For obvious reasons: Tsunami from the Manic Street Preachers.

The year 2004 is almost over, which means that it is time for reviews. All important media have a review, so Brain Tags as wel! Personal Lets start with the most important day of this year: August 7. For us the greatest thing of that day was to see all our friends and all our family together. Even though they could not understand each other, it was great to see how they tried to help.

Once in a while I put a song in the Jukebox. Some songs are popular, others won’t be downloaded at all. That’s your choice. Today I put a file in the box of which I was sure that it would be popular. Why? Because the famous Boing Boing links to it. And while I have enough bandwidth left for this month, I had no idea what to expect. 10 downloads? 100 downloads?

This is our new entrance, with some chistmas decoration. The nativity scene is made from clay, with lead hands (clay fingers tend to break) and real textile clothes. The mark in the upper left corner contains dried mushrooms, hand-picked by my inlaws.

Found on Boing Boing: a Beatles Mash-up Medley. Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!

A little bit of copy and paste work, and my Flickr page is up and running. At the moment it contains the same images in the same low resolution (400x300) as the original Brain Pics contained, but I will add more and higher quality photos soon. I will remove the Brain Pics section from this site, and link to the Flickr site instead. For a DIY guy like me this is a big step, but Flickr offers so many advantages and features, that I decided to outsource this feature to them.

Since my parents are here to celebrate Christmas with us, we took them to a living nativity scene in Sudanell on the 25th of December. Each year they show some on the television, but I never actually visited one, so it was interesting for me as well. After buying the entrance tickets, I browsed through the leaflet, and found out that it was not exactly what I expected. I had imagined a place where the main figures would walk around with some animals, but in reality it was a lot more.

It just had to happen one day: a mix up of the Beatles and the Beastie Boys. I have put three tracks in the Jukebox: Whatcha Want, Lady?, Tripper Trouble and Hold It Together Now.

After the recent messages about comment spam, I have upgraded both Movable Type and MT-Blacklist. Not that my comment spam problem became bigger, since my setup is different enough from the regular MT site to stop them. I have renamed my comment script and, more important, I force commenters to preview. This alone blocks all spam coming in through the comments. The problem is that once in a while I receive spam through the trackback interface.

I just installed Skype on my PC to have a look at it, but really wonder what it adds. I am already available through ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo and IRC, and most of these services also support audio chats with reasonable quality. In my opinion Skype is just another IM client. I don’t want to have yet another client, I only want that the existing clients work together. Of course, I don’t have five applications running, I use Trillian, but it does open five network connections over different ports.

Today I will fly to the Netherlands for work. I will have some meetings with (potential) distributors and clients in the Netherlands and Germany. My schedule is quite full, which is a good sign for the future sales ;-).

Flickr is a great service for storing your photos, as everybody already found out. As the last person on the internet, I finally got to try their service out today, and just like everybody else I am very impressed. I have uploaded a bunch of photos and started playing around. thing I like most is the tagging feature, allowing me to link keywords to photos. I like Flickr so much, that I am probably going to replace my existing photo gallery which I maintain in Movable Type by Flickr.

Until yesterday I stayed away from social networks like friendster. Yesterday it changed when I saw that Volker Weber had been able to build a network of more than 10.000 second degree contacts, contacts of your contacts, in only six days. So I entered openBC and am now taking the first steps to build my own business network.

Windows XP has a nice function to keep your task bar organised by grouping windows of the same application. Apparently Windows considers Firefox to be the same application as Windows Explorer :-D

In my quest for a good CMS I have been looking at eZ Publish this week, and my first reaction is: “wow!” It looks very slick, very complete, very customisable, well thought out, … but also looks very daunting to implement. The sky is the limit, since you can create your own content classes, but this involves also a lot of scripting templates to get the functionality to work. Previously I have been looking at Mambo Open Source, which is very easy to use, but has no fine-grained control; I just want to decide what HTML elements are used in templates.

The easiest way for a club, company or organisation to have a webshop is CafePress. You can upload your logo and select which products you want to offer, and they take care about taking orders, printing the products and shipment. Works like a charm, but they are USA-based. That means that European customers will ahve to pay extra shipment costs, which makes the items rather expensive. So I am looking for companies like CafePress with facilities in Europe to lower the costs.

It’s time for some punk!!! Dirty Girl from Boobie Trap.

Each year I look at the artists playing at the Dutch Noorderslag festival, since those are the artists that are very likely to break through during the coming year. I just received a message from Apesjit in which they state that they are going to play on that important festival. I really hope that they are one of the bands that are going to break through next year!

Although I am not a fan of these 80x15 buttons, I noticed that TotalChoice Hosting does not have them. So I went to the Button Maker page, and made some buttons. They are free to use for everybody.

One of the nicest traditions in Catalonia is the ‘correfoc’: corre = run and foc = fire. The Catalans love any excuse to have a correfoc, a riotous fiesta of sparklers, firecrackers, and roman candles, where colles de diables, or brigades of devils and dragons, dance threateningly to the strains of an accompanying percussion band as they weave through a startled and delighted public. In order to save your clothes, there is only one remedy: jump so the sparks roll off.

Tomorrow evening we will take the plane to the Netherlands for a short holiday. We will stay there until Wednesday. I’m afraid that we don’t have a lot of opportunities to meet you, since we will spend the weekend with my parents and my sister. In the little time left after the weekend we have many obligations, but will try to meet as much friends as possible. We will bring the DVD of our holidays to keep you away from meeting us.

This week the most important IT fair in Spain takes place: the Simo TCI. Of course ICG Software is present; we have a big stand together with our Master Providers. As a result, the office is very empty this week, since most of our commercial department is in Madrid. We will be presenting version 5 of our software, which brings real-time communication between shops or restaurants and the central office.

I just installed Firefox, the Spanish version, which went flawlessly. It placed the files and updated my extensions. But after one hour I saw a new icon on my screen: Apparently there are updates available, only one hour after I installed it. Almost surely this is an external extension that has quickly been updated after the new release of Firefox, but it will confuse new users.

Hoewel ik uit de provincie Utrecht kom, heb ik het Uterechs nooit echt onder de knie gekregen. En dat is soms best wel jammer. Ik moest dan ook hard lachen toen ik de tekst van het Utrechts dictee zag en ik de tekst in mijn hoofd hoorde.

Technorati has launched a new service: Top MP3s. They monitor which MP3 files have the most references in the last 48 hours, and publish their results as a handy list. I used the list to add two songs to the jukebox: Wonderwall from Oasis and White Wedding from Billy Idol.

This is the obligatory “If you can read this, the move was successful” message. Moving to the new server was very easy, I only had to give my cPanel details to the support staff, and ten minutes later they had my site and e-mail up and running. There was only one Perl module missing to get my applications going, which was fixed in another two minutes. Now I have to wait for the new DNS settings to propagate.

I have made my choice: this site is moving to TotalChoice Hosting. I have looked at many hosting providers, and TCH appeared to be the best choice for me. I was looking for a hosting provider with more or less the same characteristics as my current provider; I only want a little bit bigger company to prevent problems. In the past I have read good comments about TCH’s performance and service, and their prices are incredible.

The hosting provider for this site, bloghosts is stopping. Anybody knows a good provider? Several technical problems with our backend have corrupted critical portions of our billing and support databases. While we have tried to recover this data several times and enlisted the help of an outside agency our efforts have been in vain. Although security has been very good we’ve found several discrepancies in our logs indicating the damage may have been intentional.

This site is hosted by Bloghosts, and I am very happy with their service. They are very cheap, and Jace, who runs the company, always gives great service. But lately they are having some problems. Not that it affects me, since my site has already been set up and runs fine. Fortunately, Jace has build up a lot of credit, and most existing customers understand the situation, and are willing to wait until the problems are solved.

Five minutes of R.E.M.: The Great Beyond

Now that I have burned my first DVD with material we recorded last summer, I want to show it to our friends and family. But I notice a great difference between the people here and in Holland. All our family and friends here have a DVD player. Videotape is dead; DVD is the current device to use. It is almost impossible to rent a recent movie on tape. However, none of the Dutch people I have recently spoken have a DVD player!

I just installed the latest version (1.32) of the MTSimpleComments plugin, but receive the following error when scheduled posts are being built: Undefined subroutine MTPlugins::simplecomments::SimpleCommentCount at lib/MT/Builder.pm line 139 The strange thing is that all files, both from index templates as archive templates, are created correctly, except for the main index.

Today I ran across three situations related to censorship. They are not related to each other, but the coincidence struck me. First, I found out that my hosting provider bloghosts closed their support forum. Bloghosts gives excellent service and support and I recommend them to everybody looking for a reliable hosting provider. A few weeks ago they had some internal technical problems with their servers, resulting in lost support tickets. While normally support tickets were answered within a few hours, in that period tickets got lost and were not answered.

Movable Type version 3.12 was released today, and as usual I immediately installed it. The feature I wanted was the promised fasted build times, but I also encountered some undocumented new buttons in the edit screen: I uploaded the image above using the Upload File button, but was a little bit disappointed that this feature did not copy the corresponding <img /> element into my entry. Shall I wait for version 3.

In the pas years I have written 375 entries, linkdump excluded, for this site, of which only 21, 6%, are related to my professional life. Does that mean that nothing interesting is happening during the hours I spend in the office? Does that mean I am not enthusiastic about my job? Of course not. I don’t write about my job because I don’t know how my colleagues are going to react.

One month after buying the Pinnacle Studio software, I have finished my first DVD project. The update to version 9.1.2 solved my problems. Now that the work is done, is is time to complain to Pinnacle, since they sold me a broken product while they already had the newer version for three months.

I just looked into the log files, and found out that people got blocked for trying to open old MP3 files from the jukebox. The jukebox is supposed to handle all requests for MP3 files on Brain Tags. If the requested file exists and the time-out period has not passed yet, the file is served; in all other occasions a list of currently available files is presented. However, after forwarding MP3 requests to the jukebox, all requests for old MP3 files got redirected to my spamtrap, effectively blocking visitors looking for MP3 files.

The latest CD I bought is “The Sound of Science” from the Beastie Boys. I was thinking of ripping a song and putting it in the Jukebox, when I saw that Lijn had put them in her jukebox. A download and an upload later, Intergalactic is available.

Another one for the jukebox: Satisfied from Bettie Serveert, a dark track with lyrics like, Callous on the soul/ There’s a tale untold/ About how you spend your life/ In a place where no one goes. I like this track a lot, and used it for the DVD about our holiday in Thailand that I am still trying to render.

After CasaSpider and Dudesh Ramadhin.

After all problems I encountered last week, I laid my little video project to rest for a while. Until yesterday; when I felt the itch of an unfinished project. In the mean time I found on the internet how to get around the rendering problem: I simply created another project that contained the problematic scene plus some footage before and after, rendered it to an AVI file, and included this file in my project.

Just a few weeks after Microsoft acquired LookOut to provide advanced search for Outlook, Google released Google Desktop Search. LookOut is mainly focused on OutLook, but also does a little bit with other files, while Google focuses on Office files and also does Outlook. At the moment I have both tools installed, to see which one I prefer. Of course I expect Google to expand their application very soon, while an upgrade from Microsoft might take a while.

To get you all through the weekend, I placed some Dutch punk rock in the jukebox: We’re All Fucked Up from De Heideroosjes. Enjoy it!

The PalmOne Zire 31 comes with a SD slot and a default, small, card of 16 Mb. It’s basic use is to put MP3 songs on it, to be played with the RealOne player. Putting files on the SD card is very easy; you only have to drag the file to the QuickInstall icon, and the next time you synchronise it will put the file on the card. However, you can only access the file from the Palm, there is no way to copy it back to a PC.

Nick Bradbury likes them, so I put Green Day in the jukebox. For your ears only: Extraordinary Girl. As usual, you have 4 days to listen.

The Dooie Donders Club is an infamous club in Harmelen, formed by four self proclaimed brothers. Until some years ago, they had a nice web site with plastic ducks and other toys as decoration. I made this site using Microsoft Frontpage, and maintained it for some years. It contained stories about the activities of this club, which had its highlight in 2000, with an appearance in the Dutch men magazine the Panorama and the production of their CD Dagobert, de heerser hier.

The past few weeks I have been working myself into a completely new world: video editing. It all started with the camera we received this spring. Of course we took it with us on holidays, and back home we wondered what to do with the tapes. They contained some nice material, but also a lot of ‘crap’ produced when trying out the functions of the camera. I wanted to edit the video, and copy the result to a DVD for easy play back.

There is new music available in the jukebox: Allermooiste Fout from Poels & Giessen. You have 96 hours to download it. Enjoy it!

Yet another meme. It came here via Realization, Big Pink Cookie and Jay Allen. I have highlighted the items that apply to me. N.B.: Why am I the first to make this an Ordered List? Bought everyone in the pub a drink Swam with wild dolphins Climbed a mountain Taken a Ferrari for a test drive Been inside the Great Pyramid Held a tarantula. Taken a candlelit bath with someone Said ‘I love you’ and meant it Hugged a tree Done a striptease Bungee jumped Visited Paris Watched a lightning storm at sea Stayed up all night long, and watch the sun rise Seen the Northern Lights Gone to a huge sports game Walked the stairs to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa Grown and eaten your own vegetables Touched an iceberg Slept under the stars Changed a baby’s diaper Taken a trip in a hot air balloon Watched a meteor shower Gotten drunk on champagne Given more than you can afford to charity Looked up at the night sky through a telescope Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment Had a food fight Bet on a winning horse Taken a sick day when you’re not ill Asked out a stranger Had a snowball fight Photocopied your bottom on the office photocopier Screamed as loudly as you possibly can Held a lamb Enacted a favorite fantasy Taken a midnight skinny dip Taken an ice cold bath Had a meaningful conversation with a beggar Seen a total eclipse Ridden a roller coaster Hit a home run Fit three weeks miraculously into three days Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking Adopted an accent for an entire day Visited the birthplace of your ancestors Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment Had two hard drives for your computer Visited all 50 states Loved your job for all accounts Taken care of someone who was shit faced Had enough money to be truly satisfied (money !

The link dump of this site is kaputt. So no new links until I have repaired it. I do not know yet what went wrong, but after removing a test blog I am also missing part of the Links blog. [2004.10.04]: We’re back to normal again.

I have put some ska in the Jukebox. Smooth swinging horns, velvet vocals, rhythms…

Each morning before I leave home to go to the office, I take some time to see what is happening in the world. A few years ago, I used newspapers, radio or television for that, but nowadays we have internet. While eating a sandwich and drinking my coffee, I check my e-mail and scan the headlines of about 200 web sites. If I see something interesting, I read it or bookmark it to be read later.

When I read about the Jukebox that Lijn created, I got this feeling inside… I copied the two files to my server, made some changes to the configuration, and there it is: the Brain Tags Jukebox!!! It needs a little bit of decoration, but the functionality is there. All songs will stay available for 96 hours, after which they will automagically disappear. At this moment you can find You Learn About It from The Gathering, and of course the wildly popular new song from the Pixies Ain’t That Pretty At All.

Besides collecting spam, I can also use my GMail account to invite others to use this service. If anybody still doesn’t have a GMail account and wished to have one, leave your full name and current e-mail address —which won’t be shown— in a comment.

Many people starting to implement the Getting Things Done methodology start processing their inboxes full of energy. The first result is usually obtained within a few days: an empty inbox! Everything has been evaluated, using the well know flow chart, and stored in reference files, someday/maybe actions, next actions… Small tasks (2–minute rule!) have been finished immediately, and a lot of junk has been thrown away. Great! Once the big mess is out of the way, you only need to maintain it.

Even the best drivers sometime get into situations in which they cannot prevent damage. I am not one of the best drivers, so I might get into this kind of situations a little bit more. This morning when I was driving to the office, I noticed a dog crossing the road. The car coming from the opposite direction stopped, and the dog reached the other side of the road without problems.

On my individual entry pages, I show two dates: the date on which I created the entry, and the date on which I modified the entry. Today, after making some changes to an entry, I noticed that the modification date was not updated. I found some information about this problem in earlier versions of Movable Type on the Tweezer’s Edge, but they state that this error has been fixed in the 3.

Here is Johnny’s guitar solo on the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”: E-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 B—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— G—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— D—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— A—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— E—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— (Via BoingBoing)

If you want to leave a comment on this site, you have the option to identify yourself using your TypeKey account. TypeKey is a centralized authentication service from Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type. It was developed as a measure against comment spam, and made available in version 3.0 of MT. After TypeKey was released I changed my templates to include this system. I do not force commenters to use TypeKey, since my spam problem is not that big.

I have plenty of bandwidth, and have been thinking about ways to use it. It appears to me that the best way to burn up my bandwidth is to serve MP3 files. So as an experiment I offer you Ain’t That Pretty At All from the Pixies, since this is becoming a Pixies site anyway. Keep in mind that it is an experiment; I might withdraw the file at any moment.

Within one week I encountered two computers showing the same problem, which I haven’t been able to solve. This concerns me, since one of these machines is mine. What happened is the following: Both machines run Windows XP, and use a modem — in one case an ADSL modem — to connect to internet. Everything works just fine, until I added a network card to these machines. After that, the modem seems to connect just fine, but DNS is not working.

Recently my server logs show a big increase in requests for a single image, the one shown above. Somebody must be hotlinking this image! Hotlinking is when somebody uses an image on their page, but does not put a copy of the image on their server. Each time somebody views that page, the image is requested from my server. In general, hotlinking images is not polite, since you use bandwidth of somebody else.

I finally also have a GMail account! Even though I already have many @jeroensangers.com and @braintags.com mail addresses, I opted for beltza@gmail.com, just to see what it is and what it does. You don’t have to update your address books, since I will continue to use the old addresses, and will check this one rarely. I only posted the address here, since I need some mail to see what I can do with GMail.

That’s it! The upgrade went flawless. Everything seems to work fine until now. Of course I haven’t tried out any of the new features yet. There are two features I would like to have a look at. The ability to create subcategories look really sexy, however I have doubts whether my writings need a more complex category structure. I will have to review all items to decide on that. The feature everybody waited a long time for is dynamic publishing.

Today, six apart launched version 3.1 of Movable Type, the software I use as the motor of this site. Since I am an early adaptor, I immediately downloaded the latest version, and will install it as soon as possible. I already heard about some problems in the update scripts, so we’ll see how it goes…

Almost a week ago we returned from our holiday in Thailand. The fact that I did not write anything about it yet has two reasons:

1. We have been too busy taking up our social life again, meeting friends and family, supper here, coffee/beer there… I simply did not touch my computers last week. I find it difficult to write about things that happened more than a day ago. And during my stay abroad I prefer to visit temples and markets over writing in an internet café.

Great party, I love Thailand, much to do… Until later!

One more day of work, and I will have holidays; Three more days, and I will drive to Holland; Nine more days, and my (our) life will change forever; Eleven more days, and I will be packing again; Thirteen more days, and I will take the plane to Bangkok; Probably twenty-eight more days before I will publish on this site again. See you later!

Almost two years ago, Antipixel published a set of minimal buttons to replace the ugly buttons used by most people at that time. They were modern, tight, fashion… so a lot of people started using them on their sites and many people designed buttons in the same style. I also preferred them over the traditional buttons, but I never placed them on my sites. Why? Because the Antipixel style did not mix with the style of my site.

There is nothing to celebrate yet, but the presents are already rolling in… In Holland people don’t want to arrive to a party with empty hands; the people from here feel better when they know that we have already received our present when they arrive. Anyway, our gadget collection has increased a lot last week. After buying the Palm Zire 31, we received a Sony DCR-HC40E video camera. I haven’t had the time yet to try out all its features, but we are going to take it with us on our holidays in August.

I was always thought that the Netherlands have two languages: Dutch and Frisian. Besides these two languages, many dialects exist. Spain in contrary, has 5 languages: Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician and Aragonese. Today I found out these numbers are wrong. Or not? The languages I mentioned above are the languages that have an official status in those countries, based on history and culture. The real number of languages (linguistically seen) is higher: there are 15 languages in the Netherlands, and 11 languages in Spain.

Ik ben dus nummer 22 en doe bij deze de splitsing die door Lijn en David gemaakt was weer ongedaan! Misverstanden alom! Ik dacht nummer 22 te wezen, maar die was al vergeven op Davids’s site. Daarom gaan we maar voor nummertje 25, leuk nummer overigens… Voor de geïnteresseerden, Mieke was nummer 24. Voor verdere uitleg, zie Punkey.

Already for some months I wanted to bey me a palmOne PDA. Last week I finally found what I wanted: the Zire 31 was offered on eBay for a very good price. And now I have it!!!! :-D I still have to research all the available options, study Graffity 2 and enter data, but I am already convinced about my purchase.

An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trashcan. The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!” The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that!

The billboard shown above is part of a recruiting campaing of Google. I am far from smart enough to solve this problem, and it this moment I haven’t got any plans to move to the United States. But I am interested in the solution, so for the moment I wait until somebody has solved this problem, and publishes it on internet. After that, I will be able to find it throught Google.

The Classic IQ Test Watch out, they want your data! Congratulations, Jeroen! Your IQ score is 136 This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the Classic IQ Test relative to others. Your Intellectual Type is Visionary Philosopher. This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways.

DiceLaRed —TheNetSays— has a nice tool: the Technology Barometer. They monitor several sites, mostly weblogs, and automatically create a graph of the subjects these sites talk about. Really neat. This is the current graph:

About a year ago I made a list of webloggers from Lleida. It was time to have a look at it again, so I consulted my friend Google, to find some additional weblogs: El Bloc Catxipanda A Catalan site, made with an Italian CMS :-D. I like the use of the word “tristpartit” for the Catalan government. Lizzie Another Lleidatan writing in English!!! Bitacola d’en Chufo A new blog, counting only three posts at the moment.

I have a confession to make: I use Microsoft Outlook. Not at home, but in the office. I know many people are stuck with Microsoft Outlook because their company uses an Exchange server, but that is not the case with me; I am free to choose. I use Microsoft Outlook because it allows me to do some things I can’t accomplish with other tools, even though there are many things I don’t like about Outlook.

Bloglines has redesigned! The new user interface looks more beautiful, and they also added some new functions. You can now blog about the items you read, directly in Bloglines!

Six months ago I set some targets for myself for this year. Now that I am halfway the year, it is time to evaluate my progress: Learn to speak Spanish My Spanish is definitely better, simply because I have been using it some months more. I planned to study more structurally, but so far I haven’t spent a single minute doing this. There’s still work to do on this one.

I have been using the services of Mobical for some time now, mainly to back up my cell phone’s contact list, and have been very satisfied. Once in a while I press the button on my phone, and I know that all my phone numbers are stored safely on a server in Sweden. They also supply a web interface to your data, so you can enter your contacts with more than nine buttons, but I never used that.

This is a message for every person in the world creating a form with a drop-down list to choose the country from: the country where I was born is called The Netherlands, and I expect it to appear in the list right between Nepal and Netherlands Antilles. I am not going to look at the H, since Holland is only a part of The Netherlands, and neither do I expect it at the T, if dictionaries would do the same, most entries would be found under the T!

💬 Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. — Albert Einstein

Summer in Lleida has a bad name. Being in the inlands without any lake and usually without even a small breeze makes Lleida a very hot place. The hottest months yet have to come and the temperature is already at 38°C. With this kind of temperatures you have only two options to spend your free time: inside the water (a swimming pool or the sea) or in the mountains. In both cases it is advisable to leave early in the morning, as driving a car can be unbearable during the day.

The night of San Joan, two o’clock in the morning. We are sitting side by side on a balcony on the fifth floor of a house in Balafia. The view is stunning; we can oversee the whole city with the Seu Vella high above it. There are fireworks and bonfires everywhere, and I count 5 empty bottles of Cava. The radio plays “The house of the rising sun”, so there is no need to say anything…

Just like many people, sometimes my head bursts of all things I have to remember and to do. In fact, my short—term memory is terrible; I am able to tell you to do something and completely forget about it within 10 minutes. The reason for this is that I can be completely focussed on the action I am doing at the moment. I am aware of this problem, and have tried out many strategies to overcome this.

These days I am trying to see whether the Mambo Open Source CMS system could fit my idea’s for the new Fimcap site. The software is very complete, and I still have to explore all available third-party Components and Modules before I can make my final judgement. I am using this post as my scrapbook, so I can access my notes from any computer. To support the site in three languages, the best solution is to have three separate installation; note: I still have to look at mambelfish The default DTD is XHTML 1.

More and more people are buying digital cameras; I even read that the digital camera sales outnumber the traditional film cameras nowadays. I am very happy with my Canon film camera, but after I have been playing with my parents’ new Sony digital camera last week I wondered whether a digital camera would be something for me. Of course as a gadget it would most certainly be welcome, but as a replacement for my current film camera it will need to add much additional benefits.

Firefox 0.9 has been released today. Of course I immediately downloaded and installed it. As the version number shows, this is still a technology preview, so there still are some things not working quite as they should. The most important missing feature is a good installation procedure. To upgrade from version 0.8 to 0.9, I had to remove the old version, install the new one and after that I had to reinstall all my extensions — Bookmarks synchronizer, Bloglines notifier, Links toolbar.

A red Buick Electra Convertible 1959. Really nice car…

When you travel by car through Europe, you’ll find that the traffic rules are more or less the same for all countries. Of course there are some minor differences as the maximum speed on —120 km/h in the Netherlands, 130 km/h in France— but in general the rules are the same. Nobody ever warned for the fact that the Standard European Traffic Rules are not valid in Spain. The confusing part is that the used signs are exactly the same, but the interpretation might surprise visitors from abroad.

Already for some months, this site can be reached at another domain name: braintags.com. First this domain was hosted at another server, redirecting to jeroensangers.com, and since some weeks it serves as a full domain name for this site. Silently I have tested the new domain name for some time, since I like it better than the original one. This site is called ‘Brain Tags’, so it is only logical that you can reach it through braintags.

The new Link dump section of this site is now also available as an Atom 0.3 feed, so you will be able to receive my links in your favourite feed reader — my preferred reader is Bloglines. In the footer of each page you will find feeds button, showing you all available feeds.

After restructuring the templates, it was time top add a new feature: the Link dump. While surfing the internet, I find so many interesting sites, which I usually bookmark all. Lately I found my bookmarks getting too crowded, making it difficult to find specific links. From now on I won’t put them in my bookmarks anymore, but publish them on this site, for four good reasons: My bookmarks list stays cleaner; I can use the search function to look up links; I can easily add comments; You also benefit from my findings.

In an international office like ours, the right tools are very important. My most important tool is the phone; I spend most of the day talking on the phone. All other important tools are electronic ones, as you can see from this screenshot (click for a larger version): I e-mail a lot and use instant messaging through Trillian (MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and IRC in one application). But the handiest tool I have is the big image on the background: xearth for Windows.

I am facing a small CSS problem: I have a page with some blocks of content, of which I don’t know the contents on beforehand. Therefore all blocks — defined by div elements — have the same definition. If the block contains text, it has to be left aligned; if the block contains an image, it has to be horizontally centred. In the good ol’ HTML era, I would simply add align=“center” to the img element, and I would be done.

I have restructured my templates for this site. The old ones used way too many <div>’s and <span>’s, which cluttered up the HTML — these elements are today’s equivalent of the tables in the 90’s. I decided to start from zero and only add those elements that I think are necessary. As a result, the new pages are smaller, which should make them faster for you. To make things easier for me, I decided to use another Document Type Definition.

Last week when I entered my hotel room and switched on the light, the TV turned on and showed me a welcome message explaining how to use Pay TV. First I did not pay any attention to this screen, and I started unpacking my bags. When I passed the TV for about the fifth time, I suddenly saw something I did not notice before. On the top of the screen I could see a blue bar with some letters below it.

The next week I don’t expect to write many things. This morning I will be leaving for Cyprus–I will be flying over Amsterdam!!!—where I will stay until Sunday. I will have meetings with four companies over there and am going to try to teach them as much as possible about our main programs. Bye!

I temporary disabled the comments on this site. The last days I have received too much comment spam. Until two weeks ago, I could control comment spam by using the MT-Blacklist plug-in. Unfortunately this plug-in does not work on the latest version of Movable Type, so I had to remove it. MT 3.0D has the option to require commenters to sign up first before posting a comment, but I have not yet been able to get the JavaScript to work on XHTML 1.

It was that famous weekend again: the Aplec del Caragol. I won’t go into details, but after two days of eating and drinking I feel tired, dirty, and have pain in my stomach.

A little bit more than a year ago, I entered the fantasy blog shares market with exactly B$500. As of today I may call myself a virtual billionaire, since the total of my virtual possessions passed B$1.000.000.000!!! Now let’s see if I can do the same with real money… [Update 2004.05.19]: OK, I deserved it! Directly after writing this entry I took some losses, which brought my virtual wealth down to B$967.

Four days ago I upgraded the motor of this site to Movable Type version 3.0D — the D is for Developer edition. Unlike many others who installed this version, I was fully aware that this developer edition could have some problems with plug-ins. Here are my findings of the first days playing around. Dashboard The first screen of the MT interface clearly shows a new item: the Movable Type News box.

If you are thinking about speeding on Italian highways this year, think twice. You might find yourself being chased by a Lamborghini. Italian police took possession Friday of a sleek, 500 horsepower, two-seater Lamborghini Gallardo, which can hit a top speed of 185 miles per hour.

The radar is a handy and necessary tool in the aviation business. A long time ago, when there was not much trafic, there was no need for a radar; for the people in the control towers it was enough to have visual contact with the airplane the moment it arrived. But as trafic increased more sophisticated systems were needed. Nowadays all incoming and outgoing planes appear on the radar screens, unless they fly too low.

Yesterday suddenly it was there: the summer! But wait, I can’t remember that we passed spring. That’s right, it is more like the season changed from the wet season into the dry season. Is our climate really changing, or is did this just happen accidentally?

One of the additions to Movable Type is a news box in the main menu of the main menu. This box syndicates the latest news from the Movable Type site, and has a prominent position on the top right of the screen. I prefer to read syndicated content through my news reader, and this news box simply irritates me. So I searched through the files and removed the responsible code. In case you want to do the same: you’ll need to edit the file tmpl/cms/list_blog.

I have upgraded to Movable Type 3.0, and am trying to fix the templates at the moment. During the next days, posting comments might give some problems, but I am working on it. On the web a lot of people complain about the new licences, but I haven’t got any problems with it. As this site uses only three webblogs –the main site, the photo site and one for static content– and has only one author –that’s me :-D–, I fall exactly within the limits of the free licence.

There is a law that is valid on both the internet as on every school yard: how important you are depends on who your friends are. Nowadays on the internet, your importance is expressed as PageRank. PageRank is a number between 0 and 10, calculated in a very secret way, but based on the amount of links to your site and the PageRank of the sites linking to you. If you own a site with a high PageRank (8+) you can earn a lot of money by simply putting a link to other sites on your homepage.

Here is a short manual on finding products and services on the internet. I found this method when I was looking for SyncML servers. A quick google on several keyword combinations did not result in the product I was looking for, but using the method described below I found what I wanted: Write down exactly what you are looking for, and why you are looking for it; Publish your writings on the internet, and make sure your page uses Google AdSense; Wait a day, and visit your page.

Mozilla Firefox is a great internet browser, and I just love tabbed browsing. Each day I look in Bloglines to see which sites have been updated, and I open up all interesting reading matter in new tabs — I CRTL-click more than I click. After that I go one by one through my tabs, reading each page and opening interesting links in new tabs. I continue doing so until I have closed all my tabs, or until I run out of time, in which case I simply bookmark all open tabs.

SyncML is an XML standard for synchronizing data between devices. The most common use for it is to create back-up copies of your cellphone data, or even synchronise it with your desktop PIM. I want that too! The user manual of my phone describes how I can set up synchronisation to store a copy my data on the Siemens web site. But…. it did not work. After looking in every corner of the Siemens site, I came to the conclusion that they only support SyncML for some countries, and Spain is not one of them.

Since September of last year, this site is also available in WAP format at http://wap.braintags.com/. As you might imagine, there are not many people using this feature, I guess only 2-5 visitors per day. With my new phone I also had a look at this site over WAP, and ran into an error. Clearly the template I was using was not OK. I made this template myself, because at the time I could not find a suitable template on the internet.

Todays trend in weblog country is the Ego Watch: looking at which position you end up on several search engines. It started with Brad Choate, directly followed by Baviaan. And here are my results: TERM Google Yahoo Altavista Lycos Excite MSN A9 jeroen 60 1 4 1 7 4 85 sangers 3 5 8 2 12 45 4 jeroen sangers 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 jeroensangers 1 5 4 1 1 1 1 brain tags 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 braintags 1 1 1 1 8 1 1 It looks like I’ll have to use my surname Sangers more on this blog, and somehow I’ll have to convince Google that I am an important Jeroen.

Do you recognise this: You are at your office, browsing the internet to solve a specific problem. You open some pages looking for the right clue, and suddenly you see an interesting story, explaining how you can manipulate HotMail to send passwords of other users to you. It is not related to your current search, but you would like to read it over quietly at home — you already imagine using this trick to fool some friends who stubbornly keep on using HotMail…

You might already have seen it, I added some new pictures to my photo gallery. You’ll see some typical tourist photos as well as some pictures of our bachelor day.

Yesterday I wrote about some usability problems with cellphones. As I am exploring the functionality of my new phone, I have run into some more small usability problems. Yesterday I already wrote about the fast access button asking for a confirmation. The reason they did this was probably to provide the user with an easy way to configure the fast access buttons. The moment I use the fast access button, a screen appears asking me whether I want to start the selected function or whether I want to modify the function linked to the button.

Got it!!! This weekend I finally got some time to walk to the shop and buy a new cellphone. They girl helping me wanted to show me many models, but I interrupted her to tell her first my criteria: A good price Small size (I usually wear my cellphone in the pockets of my trousers) Easy to use My first criteria limited the selection to those models for which my provider had an offer.

Almost a year ago I posted the last picture to my photo gallery. That’s what happens if you’re one of the last fossils preferring ‘real’ photo’s over digital photo’s and you’re too lazy to scan your pictures. Today I added a photo of our stand at the CeBIT, and I am preparing to publish a series of photo’s of our last visit to Holland.

Sometimes people ask me whether there are certain Dutch products I miss here in Lleida. The answer is: “No, I don’t miss anything, since I am often enough in Holland to do some shoppings.” Most people can guess the most obvious items from my Dutch shopping list (Cheese & Dropjes), but there are some things which are not so obvious. Last weekend Berry and Manon told us several times that they would have brought it if they would have known it.

Last weekend Berry & Manon visited us. The good thing about people spending their holiday with us, is that we also get a little bit the ‘holiday feeling’. Normally we use part of the weekend to clean the house, do some shopping and work in the house, but now we did all this during the days before. So we had all the time to relax! On Friday evening we welcomed our guest with a beer, after which we ate a little bit.

> To set a blank blue homepage in Internet Explorer, do the following: Click Tools and choose Internet Options. On the General tab, set the homepage to about:mozilla. Click OK. No comments…

Slightly condensed… Hat tip: Punkey

The only shops open in the morning when I wake up are bakeries and kiosks. I like that, since many days I go downstairs to buy some fresh bread for breakfast, once in a while accompanied with a newspaper. When I come home from my work, almost all shops are closed. I don’t like that, since many days I need something, and I will have to wait until Saturday to buy it.

> Ik haat het om geblinddoekt te worden. Al met al een geslaagd vrijgezellenfeest. Vrij naar John

Bags packed… Some hours of sleep… Air plane to Amsterdam… Arriving in Harmelen… Relaxing…. Tourist in my former country…

One of the problems of using the XHTML 1.1 doctype is the fact that your pages need to be completely valid in order to be displayed. If there is one single error in the XHTML code, the browser will display an error message. This in difference with HTML and XHTML 1.0 pages, which browsers will try to show even if the code contains errors. Of course, all my templates contain valid code, but the problem comes when I or my commenters use code in my texts.

YRCHTVOL is still a difficult thing to understand for most people in the web-business: Single Input – Multiple Outputs.

Now that I am back home again and took some time to catch some sleep, it’s time to tell about the CeBIT experience. It was my first time at the biggest technology fair in the world, and the first time ICG was present with their own stand. Therefore I did not really know what to expect. I assumed to see many new things, but not in the area where we have our stand.

The last week we have worked very hard. Not only to prepare for the CeBIT, but also to do our regular work and the work that we normally should have done the next two weeks. Now, we’re almost there. Tomorrow we will load the truck with all material for the stand, and Monday morning we will drive to Germany. After two days of travelling we’ll have a day to construct everything and then… let the show begin!

Out of respect for the victims and out of protest towards terrorism, today I put my site on black. What happened this morning in Madrid is inhuman and cannot be justified. I can only guess for the reasons behind this horrible deed, but know that whatever they were trying to reach is not going to happen, in contrary. If they wanted to put political parties up against each other, they failed, since all parties now form one front against terrorism.

Maybe I am convinced

Just a small message to give you the possibility to congratulate me. 😉

Sometimes I post comments on my own pages, usually in reaction to other comments. I usually use only my first name ‘Jeroen’ to post these comments, but everybody is free to use any name he/she wishes, including my first name. After all, I am not the only Jeroen in the world. But how do you know that it was really me who posted the comment? From now on all my comments are PGP signed, so you can verify them with my public key.

How wonderful!!! In these times of stress we receive an extra day for free! Let’s enjoy it… 😀

Today it is raining in Lleida. So what? Well, the problem is that the people over here are not used to rain. When it is raining, the people simply stay inside until the rain is over. When I drove this morning past the market square, I could see all merchants waiting inside their cars, still packed. They were waiting for the rain to stop, because their clients won’t show up when it is raining.

Today I received the following message in my mailbox: an improper scan has caused a ban on your site date: Tue Feb 24 18:30:20 2004 ip: 66.77.73.32 host: shop-gw.sac.overture.com agent: Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler I regulary receive this kind of messages, usually created because bad robots or script kiddies access my spam trap. But Yahoo and Overture are well respected companies, and I would assume that they would have respected my robots.

That is an awfully big gray area!!! I guess I still have some traveling to do 😀 Notice that a holiday in a small part of the US of A made a big difference, since the whole country is marked red after visiting only 2 states: The fastest way to fill my map would be to make some strategical visits to Canada, Russia, Greenland, Brazil or China. The other way would be to go for the biggest number of countries, and in that case traveling through Europe is the way to go:

It has been very silent on this site lately. This was not because I did not have time to write; it only takes about five minutes to write some lines. This was not because I did not have anything to write about; I could have written about using Zempt for posting on this site, about the political situation in Spain, about my parents coming to visit me this week, about the fimcap.

That the pixies are going to tour again is old news. The problem is finding the tour schedule, it simply does not exist. So I googled a little bit, and made the following scheme. Surely it is still incomplete, so if you have any additions or corrections, please let me know. Date Gig Where Comments 2004.04.14 Burton Cummings Theatre Winnipeg, Manitoba, CA 2004.04.15 Doris Knight Ballroom Regina, Saskatchewan, CA 2004.

Sometimes people ask me why this site is called ‘Brain Tags’. Well, the origin comes from a nice song of Bettie Serveert called Brain Tag. Of course the word Tag links nicely to my interest in web development, while people knowing me only a little bit realise that the word Brain has no link to me at all… How does this rhyme, cause every time I see you well, I could swear, must’ve met you somewhere Down under lock and key, there’s a brain-tag to every secret If I could keep my mind shut, there’s a chance that I might even keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before This must sound weird, it’s like you peered inside me cause every time, you recognise my state of mind Down under lock and key, we put a brain-tag to every secret Now comes the time to figure out whether we should keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before Total freedom beneath the waves Floating through the arcane waves Synchronised in space and time Leaving all desire behind

When entering a comment in a Movable Type powered site, a radio button is available telling you that it is going to ‘Remember personal info’. However, sometimes when you come back to the same site and want to write another comment, all fields are empty. Your personal info has not been saved… 🙁 The problem I described above appears regularly on the Movable Type support forum, and since the answer is always the same, I created this explanation, so I only have to point here to answer the question.

I am going to the CeBIT! This year will be the first year that our company will have a stand at Europe’s biggest technology fair in Germany. And I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to organise everything. As we are a do-it-ourselves shop, I’ve had many meetings in which we were making sketches for the stand, writing texts for press announcements and thinking about all details involved in this project.

Configure a (Windows) computer to use a DHCP and static IP address at the same time.

Today version 2.66 of Movable Type has been released, which addresses amongs others some of the comment spam issues. I installed the update, and wrote a test comment to see how it works, but the entry did not show up anymore. Mozilla told me that there was a XML parsing error, and since I am serving my pages as application/xhtml+xml, Moz did not parse the page at all. I quickly changed my server settings so that my pages are served as text/html, and looked into the code.

Using the service from Mfop2 I am now able to post my messages from any place I want. All I have to do is send an e-mail (including images if I want) with some special fields to Mfop2, and it will automagically appear on my site! Now that I have my GPRS connection activated on my cellphone, this means that I can even do this from my phone.

After 7 years of intensive use, time has come to say goodbye to my old PC. It simply has too much technical problems: I assume problems with the power supply, the memory and the CPU! As a result, my screen freezes frequently, usually when I am using Microsoft software. So last Saturday I took the step and ordered a new PC. Just like the one I have now it is a low-budget (€500) white label box, which I hope will also last the same number of years.

As everybody knows, WAP is not the mobile killer protocol, nor will it ever be. However, it has its uses. I use it for example to consult my bank account when I’m on the road. For Telefonica,- the Spanish phone monopolist, WAP also has its uses, since they offer Emoción; WAP-based services of which some bring in some money for every minute it is used. The thing I never understood is that they sell packages with modern phones like my T200 with badly configured WAP access.

A small experiment to start the year 😉 I installed SnagIt on my computer, which I configured to upload each 30 minutes a screendump of my desktop. Now everybody can see what I am doing during the day. As soon as I have a more powerful computer at home, I will do the same from there.

Happy 2004!!!! I am absolutely sure that this year is going to be a fabulous year. And with a new year come resolutions. Now I think that this is something crazy, because you can make your resolutions any day you want, and don’t have to wait for new year. The past period I made some resolutions in my mind and already started working on some, but nevertheless I will post them today: