to have some friends back home who didn't depart me but for now, I'm just bloody depressed and hate the world AND myself.

Ah well, life can't be perfect, right?

shellwrapper.sh - a wrapper script for shellscripts

I've been playing with the idea of writing a generic wrapper script for shellscripts for a while. The idea is that you start a generic wrapper script, write your code in whatever shellcode you like and that the wrapper takes care of fuzz like finding out where your preferred shell is or how to use trivial tools like ls and date. All this with only minor modifications to the original shellcode.

The reason for this is that I ran into a Solaris box and it took a while before I found out that the shell I wanted to use (dtksh) was quite well hidden. The /bin/ksh however was based on an ancient ksh88 and if you want to do the groovy stuff with ksh you really want to use a ksh93 version. dtksh is based on ksh93d and therefore probably the most modern shell available on a Solaris 9 box. Well, I managed to create wonderfull things including forkbombs but today finally I got the code ready and I got a framework for how it SHOULD work. It is definetely NOT finished yet, there are tons of pitfalls and caveats, for now it only works if you're starting with a bourne-shell as /bin/sh and are shifting to a ksh shell but at least it's a usefull start. I've created 2 versions of the code, one stripped to the bare bone, without ANY explanation. It lies uit the framework in really just a few lines and looking at that you wonder why it took so long to work that out. Next to that there is a fully commented version with all sorts of examples about how variables are pushed around and what is dependant on what. But bottom line is that you need 2 files, one contains your original script, one contains the function who actually executes the chosen shell via a bit of a nasty nested function construction. (And yes, it is possible to push them into one but one of the goals was making minor alterations to the original scriptfile so I pulled the function responsible for the starting of the new shell OUT of the original file and dumped it into a function, which contains a small for-loop.)

I know that this is just early development, if I have time I'll extend the script to achieve all goals in mind. I also know that it probably could've done better by people who know all ins and outs of the bourne shell and shell scripting in general, but as far as my knowledge goes I didn't do an entirely awfull job on this. However, input will definetely be appreciated and if anyone wants to write a better wrapper, go ahead. The reason I wrote this was that I couldn't find anything on the internet that does what this script does.

Anyhow, see below for the 2 base files and have a look at http://murf.nl/tmp/shellwrapper/ for the whole kit kaboodle. (IOW, the one with demo capabillities...)

NOTE:
shellwrapper.sh is where your shellscript lives between the parenthesis of the main () function
functions.sh contains all generic functions but most important, the "wrapper" function, and IN that function the call to "main"

shellwrapper.sh

main () {

  # Your script goes here

}


. ./functions.sh

functions.sh

wrapper () {

if [ "${SHELLWRAPPERSTATUS}" = "running" ] ; then

  main

  exit 0

else

  SHELLWRAPPERSTATUS="running"

  export SHELLWRAPPERSTATUS

  /bin/ksh "$0" "$@" #(does not work yet)

fi

}


# ALL extra functions go here

PARAMS="$@"

wrapper "${PARAMS}"

Editors Note:
It's completely embarassing how simple this is. But look at the non-stripped version and you'll see that it's probably less trivial than it looks in these 16 lines of code.

I'm a nerd!

I just finished chapter 5 of "Practical C++ Programming".

I can write a program that converts Kph to Mph, or Celcius to Fahrenheit, hours and minutes from given minutes and vice versa.

For the first time in years I admit I'm a nerd,
it must be, because I enjoy this so much.

I'm proud and happy now!

If you wanna have attention, read a book!

Really. If you want to have some spontaneous attention while you're all alone in a big theme park, read a book in a foreign language while waiting for the rides. Before you know some girl notices you're reading a book, asks about what book it was, looks surprised that it's not in English and there you have it, a nice conversation about life, the universe and everything is born.

Too bad it's my one and only book in Dutch and I've finished it now (commuting is good for you!) so I can't try it out another time. Ah well, next time I'm probably reading an English book while in Holland, though THAT doesn't surprise too many people over there. Unfortunately. So I have to find another strategy to open up a conversation. Any suggestions for a person like me who is terribly afraid for even picking up the phone to call a delivery service?

SixFlags over Georgia - the Deja Vu

Today I almost passed out on a rollercoaster.

It was the best coaster I've ever ridden.

Well, maybe you'd like a little more explanation :-) It was actually THIS rollercoaster. The "Deja Vu", located in SixFlags over Georgia. Anyone familiar with Walibi Flevo in the Netherlands should know La Via Volta, a very short rollercoaster who will go back and forth on the same track. This is something similar but with THAT difference that this one goes vertical. 90 degrees, straight up in the air. And you're dangling underneath the track. Somewhere on the second loop it became little dark before my eyes, it felt like I was passing out and regained proper sight just 5 seconds later. That was great, I never almost passed out on a rollercoaster and the fact that this one did made me feel extremely happy. It was well worth the 2 hours waiting.

Definetely the most exiting ride in the park, though "Goliath" and "Superman Ultimate Flight" where pretty cool as well. Goliath is what Goliath is always, no loops, no nothing, but an amazingly high drop (170 feet) and a speed up to 70 miles an hour. Superman is a quite short ride but you're hanging with your belly down and one of the loops is the kind where you end upside down. So, instead of hanging behind my computer all day I tried to get my adrenaline kicks. And I succeeded, more or less. Though I must admit that actually almost all but "Deja Vu" didn't freak me out at all. They where nice, it feels good to go hands-up-in-the-air and feet-off-the-ground through Goliath the first time (leaving an American guy behind ashonished as he didn't expect my "Yes" on his question if it was my first ride on Goliath) and the rides are definetely worth going there, but aparently I need much bigger stuff to really scare me off...

std::cout << "Hello World!\n";

It's quite funny how you often change plans quite suddenly, most of the time unexpected. Today I didn't have any plans of writing about a previous thing I wrote untill someone wrote that one comment and I noticed it. (There are times I don't even notice the comments, though I usually check them quite regularly as they are important to me. After all, I don't write just to blurt my feelings to the world, I want people to actually read them and respond.) No, actually I had plans about something else unexpeced. I've been dropped here in Atlanta to do some cool stuff with what they call Performance Management Software. That's a very expensive word for what the OSS community usually knows as something like Cacti or MRTG. But then a "little" more complicated and of course with a $50,000.- licence attached to it. (Except the cost to implement the stuff, that's at least another 50 grand, if not 10 times that amount.)

In fact I didn't to much with that software yet. I did, sideways, but not with the software itself. Despite my moderate programming skills I've been asked to write a couple of so-called wrapper scripts. Scripts who do nothing more than executing an other script or program, but DO some extensive logging and error checking. And so far I succeeded quite well. Still have to go through final testing but in my Cygwin environment AND in my Solaris 10 i386 installation (under VMWare) everything looks allright, in a simulated environment that is as the software it's meant to run under Solaris i386. The odd thing about this is that I suddenly feel as eager to go to work as I feel to go home. Because at work I get the chance to do some advanced scripting work (after all, that still IS programming though I might want to learn Perl do to some more advanced stuff) and back home I deciced to take my first few wobbly steps on the C++ road. By now I can write a program that writes "Hello World" to the screen and even do a simple calculation. It's not much and probably a lot of people will make fun of me right now but hey, I'm proud of myself! After all, anyone who has ever learned any programming language started with the good old "Hello World". (In C++ that's a little harder than in the ksh or bash scripting languages, where it's just echo "Hello World".) For the first time in my life I wrote some compilable code in a *real* language and I like it. I felt the flow, which I missed for years, and the adrenaline rush afterwards if it compiles and runs without crashing your system. (The same of course if you're working on a shellscript for 3 days, debugging and testing it for a day and then realize it just WORKS and it can go into production within a day.)

Well, *that* was wat I planned to write about. That I finally felt happy. Programming, using my brains, spending a cool $200.- on almost half the O'Reilly C++ collection and a ksh book, because my softcopies just didn't read well on odd places like the MARTA and the toilet. And now I did. Expanding my O'Reilly collection (some people collect stamps, I collect O'Reilly books) AND expanding my knowledge as I'm actually using them for more than just a very cool book-case filling.

The harder you try... (Anonymizers are a sad thing!)

The harder you try, the dumber you look.
n/a @ May 31, 2006 01:38 PM

This is someones reaction on my article of not beeing happy with my Xandros installation and therefore reinstalling windows and patch it up with some tools to make it actually work for me. More or less. But at least more than I could patch up Linux to do whatever I primarily need my OS for. Getting my work done. The fact that I didn't get Xandros up to what I wanted has nothing to do with my lack of knowledge about the Linux operating system but solely with the lack of support for my hardware platform and the fact that how odd it may sound, Linux is just NOT capable of providing me with a workable environment.

But, this article is not about Xandros. This is about what bothers me about that comment. I do care if someone dislikes me yes. I do want to be liked. When you're suffering from a nasty lack of self-esteem like I do you NEED people around you who think you're not stupid, not ugly and not the most horrible and sad person they've ever met. In fact, you need people to tell you you ARE indeed doing your job right, are smart and fun to hang out with and simply are a likeable person. But, reality is that *that* is simply impossible so there are always people who will dislike you, no matter what so you just have to accept that.

But WHY would you be such a coward that you have to post an anonymous comment on someone's weblog? Not only has this person filled in a fake name and non-existant emailaddress, but aparently he or she was so afraid that I would be able to track him down that he or she felt the need to use an anonymizer. A web-proxy, leaving me with nothing but this:

www.yadayadayada.nl-access_log.0.gz:72.29.67.118 - - [29/May/2006:14:43:51 +0200] "GET /archives/2006/05/000499-installing_xandros_the_result.html HTTP/1.0" 200 10506 "http://yadayadayada.nl/archives/2006/05" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686; en) Opera 9.00"

Aparently the anonymizer is beeing used by more than just that single person as the first entry in my logfile looks like this:

www.yadayadayada.nl-access_log.0.gz:72.29.67.118 - - [28/May/2006:14:58:45 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 78612 "http://yadayadayada.nl" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.3"

(Having 276 hits in between, both images and html pages.) So either the person visited my weblog more than one time, using a different OS and browser, or I'm dealing with different people using the same anonymizer, visiting my blog. Nevertheless, I think it's pretty sad to insult someone who you aparently dislike and NOT have the guts to reveal your true identity. So please stand up, be a man, or a women, and insult me as much has you like. But at least be brave enough so say who you are so that I can respond, if I want to.

Thanks,

Murf

Installing Xandros - The result

I spent 2 days straight on installing Xandros to replace my Windows XP. Just because with any Unix on my laptop I could do my job a little better. XP simply doesn't have the bells and wistles to make it a good platform for things like developing shellscripts. Using XP just doesn't feel right if all you do and all you get paid for is using Unix machines. So I decided to replace XP with a fresh install of Xandros and keep an XP install just for the occasional game. Well, it was definetely not an easy job, but THIS is the result:

And for all you who now look at the picture and immediatly want to reply with "but that IS Windows XP", yes you're right... You're damn right. :-(

Because despite Linux or FreeBSD seems to be the preferred operating system if you work almost exclusively in Unix environments, there are situation where aparently it's not. This is one of them. There are tons of things which just didn't work at all or simply didn't work the way I like under Xandros. So at the end, after almost 2 days of non-stop fiddling around with it and trying to make it work for me I decided to go back to Windows. A fresh install, on top some 3rd party software who takes away most of windows' annoyances (X-Mouse, PuTTYtray, PuTTYcyg, CygWin, allSnap, Virtual Dimension and Xming) and off we go. Yes I know Linux is sweet but its utterly useless if you have to make it a dual-boot system NOT only because you want to play a game once in a while...

Lost and found! Juul de Vries - Photographic artist

For months I've been searching in the usenet archives for the website of a person who's name I've been forgotten. The only thing I knew what that I was utterly impressed with his surrealistic photographic images. Black and white images, printed on "bariet"-paper and then colored by hand with ink. Sometimes combined with other pictures, combined to photocollages. Not photoshopped in any kind. I might've mistaken the latter fact but I'm still absolutely impressed by his artwork. It's one of the people I'd almost spend a couple of hundred dollars on if I could've afforded that at that time.

But somehow I forgot his name. Timeless attemts to zift through Google Groups (nl.foto) to find one of the posts with his name on it. Untill I suddenly remembered one thing, that his name probably was Jules. So I searched and finally found what I was looking for. The website of this man. Jules de Vries. I will make sure that one day I can affort his artwork and have a place to put it on the wall. That day I'll ask him if he would be so pollite to print a couple of them on 76x50 or even 114x75. For now, I'll just enjoy his artwork. As an example a couple of his miniatures. Enjoy:

(It's obvious that the copyright of those images is his, not mine. Please respect that. The ONLY reason why I show them here is because I admire his work and hope that more people will be able to enjoy his art. One picture just says more that a 1000 words.)

F*cked is...

Starting at 5am to get some tiresome, horrible job done and then getting an email at 7pm that basically tells you that all you did was useless and that you'd better stop working on it straight away and start working on something else.

That is what you call "fucked"!

(And that's when you call it a day as well...)

European Song Contest 2006 - Lordi

One day there is nothing to tell and just the other day you want to tell a lot even there is not much happening. Well, this is one. I heard about the Eurovision Song Contest and as I'm not able to watch it here (my webstream died after 30 seconds) I couldn't see it in whole. But what I did hear was who the winners where. Some Finnisch scare-metal band called Lordi who did quite a nice show and where absolutely non-songfestival-like. That's what's been told to me. But then you watch some videoclips like this:

Hardrock Haleluja @ Eurovision

Hardrock Haleluja (original clip)

Would you love a monster man?

Definetely it's nice, I actually kinda like the catchy poppy tunes. But all it is, it is definetely NO metal. It's got some metal riffs and they pretend to be pretty tough but they're not to be too taken serious. They're about as metal as the band Europe used to be. Great 80's music, for sure, Final Countdown is still a song to give me goose bumps, but it's so far from anything I associate with metal. I'm not really into it, hell no, but if I think of Metal I think of bands like Metallica, Korn, Endymaeria or Nightwish. So despite their tough looks, I really think it's a good act. The show is fun, the costumes are great. It's cool that they won the Eurovision Song Contest and it's definetely different then what I've seen so far but it won't let anyone take that festival any more serious than they did 'till now. For that they need to change course and bring REAL music with REAL artists in there. People who are capable of selling millions and millions of records. People like Madonna, Lenny Kravitz, Live, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Skunk Anancie, etc, etc.

I think winning the this event is definetely no guarantee for a big international breakthrough. At least not with the songs usually played there. Too soft, too poppy, too hollow, too mellow, too, well, with absolutely no pun intended, too GAY perhaps.

Look, look closer...

Look!
Look closer!
Look even closer!
Isn't there something odd about this picture?

Well, there is, at least if you're a european citizen like me. Because there is one thing I noticed just 3 weeks after my arrival in Atlanta and that is that those cars don't have a licence plate on their front!

Is it because they simply have only traffick camera's who take you from behind? Or is it just because Americans looove cars and don't want to ruin their beautifully streamlined noses with an ugly big licence plate? Either way, some people would say it's tipically American. They take you from behind and it's all about the looks...

*Bored*

Bored
Bored to schreds
Bored like hell
Bored with a new dimension
Bored beyond boredom

I AM BORED!

Because what can you do in a city when:

• you're not into sports (while sport is a big thing in every american city)
  
• don't like going to a bar alone (though your area is famous for it's nightlife)
  
• are not interested in animals in a cage (specially not in a tiny local zoo)
  
• don't really want to socialize with anyone (you're not a very social persion anyway, specially not with strangers)
  
• are too lazy to go downtown just for a 30 minute $5,- view of the city on top of one of the talles buildings downtown
  
• don't want to go shopping (as you want to save some money and the malls are boring anyway)
  
• don't want to go to the movie theatre (as you still have 5 movies with you)
  
• have done the 2 of the 5 major attractions you WANTED to do, find out it's too late to go to the 3rd, need to make a reservation for the 4th and forgot the 5th (you don't go to a big museum at 12am which closed at 5pm)
  
• actually don't want to spend your afternoon in a museum at all
  

Ah well, I'll probably just stay home, do some work, game a little, have a chat with some ppl back home, post some postcards, work my powerball, watch a movie, surf the internet, fill in my expenses sheet. But best of all:

Write on my weblog how absolutely terrifyingly BORING life can be down here!

*SIGH!* It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Transcript of a conversation:

CUST: Hi, if I install product A on a clean box it ruins the sticky bit of /tmp
SUPP: Sorry, we're not aware of this problem
CUST: But product A is causing trouble for product B because of this!
SUPP: We don't reccoment installing product A and B on the same box.
CUST: So that means that we have to buy yet another box just to prevent product A causing trouble for product B, despite the fact that this is clearly a design flaw?
SUPP: Yes

*SIGH!*
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

(And yes there are products of the same product family of the same manufacturer which should cooperate quite nicely...)

No I do NOT want an iPod! (Or do I?)

This is a rant about the Apple iPod. If you're very sensitive about your cuddly toy and can not handle a firm rant about one of the worst and utterless pointless flaws in one of the most popular mp3 players available to day, stop reading, NOW. Because despite it's puppy-dog-eyes-look, it's smooth skin, it's absolutely fabulous design, Apple made a couple of mistakes. Most of then I can handle but there is ONE mistake really keeping me from buying an iPod untill that mistake has been fixed, either by Apple or a 3rd party craftsman.

The first problem is that it's by no means possible to expand your iPod Nano or any other iPod with external storage card. For the Shuffle and the regular iPod this is perfectly explainable. The shuffle is simply to small, a harddrive-driven device with 60G of storage is just not made for expansion as you won't be able to get any sensible size expansion unless you tuck in another 60G harddrive which won't fit of course. But for the Nano it's kinda odd. My $100,- Sandisk Sansa, despite beeing almost the same size as the iPod Nano, has no problems with it. It's shipped with an internal 1G memory and you can expand it with whatever SD card is available on the market. (4G now but I won't be surprised if you can get an 8G card between now and 12 months.) If you want to carry around 10 separate 8G cards, have fun, you can. Just tuck 'm in your Sansa them and off you go.

The second problem is the battery. All iPods have a built-in battery. You can't simply toss in an AA or AAA battery and play, you really have to recharge your iPod either via USB or an external recharger. This is no problem if you're close to wall-outlets or a notebook all the time but it WILL get a problem if you're on holiday and you don't have a notebook or wall-outlet available. Of course, for the iPod Shuffle the formfactor simply doesn't allow an AAA battery and maybe the regular iPod will drain it's battery within an hour if you use AA's but for the Nano there is no excuse. My Sansa is hardly bigger than the Nano and it runs for 8 hours straight on just one AAA battery. Most of the time I do use a rechargable one, but I don't need a separate charger for it, I just use the charger of my digital camera for it. And if I'm somewhere where I don't have the chance to recharge it, I just go to a shop and buy a couple of AAA's. This is one of the main reasons why I have a Sony DSC-W15 and not one of the newer models. They run on proprietry batteries as well and that's really something which I don't think is very handy. Specially not for digicams and mp3 players. While most of the time recharging your battery is possible, you really don't want to have your iPod or camera just lying around in a hostel room. If your AA's get stolen, too bad, that's just $40,- but if your digicam or iPod gets lost you'll lose an easy $400,- (AND your music and photo's).

But the big problem for me is this: You can NOT use the device as a regular USB Mass Storage device, simply dump your files on it and if it's something the iPod is capable of playing, play it. You HAVE to use iTunes or some 3rd party software to copy your files onto your iPod and after you've done it you're not able to transfer them back to your harddrive in an ordinairy way. Yes you can transfer them but you get mangled filename so you have to use some tool that reads the ID3 tag and "restores" the filename according to the ID tag. The iPod is not capable of simply rebuilding it's own database. Funny as my cheap-ass Sansa has absolutely no problems with it. You just attach it to a computer, dump some files on it (or flick in an SD card with music already on it), switch the device on, wait 30 seconds and off you go! The device indexes its files, checks what it can play, rebuilds it's database and plays.

Exactly this is what keeps me from buying an iPod. The first 2 things are nasty but the first one is nonexistant for me as I would buy the biggest regular iPod available anyway. The second one is a bit more severe but for those rare occasions where I really don't have the chance to recharge it I'd just keep a Sansa with me with the most important music loaded on it. The last one really is the killer flaw. I like to do whatever I want with my music. I'm travelling a lot, my iPod would be my main music storage and any computer capable of ripping my newly bought cd's would be donors for the music. But I still would be able to make a coupy back to my own laptop if needed and not beeing stuck with mangled filenames.

So there we go. Unless some smart geek writes a plugin for the iPod which is capable of indexing it's own harddisk, I probably won't buy an iPod. And I'm not the only one. Zillions of geeks go all crazy as soon as it's Apple. They get weak knees. They start to drool. They defend Apple in any way they can. But they tend to forget that Apple is just behaving like Microsoft these days. THEY create the standard, and just force it into everyones throat. Sure you can choose not to buy an iPod, or an iMac, but hell are those iPods the most beautifully designed music players on earth! Even I get weak looking at those shiny black slick devices. I really want to have an iPod, I'm absolutely in love with them, but at the end I know it's just like THE girl who is in every thinkable way perfect for you but just has the ONE nasty habit you can't stand and therefore won't make you happy at all but just annoys the hell out of you.

A child came to the world

Last night I had this dream. A child came to the world. Had trouble starting up. I was there, helping this kid to breathe, to live and I felt wonderfull. Realizing the kid could've died right there in my hands however made me feel the other and sad side of such a wonderfull job. There is no perfect world of course.

I talked, wondered if I could do this for a living. Someone talked back, "yes you can, but you have to combine it with your profession, so you're able to do this job AND get satisfied in both your nerdy and your social needs".

It was just a dream, but sometimes I have the feeling that my dream of all times, doing something with computers AND people is the thing I need to do despite the fact that commercial jobs tend to pay a lot more and just by that fact can make life much easier than the underpaid wellfare ones...

Deeper and deeper

Aparently you have to go deeper and deeper before you find what makes you really happy and satisfied. If you'll find it at all. At the moment I'm just in the process of going deeper. Ultimate chaos. No words to explain what is really going on in my mind because even I simply don't know.

Where is the end? When will I find what I'm looking for? What am I looking for anyway? I don't know. All I know is that I've been through this a million times, and for some odd reason it seems that I have to go through this another couple of million times before I'm there. I don't mind, really, but on some nights, when there is no-one to talk to, it feels like Atlas trying to the world AND the universe. At least he managed, to carry the world...

The aquarium vs The dive

I wrote about this before. I must have. I've visited the Georgia Aquarium today. And yes, it was really nice. Despite the $22,- entrance fee and the all-american metal detectors (security, security, security) it's a nice aquarium for sure. But every time I enter an aquarium I have the same experience. I like what I see, but as a certified diver I know how it looks like outside the confined space of an aquarium. Out in the open, The Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea. So while enjoying the view and seeing some things I haven't seen out in the open I still feel sad because I know what it feels like to put on your wetsuit and dive. People where surprised by the size of a 2 foot bumpheaded parrotfish, they thought it was big. They looked at an in their eyes bit turtle, about 3 feet. Well, sorry folks, those animals in the aquarium are not big, they're small. In the wild they are big, turtles easily grow to the size of 13 feet, bumpheaded parrotfish do an easy 6 feet as well as potato cods. I've seen them. I *HAVE* seen a 6 feet sea turtle, many of them, even a 13 feet one. A complete school of 6 feet parrotfish, silently sleeping underneath the boat. I even have seen a whaleshark, about 18 feet in length. Those animals are impressive, while watching them in the wild, not in an aquarium.

So everytime I visit an aquarium, how impressive it might be for people who haven't been out there, I feel sad. A desillusion. Because there is no way I can just slip into my wetsuit, put on my bcd, fins, mask and dive. Maybe I should never visit an aquarium again and just wait 'till the time where I have the time, money and chance to go down. As no aquarium can and will ever be able to compete with the real thing. Getting your feet wet, going down in the deep and see the whole picture in 3d. Withouth the possibillity to take pictures though. But pictures are not important, it's the memory if those animals in the wild, all around you, which is a 1000x more impressive than just those animals in a way too small artificial tank in some city a couple of hundred miles to a couple of thousand miles away from their natural habitat.

The bus stop

There she was, a very cool, alternative, punky girl. Complete with massive black boots and the accomplishing "Fuck you!" grim on her face. She was waiting for the bus meanwhile doing her makeup. I looked at her. I used the shelter for the rain. She looked at me. I mumbled "hi". She mumbled nothing.

There I was, in my awkward business clothes. Looking at a girl who is more like me that she probably could ever imagine. She ignored me. Probably she thought "what a dork", while I though "I'm not a dork! I'm like you! I just *have* to dress this way!" Or maybe she just thought nothing at all.

The rain stopped, I walked on. She must be still there. I wonder what she's thinking now...

Yes it feels great to be here!

Despite the partial misery I blurted out on sunday, it's absolutely not always that way. Definetely not actually. Today I woke up, had my breakfast, turned on my tiny little cheap-ass MP3 player, started walking to work and suddenly I felt a very odd mixture of both missing all and everyone back home but at the same time the great joy of the privilege to walk 7000Km away from home in a nice an warm part of the world and actually get paid for it. And that DOES feel great. :-)

Finding a size 13, at PayLess, easily!

In a country where everything is big I still was a bit surprised today. I ran into PayLess Shoes to buy a couple of new classy shoes as my original classy shoes just don't walk very nicely and I wanted to get something that looks a bit classy (my employer demands it) but walk well. I get incredible pain in my legs after just 5 minutes of walking and it takes 10 to walk to work so just going to work is a bit of a painfull excercise everyday. PayLess is the shoestore where you normally don't want to be found, it's really dirt cheap over there and you're sure your shoes don't last 3 years. It's not really the place where you'd expect to find a size 13 easily. But they had them, and I bought 2 pairs for just $42,- including 2 pairs of socks. (2nd pair half price, 2 pair of socks for $5,-)

The surprise came when a couple of ladies asked me if they didn't have any size 14 there and where surprised they didn't as another PayLess did have them on stock, standard. WHAT!? You know how hard it is to get a size 12 or over in a cheap-ass store like PayLess back home? You just can't find them. If you have anything like 13 or over you're doomed. You really have to go to places where even the simples pair of shoes cost you $100,- or more. But here they are honestly surprised that they don't have a 14. It's an odd country, and that's what it is...

Odd taste coke

On one morning you buy a bottle of coke to get you fresh and sharp for the day. In your cubicle you take a sip and have the feeling that there is something wrong. Something terribly wrong. Then you look closely at your bottle, and realize you bought Cherry Coke instead of the regular non-odd-flavoured one.

*YUCK!*

Swim!

Swim!
I can't!
Swim!
There are sharks!
*push*
*SPLASH!*
F*ck!

Goodbye NYC, Hello ATL

Well, so far for NYC. There is not much to say, just look at the pictures. I can tell you one thing about New York. It's HUGE. If you really get tired of all the fuzz in the city, just go uptown to Central Park and relax. The park itself is massive, an oase of green in the middle of a city where more people live and work than in the whole country of The Netherlands. Impressive. But I had to leave, to Atlanta. That's where I am right now and will stay for the next 2 months or so. Don't know much about the city, landed in the dark. But I can tell you that the airport is massive. There is a subway connecting all terminals together and you'd better use it at it's not a walkable distance all the way from terminal D to the exit. The subway is of the Singapore kind. No driver and 2 pairs of doors, one pair in the train and one pair on the platform. So you see nothing, just sliding doors, they open and suddenly you're in a moving vehicle taking you all the way to the exit (and baggage claim) area. Well, TIFN, time for a good night of well deserved sleep :-)

Confusing

I always find certain things very confusing:

NL: dutch, driving on right, metric
IE: english, driving on left, metric
UK: english, driving on left, imperial
AU: english, driving on left, metric
US: english, driving on right, imperial

And what happens if you're used to IE and AU and you suddenly find yourself in the US? Indeed, you expect them driving on the left and are confused by the fact that they use imperial units for ANYTHING.

Dodgy powerplugs and the wall outlet

Of course, you've booked a hotel WITH internet because in those lonely nights it's really nice to be able to have a chat with some friends. Once in the hotel you notice that the internet is even wireless, so even though it's not free, it's there, it's fast, and reliable. But after a while you find out that you forgot just one quite essential part... A powerplug convertor. The one to convert your UK-plugged notebook into something that fits into the US sockets. So off you go, up to a shop who sells those bastards, and finally, right on Times Square you find a dodgy convertor for a whopping 19 USD. *AUTCH!* But once back in the hotel, you guessed it right, you have some trouble to get the damn thing working. Your notebook adaptor lights up, and down the same second after plugging in. It takes 10 minutes to find out that there is only one and very simple solution to this problem:

Just BEND it!

The wrong side of the track

It was a bit rainy outside and I didn't want to walk 30 minutes in the drizzle so today I deciced to go back to the hotel by train. Why not, the train would come just 5 minutes after I passed the Rushbrooke station and if they would charge me it'd be only a euro or so so that sounded quite fair to me. (And as it is only a 3 minute ride anyway the chance that I had to pay was almost zero so why not.) Well, so far so good, but what I *did* forget was the fact that as well as the cars, also the trains drive on the wrong side of the road, erh, track. The LEFT side it is. So I was waiting, and waiting, and finally the train came, from the right direction, but for my feeling on the wrong side of the track. Or more, I was on the wrong side of the station. Luckily I got my brains together in time (quite hard after an 11 hour day of work, while my alarm was at 4am to get Janneke to the airport), I rushed to the other side cross the slippery iron bridge and got my train to Cobh before it could depart.

So I got lucky and indeed didn't pay a penny for the 3 minute ride. But it did remind me of the fact that though I'm already fairly used to this odd country, I'm still just an immigrant...

Reported: missing

Damn, welcome to Ireland. Sitting in the local Cork Subway to eat my luch, there was a guy coming a little too close to my right pocket. But hey, can happen, you think. So the guy left. Unfortunately so did my Sony DSC-W17 digital camera, as I found out a couple of minutes later.

Called insurance, went to the Garda station (police), looked for a new one, and found out that that same camera would set me back a whopping 470 EUR in total, instead of the 340 I paid back home. So I decided not to buy a new one straight away as I'm not sure of insurance will pay or not (will hear that on monday) and it'll be cheaper to let Janneke buy one back home and ship that over. She'll be here on thursday anyway.

But is massively sucks, I planned to see some of the environment tomorrow and make shitloads of lovely pictures. (There are a few online already, see my gallery, luckily I transferred them to my laptop just before the camera was stolen.) But plans have changed. I'll probably spent tomorrow in the hotel bar, studying a 226 pages document of the project I'll be involved in. (But that's for another story.) For now, I'll just stay her, in the Bella Vista hotel bar, with my free internet and affordable Guinness. (3.70 per pint)

Sometimes life IS truly wonderfull!

================================================================
MW JANNEKE ELZINGA
================================================================
AER LINGUS                     EI 841  M/ECONOMY CLASS BEVESTIGD
VERT AMSTERDAM                            DO  13APR06  10.00AM
AANK CORK                                 DO  13APR06  10.40AM

AER LINGUS                     EI 840  S/ECONOMY CLASS BEVESTIGD
VERT CORK                                 DI  18APR06   6.30AM
AANK AMSTERDAM                            DI  18APR06   9.10AM

... No Comment ...

Conversions

One of the nasty things which will happen to you if you go from speaking fulltime dutch to to fulltime english is a thing you might not think of in the first place. Of course your SMS-ses will be in english, and you start thinking and dreaming in english. That's quite fun. But what is NOT funny is that your throat gets sour after just a couple of days because it's converting from the hard dutch sounds to the softer, throat-based english sounds. Ah well, luckily there is a solution: There is plenty of Guinness around to ease the pain ;-P

The |, the ¦ and the ¬

Used to US-English keyboards I couldn't imagine that in Ireland they have a different lay-out. Not just that the @ is dislocated (next to some other keys), they also have a couple of characters we're not familiar with on the US keyboard. There *is* a difference between the | (regular pipe) and the ¦ (alt-gr+`) and then there is the ¬ symbol (shift `). So used to the belgian layout a long time ago, now I have to get used to the Irish layout as well as both my Solaris training station as well as my notebook are equipped with those odd keys. Erh, does anybody know the NAME of those symbols actually?

And so there was, the first day

Well, that was it. My first day at work. It was kinda hard, I just got plummeted into a techtraining of a product I've never heard of with all guys I've never seen in a strange environment I've never been. But I survived. Got some things sorted out (bank account, health insurance, tax number, business card, laptop and cellphone) and well, that was about it. Too bad the hotel didn't have internet though, the location is marvellous, great view over the canal from the ocean to Cork, just a 5 minute walk from the office, but NO INTERNET. (Nor a grocery store, nor an ATM, nor a cosy bar, nor, well it's basically just completely isolated...) Anyway, I'll try to arrange that today and see if I can swap hotels early this week to that at least I can stay in touch with the rest of the world. TTYL!

0 days to go - 10am CEST, Off 2 Ireland!

Today will be the day. As I might not have access to the internet today (this entry is written on friday) I can only say:

I will keep you posted!

3 days to go

5 days to go

5 day's to go and all you do is just go to bed at 8.30pm CEST because you're completely exhausted of, yeah, of WHAT actually? The mellow, soothing semi-punk of Greenday flowing around your ears. The wine gently putting a halt on every sensible thought in your brain. Slowly drifting away. There are worse ways to get to sleep.

But so far so good, what isn't nice is that your biological clock is completely haywire, lost it's way, really doesn't know in what timezone it actually is though it's just it's own, CEST. The only odd thing is that last night the daylight saving time kicked in, but that means that it's just an hour LATER than you'd expect not like 6 hours later so it isn't an adjustment for the DST. So I'm kinda curious why on earth my brain suddenly thinks it's bedtime at 7.30pm (CET, not CEST) and wakeup-time at exactly 7 hours later, 2.30am CET.

Ah well, there are ways to cope with it. One of 'm is just writing your 5-days-to-go blog and drinking some tea, when the whole world is asleep and irc deserted.

7 days to go

9 days to go

Cancel, cancel, cancel! (Nothing left behind.)

One of the odd things about emigration is that suddenly you have to and can cancel almost anything. They pick up the phone, you tell 'm that you want to cancel it and all they do is wish you luck and cancel whatever you like to cancel. So I cancelled my insurances, my telephone and my tax. Not that you can cancel everything, unfortunately there are exceptions like your GSM and your ADSL connection. But for sure emigration opens a lot of doors normally closed. Well, in a way it closes a lot of doors usually open as after the cancellation you can't of course use whatever you just cancelled. But still.

Of course there are more cool things, when people hear the word "emigration" they suddenly are less formal, less picky about rules, they just do whatever they need to do to help you out. If not, you just drop that you'll emigrate very soon and that you're sorry that you rush them and suddenly they don't mind anymore, rush and wish you all the best. Pretty neat eh? Even in times where suddenly the whole world seems to emigrate you still get a LOT of cooperation when you really need it. (After all, emigration is not an easy process.)

Of course there is a counterside, IT IS NOT EASY! You haven't got a clue what you started untill it's too late. For me it'll probably be when I'm on my way to Atlanta, maybe if I'm lucky already partly when flying to Cork.

But then it's too late!

Flightplan - Amsterdam (NL) to Cork (IE)

To whom it might concern, my flightplan to Cork.
And yes, this is my emigration flight.
So feel free to join me at Schiphol to wave & weep.

AER LINGUS                     EI 841  R/ECONOMY CLASS CONFIRMED
DEP  AMSTERDAM                            SAT  1APR06  10.00AM
ARR  CORK                                 SAT  1APR06  10.40AM

Everything for free, euh, sale

Just one of the things you have to arrange when you emigrate to another country is that you'll have to sell almost al your belongings. Well, today was the time, the first batch has just been put on Marktplaats. And for those interested, there are photo's (and links to the Marktplaats entries) on my gallery. I will upload more and more photo's to the "For Sale" section of my website and you're absolutely welcome to drop me a note if you're interested in buying anything.

FOR SALE (the link)

Hello world! (Goodbye moon...)

Ok, so this is it. As you've seen in the post before the weblog is now transformed to a pretention-less weblog with just my own personal stuff I like to share with the world on it. And why. Why a sudden change? Well, I'll tell you. I'm leaving the Moon. And I'm going to see the World! I've had a rough times with my current employer, what started as the perfect job at a User-Friendly-like company turned out to be one of the most stressfull and challenging jobs I've ever had. Unfortunately not challenging in a very technical way but more on the social and stress level. 5 out of 12 suddenly left, basically the whole tech-team. So I decided to quit. But I did not. I stayed and actually started to like the "new" company. Times are hard, the stress-level, well, it redefined the meaning of "stress" for me. But suddenly a recruitment company from Ireland dropped me a note, if I was interested in a position as InfoVista consultant. In Ireland. And I was. So they arranged a telephone interview for me just 2 days later. And I messed up, euh, I thought I did, but aparently I did not as there was a job offer the next day. So I booked a return flight to Ireland for saturday to meet my possible new employer on monday. Bought a suit, flew to Ireland, catched up with my brother, had a meeting on monday and flew back to the Moon on tuesday morning with a shiny contract in my hands with just one very nasty catch, I had to resign my job that day and start on april 1st or the deal was over.

Yes, you read it correctly, we're talking about 7 days in total. From the first email to the meeting in Ireland and handing over my contract. It was a hard decision, really, leaving my friends and emigrating to Ireland in less than a month or staying with my current employer for the next couple of years. Safety vs an insecure but very exiting future. And I signed. Handed over my resignation letter. With only a month to fix everything.

It means that right now I have just 18 days left before I leave, at april 1st 10am sharp, with really still a lot to arrange back home. Scary like hell, emigrating is NOT an easy thing and I won't advise you to try emigration within a month, but if you get a chance like this, despite all nastyness, you should just go for it. For me it's really the thing I'm waiting for since 2001. I have a lot of friends back home, will miss them dearly and as the position involves that I HAVE to fly around the world (my first 3-month project is in the USA) it means that I will have to make sincere sacrifices to my social life. But, well, sometimes you will only get one chance, I got two, or maybe even three and hopefully this one will fullfill my needs.

And stay it will

Okay, so far for the plan. So far for the need of a new weblog. Really, I wanted to get rid of MovableType and move on to Serendipity but decided to go for WordPress. WordPress is marvellous, it looks great, it feels great, it's euh, well, just great. But I really loved this MovableType layout, developed in little less than 2 years and perfectionist as I am I wanted to use this layout on my fresh WordPress install. You guessed it right, that's where it went wrong. I'd just spent 2 nights on installing and configuring WordPress on murf.nl and just decided that I won't go on with it. As I will tell you in another article, there are reasons why I wanted to have another blog, but that's really the same reason why I don't have much time to configure another. It's not good, usually it's best to start a new era in life with almost everything new, but sometimes you'll have to make compromises. And this is one of them. This log wil stay, there is a chance that you'd suddenly see a lot of english posts on it, and any pretention about logging about cool stuff and not the "I went to the zoo and it was nice"-boring-stuff is now gone. I will log whatever and whenever I like and in the language I feel like at that point.

Well, how about that for a statement euh? So, now you know, you're just reading a completely pretention-less dutch/english weblog about me, and the world I'm living.

The end, it is.

This will be the last post. The log will go offline. Or maybe stay. But will not be updated. YadaYadaYada.nl is done. It is no more.

It has been 2 years ago since I started this log and since then a lot happened. And because I'm now at the very edge of one of the most serious events in my life, emigrating to Ireland, this has to be the end.

BUT! No fear! Within a couple of days there will be a new weblog, at http://murf.nl/ as that seems to be the most appropriate place for a new, both dutch but mainly english weblog. For now it is in full development, but I will keep you posted :-) That's a promise.