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. I was amazed. The welcome message was simply a text file written in Write, and the whole system appeared to be running Windows 3.1!!!

It has been a long time ago since I last saw Windows 3.1 in use. I thought that everybody had already switched a long time ago to Windows 9x, but it seems that there are still some of these legacy systems around. Surely the system is running good enough, so why change 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 1.1.

Until I fix this, I simply keep a close eye on my comments, and remove any suspicious comment immediately. But the coming week I will be on a trip, and thus can’t watch my comments.

Therefore I decided to disable the comments until I am back home again. If you have any comment, just use the Feedback form.

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$967.000.000. Back to work!!!

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. This box syndicates news from the Movable Type web site. Since I prefer to read my news in my feed reader, I immediately removed this box.

Another thing changed in the main screen is the direct access to some weblog features. The 2.x versions had for each weblog links to create a new entry and to enter the entries list. Now you can also access the comments list, the templates list and the weblog configuration screen. The one thing I am missing here is the upload file feature, since I assume that bloggers will more often upload an image than tinker with their templates.

Edit Entry

Also the Entry Edit screen has some —minor— modifications. It is now possible to specify the entry date & time the moment you create a new entry. In the older versions you first had to save your entry to modify the publishing time. That leaves only one feature that cannot be modified in new entries: the multiple categories.

Another change is that the edit buttons now also work in Mozilla based browsers, but only for the entry body. If you use the extended entry field, you still have to enter the HTML code yourself.

Comments

The comments list is new and handy feature to manage your comments. You can see the details and the status of the last comments, and open them from that screen. You can filter comments on e-mail, name and IP address, but unfortunately not on status. I don’t receive many comments, but I assume that more popular sites would love to see only the comments that are pending for approval.

Trackback

In my definition, trackbacks are nothing more than comments on my entries left on other sites. I would like to treat trackbacks in exactly the same way as comments, but unfortunately trackbacks do not have status information.

Plug-ins

Of the 13 plug-ins I use for this site, I removed two after upgrading. MT-Blacklist is not compatible with MT3.0, so I am removing comment spammers by hand again.

The Optional-Redirect plug-in is not necessary anymore, since the same can be achieved in MT 3.0 by no_redirect=“1”.

All other plug-ins work the same way as before.

Individual Archive template

Most of my time went into trying to adjust the individual archive template. There have been many changes to this template to incorporate the TypeKey service, but I have not yet been able to get them to work when served as XHTML 1.1 with MIME type application/xhtml+xml. The smallest problem was to validate the template as XHTML 1.1. The new code uses some names, which I changed into ids, and I had to edit lib/MT/Template/Context.pm so it won’t use valign and border anymore – look at line 1476.

A bigger problem is the JavaScript. Things like document.comments_form.email.value is easy enough changed into document.getElementById(‘email’).value, but I don’t know how to fix document.write so it works both on text/html as on application/xhtml+xml.

The last problem I have with my template is that it shows the wrong comment form; the one that is normally used when TypeKey authentication is obligatory. I still have to find out what is going wrong here.

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.

Exactly the same is happening on the internet. Ten years ago, it was easy enough to surf the few interesting sites on a weekly basis. But as the internet grew and more sites started to publish more material, this became a kludge. I am interested in the content of about 100 sites, which I try to read on a regulary basis. Some of these sites publish daily news, some of them are only updated once a month. Four years ago I had my bookmarks ordered by update frequency: I had a folder called ‘daily’ which contained sites I tried to visit on daily basis, etc. But as the number of sites increased, it became undoable to keep on visiting all those sites.

So I started using the internet equivalent of the radar: feed readers. Most sites publish their content in several formats. Besides the usual HTML pages, many sites also publish their news in a short format as RSS or Atom. My feed reader fetches those so-called feeds every X minutes, and notifies me when a site has been updated. This saves me a lot of time! But there are still many sites flying under the radar. Sites that do not provide feeds, sites which I still have to visit manually, many times only to find out that nothing has changed. I found out that I am visiting these sites less and less. They are about to dissapear from my screen, I simply do not have the time to keep on visiting them.

And I am not the only one. Many people read the texts of this site through a feed reader, and even more use my feeds to see whether I updated my site. So webmasters: don’t fly under the radar, but give your readers the option to use feed readers!

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.tmpl, and remove lines 7-13 (starting with <div class=“news-box”>).

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. And if I really need more, I have no problem paying for it. Let’s face it, they made a far better CMS than I will ever be able to make myself.

The installation went without any problems, the pesky part is in the Individual Archive templates. There have been many changes, and I will have to go through my code line-by-line to see what I have to change.

To make it even more difficult, they did not escape ampersands in their code! The same thing happened in their 2.66 update, and I really expected that they’d learned something. Anyway, soon I expect version 3.01, which fixes these errors in the JavaScript.

Another problem I ran into is their use of JavaScript as: document.comments_form.email.value = getCookie(“mtcmtmail”);, which typically won’t work in documents served as application/xhtml+xml. I have to change all these lines to use the document.getElementById function.

You notice: work enough to do, so I’ll better get back into debugging mode.

[Update 2004.05.17]: They did escape ampersands, but that I was using the wrong version of their code.

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.

Knowing this, I wondered how popular I am. What is the PageRank of this site, where on the internet popularity scale am I. I looked it up, and found that I am exactly in the middle; I have a PageRank of 5/10. I am not the most popular guy on the school yard, but neither a looser without any friends.

This made me wonder what I had to do to get a 6. What kind of sites have a 6? And a 7? So I visited some sites from my bookmarks and made a short list with example sites for each PageRank:

It was quite difficult to find sites with PageRank 1 and 2. Most sites I found have a PageRank of 3 and 4. Most popular sites reside at PageRank 8. Jong Nederland Harmelen obviously did something very wrong, since Google punishes them hard for not letting the GoogleBot spider their site.

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:

1. Write down exactly what you are looking for, and why you are looking for it;
2. Publish your writings on the internet, and make sure your page uses Google AdSense;
3. Wait a day, and visit your page. Notice the advertisements placed by AdSense;
4. ???
5. Profit!

Why does AdSense give better results than a normal search? I guess the reason is that AdSense works in a reverse way. In a normal search I enter a few keywords, and the engine returns me a zillion of results. AdSense analyses the whole text, and returns only a few results. Of course I tried to paste the whole text in a normal Google search, but I found out that Google has a limit of only 10 keywords. Another reason for the better performance is that AdSense has a very limited database, containing almost exclusively commercial products and services.

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. The good thing about loading pages on tabs it that I can load many pages before I read them; each time I close a tab, I find a new page waiting for me.

But there is one thing that annoys me. As you might know, I am very interested in web design, and many sites I read are about standards web design. Therefore, more and more sites I visit are standards compliant: clean HTML and designed with CSS. In my opinion Firefox does not handle these sites correctly, since it only starts loading background images the moment I focus on a tab. Thus many times I close a tab, I am confronted with an almost white page with some text on it, which then is converted little by little in a beautiful design. I do not understand why Firefox waits until I focus on the tab and does not pre-load the background images while I am reading other sites.

Or is there some hidden configuration option I don’t know about?

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. Also on the site of my provider Movistar I could not find anything about SyncML.

In the mean time I read a little bit more about SyncML, and came to the conclusion that it is a very simple XML based protocol. Besides that, I figured that the average cellphone has a maximum 5Mb of data, so it must be very cheap to set up a SyncML server. My friend Google showed me some companies offering SyncML accounts, but they charge the same amount that I pay for hosting this whole site!!!

Mmm, maybe I can find some software that I can install on my own server. Once again I asked my friend Google, and he offered me two solutions: Sync4j is a Java based solution, which requires setting up a Java server (JBoss or Tomcat). I run Apache, and I prefer to use a solution that also uses Apache.

The second option is a PHP solution with a mySQL back-end. That sounds a lot better! I quickly set up the database and installed the script. But my phone could not synchronize. :-( I assume that my phone uses the binary WBXML format, which is not yet supported by the script…

What next?

[Update 2004.05.12]: I found a free service where I can store my calendar en addresses: Mobical. It is a pitty that they do not support notes and tasks yet, but at least I can backup my address book. Now all I have to do is find a SyncML plug-in for Palm Desktop, and I will be the happiest mobile user in the world!

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.

I decided to search again, and found Building a Better Wap Diary describing how to set up a WAP site with individual archives. This sounded interesting, since until now I published the last X items in a single file, without the possibility to view archived posts. I quickly set to work, using the provided templates as the base for my own styled pages. I checked the result on two different phones and on a WAP emulator on the internet, and it looked alright on all of them. The new WAP site is better in three ways:

• The index page contains only the titles of the last entries. Before it contained also the full texts. Therefore, the index will load much faster;
• Now all texts are available, in stead of only the latest ones. I only have to wait for Google to pass by, and I expect an increase in the number of visitors;
• I also included the comments and trackbacks in the individual archives.

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:

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. Excite obviously does not like me.

[Update 2004.05.07]: Added MSN [Update 2004.05.11]: Added A9

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…

What I always did in these situations was send the URL by e-mail to my personal e-mail address. Other people post them on their site, and use Google to retrieve them, but I am not that advanced yet.

Anyways, I haven’t been satisfied with this solution for a while, so I was full of joy when I found the Bookmarks Synchronizer for FireFox. I configured this little add-on to grab a file from my FTP server when starting FireFox, and to write the changes to this file when closing FireFox. Now I only have to maintain one single bookmarks file, which I can use at all my computers!

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. Though in general it is handy to have the configuration option close to the functionality, in this case it definitely gets in the way. If I have to confirm the action each time I use the fast access button, the access won’t be that fast anymore!

Another thing bothering me with many phones is the hassle I have to go through to send a SMS message. After writing the message, I have to go through the following steps to send it to somebody from my phone list:

1. The first screen asks me directly to enter the phone number to send the message to. Since I (and usually many other people) only send messages to people from my address list, I press the fast access button that brings me to my address list;
2. In the address list, I search or browse to find the right person and press Select;
3. If I have stored more than one phone number for this person, the phone lets me choose the number I want. Icons show which kind of phone it is;
4. The chosen number appears again for verification. Since I am not so good in remembering phone numbers, I always choose OK here;
5. Finally, the message is being sent…

Usually I need a minimum of 7 key-presses to send my message. If you compare that with how easy it is to write the message —T9 is great—, you can only come to the conclusion that something is going wrong here.

Maybe this set-up is useful for some people, but I assume that most people are like me, and almost always send messages to people from the phone list. In my opinion, the procedure should be the following:

1. The first thing to show should be the phone list. If I want to manually enter a number, I can use a fast access key;
2. After selecting the name from the list, I would like that the message is immediately sent to the number listed in the mobile field of that persons details. I can imagine that some people would like to see all numbers for that person to choose from, but for me that won't be necessary. They could make this configurable;
3. After that, the message is being sent...

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:

1. A good price
2. Small size (I usually wear my cellphone in the pockets of my trousers)
3. Easy to use

My first criteria limited the selection to those models for which my provider had an offer. Of these I could immediately remove all camera phones, smart phones, and big old models which left me with 3 phones to choose from (I don’t remember which were the other two). This brought me to my third criterion, usability. The girl told me that all phones are equally easy to use, which made me shock in horror, since most phones have major usability problems! And each generation of phones gets more features and thus more horrible usability decisions are made.

After trying out the three models a little bit, I decided to go for the Siemens M55, even though it had a big usability problem popping up immediately: on the main screen two fast access buttons are shown: ‘menu’ on the right, and a book icon on the left. I expected that the book icon would directly open up my address book, but to my horror a confirmation screen appeared, on which I had to select ‘yes’ to open my address book. Of course the people in the shop could not explain me why I had to press the button twice to open up a basic function as the address book.

Anyway, I have a cellphone again and still many hours to go to find out how things work.

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.

So for all my future visitors from Holland, here is our Dutch shopping list:

1. Jonge kaas
2. Dropjes (zacht zoet)
3. Chicken Tonight
4. Mix voor lasagne
5. Cup-a-Soup Tomaat (Toscaans of Chinees geen bezwaar)
6. Tijgernootjes
7. Hagelslag
8. Pepernoten (alleen in november en december uiteraard)
9. Chocoladeletters (eveneens alleen in november en december)
10. Brylcream (hier zijn ze zo modern dat ze alleen nog maar gel en wax hebben)

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. This to initiate them to the Catalan culture of spending a lot of time eating and drinking, usually a few hours later than they do in Holland – we had supper at 23:00. Saturday morning was a typical vacation morning. After sleeping a bit longer than usual, taking a shower and having a long breakfast, the morning was over. Time to head over to the city centre to take a beer on a terrace! Back home we had a long lunch and a short sleep (siesta!). When it started to become dark we walked outside to do some window shopping and compare the prices with those in Holland. In the evening Berry and I went to see a Basketball match, while Manon and Maria José had some tapas. We finished the day in a fine restaurant. After so much eating and drinking, we decided to have a slightly more active day on Sunday. The morning was the same as on Saturday, but after that we took the car to visit Montserrat and Sitges. At the end of the day we left them in front of a hotel in the middle of the Ramblas of Barcelona, so they would not have to travel a lot on Monday. Berry and Manon: thanks for getting us to relax!

> To set a blank blue homepage in Internet Explorer, do the following:

1. Click Tools and choose Internet Options.
2. On the General tab, set the homepage to about:mozilla.
3. Click OK. No comments…