Our house is one of the few places on earth where you can still find a television without remote control. We have been thinking about upgrading it to one of those modern TFT or plasma screens, but have been waiting for affordable models that incorporate Digital Terrestrial Television. Until today… DTT is available for some time now, but television sets are still running behind on this. This morning I ran into a very good offer for a Nokia Mediamaster 110 DTT set-top box.

I know many blonde jokes, but this blonde joke is by far the best!

A typical winter day in Lleida

phpCOIN is the software used by BryteNet hosting to manage orders, invoicing and the helpdesk. Tuesday a vulnerability has been discovered allowing atackers to execute remote code on the server. When a fix was published I immediately installed it on the server, but the site had already been hacked. To make matters worse, the fix files contained errors, which made that phpCOIN did not produce any output. My server error log showed me where the errrors were, and by adding some parentesis I could fix my site.

It looks like Yahoo! is testing their mobile search bot, resulting in some page requests with a very weird agent string: Nokia6682/2.0 (3.01.1) SymbianOS/8.0 Series60/2.6 Profile/MIDP-2.0 configuration/CLDC-1.1 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0 (compatible; Windowns CE; Blazer/4.0; PalmSource; MOT-V300; SEC-SGHE315; YahooSeeker/MA-R2D2; mobile-search-customer-care AT yahoo-inc DOT com) Now that is a very interesting device! Yahoo! has been able to combine some of the most popular mobile phones into a single device and run several operating systems on it simultaniously!

Now that I have left Bloglines and use RSS Bandit, it came to me that Bloglines is still fetching all those feeds in my name. So if Feedburner reports 9 Bloglines readers, I really should subtract one of them, since I am not using Bloglines anymore. Of course I could go back in and delete all my subscriptions, but nobody ever does that, do you? I wonder how many of Bloglines’ reported tens of thousands of people are zombies like me, still subscribed to feeds but not actually using Bloglines anymore to read them.

I have been looking at Google Personalized Homepage (GPH) before, but quickly decided that it has no additional use for me. GPH offers you the possibility to add content (RSS feeds) to the Google Search home page, which is fine if you only use three or four news sources to stay up-to-date. But if you use several more news sources, you probably already use a feed aggregator to read them, and don’t need the GPH.

I have switched my RSS reader from the web-based Bloglines to the PC based RSS Bandit. I have always used Bloglines, since I wanted to access my feeds from anywhere, but recently came to the conclusion that I only read feeds from exactly two PC’s. Whenever I am traveling, I hardly have the time or possibilities to connect to the Internet, and usually only read my e-mail. Bloglines has many features, but misses one: the ability to work off-line.

[Via Buzznovation]

Squidoo is open for public. Squidoo is a community where members, lensmasters, built Lenses. A lens is simply a page with information about a certain topic. I joined the beta some weeks ago after reading the e-book by Seth Godin, and have created some lenses: Point Of Sale technology; The tech-life of Jeroen Sangers; Apple iBook; Apple Powerbook;Types of web hosting. So far the tools to built lenses, and the time I had available to use them, are limited, but it looks like a viable initiative.

I have two address lists, which I synchronize daily. One copy resides on my Palm Zire 31 which I always take with me, and the other list is my Outlook contacts folder on my Office PC. My address list is growing every day, and each time it costs me more to maintain it. Looking up addresses is fast. The search function on my Palm and the excellent LookOut plug-in for Outlook are very fast.

Here is something not many people know: an open application window consumes more memory than a minimized window. You can use that in your benefit: if you have a lot of memory in your PC, you might want to keep all windows open to be able to switch faster between applications. On the other hand, if you work on a PC with little memory, it is better to keep as many windows minimized as possible to free memory for the current application.

Firefox 1.5 has been released, and I have already installed it on my PC. Why is this news? My PC runs the Spanish version of Windows, and I like my applications to be in Spanish as well. When previous versions were released, I had to wait a few days or even weeks until a Spanish version was available. This time I found the download button shown above on the Firefox site.

Recently there has been a lot of attention for web statistics: first Mint was launched, introducing design and AJAX to web statistics. Soon after that, old-timer NedStat got bought by WebStats4U, which lost most of its clients by adding unwanted advertising to sites using the NedStat counter. And last week Google re-launched Google Analytics, previously known as Urchin. There is a lot going on in a market just as old as the Internet.

We all heard about the problems Google Analytics is having at the moment: after the launch they experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, have temporarily limited the number of new signups. Not only have they stopped accepting new signups, but they also don’t allow existing users to add new website profiles. After the launch I managed to get signed up, and submitted one of my sites to evaluate Google Analytics.

Robert Scoble discovered purple numbers, the usually purple coloured permalinks for paragraphs. I was too fast commenting: The idea is very good, but as you say, nobody is going to do this manually, and in all those months (years?) since the original idea, nobody implemented it in any CMS. I got corrected immediately by David Winer, who’s site has a very good implementation of purple numbers, using the edit time as an anchor to make sure each permalink is unique.

Citizenspeak is the talk of the day. It is a free, easy-to-use service that allows grassroots organizations and activists to launch email campaigns. The only problem is… it does not work! Whenever I try to access the site, I get the following error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: drupal_goto() in /smail_cluster/home/sites/citizenspeak.org/web/modules/i18n/i18n.module on line 33 It looks like the application noticed that I am connecting from Spain, and is trying to serve me a localized page, but fails to do so.

I just found out that you can validate your Google Sitemap by placing an empty HTML file on you site. After validation, Google gives you detailed statistics, including Top Search Queries and Top Search Query Clicks: Even more interesting, they also show crawl statistics with crawl errors and the PageRank distribution for your pages: Very cool! [Via Steve Rubel]

I just noticed that I have published exactly 499 entries on Brain Tags. Time to add number 500!!! So this is number 500, a milestone. Not that it has been difficult to write that much articles, since it took me almost eight years (I wrote the first entry on November 24, 1997). Of course I didn’t start writing regularly until I moved to Spain in 2001, when I had written only 27 entries in four years.

In the past, companies had huge departments for marketing. Marketing means that you send your customers your message. You speak, and they listen. But then came the Cluetrain, followed by the Hughtrain and we started conversations. The ideal tool for conversations is the weblog. On the corporate weblog you can write down your thoughts, and the readers can comment on that. To me, this still does not feel alright. It is still the company who decides on the conversation topic.

Voor·deel·zak 1 fanatiek koopjesjager

As I wrote this morning in The future of feed reading, I am going to try out TailRank. I exported my Bloglines subscriptions to an OPML file and imported this file in TailRank to let them know what I like to read. Then I also added the latest entry on this site end and looked at what TailRank was going to suggest me: Yes, TailRank definitely seems to like my story!

Let’s continue talking about feed reading. Last week I described the five phases of feed reading I had observed. Or actually the first four phases are observations, while the fifth phase is purely speculation. And exactly this fifth phase was the part I received the most feedback on. I found somebody agreeing with this tabloid view. I also received this e-mail from Robert Scoble: That’s interesting. I don’t agree that that’s phase five.

I urgently needed a particular piece of electronics. So I checked the manufacturer’s web site top see where I could buy it. After phoning all possible shops in Lleida, I reverted to an on-line shop. I looked at the available options and choose the biggest company. That turned out to be my biggest mistake: On October 24 I connected to their site, found my item and saw that they had it on stock.

Though RSS feeds are still only used by the ‘lucky few’, I discovered several phases of RSS reading behaviour: In phase 1 you discover RSS. You are very enthusiastic about having the possibility to see all the news from your favourite resources in one place. When visiting a web site you first look for the orange XML or RSS icon to subscribe. People in phase 1 typically subscribe to 1-50 feeds.

This fun, dragging magnetic letters around the screen while 10+ people are doing the same! [Via VoWe]

10 While diving home from work, you have to pull over three times to jot it down and empty your mind. 9 You put your weekly review on a Someday/Maybe list. …NOT! 8 You go to McDonalds for lunch but, before ordering, you draw a mind map of what an ideal fast food meal would look and taste like. 7 You use your Brother P-Touch to label your kitchen drawers. 6 You actually know how to pronounce “Moleskine”.

I just received a cheque from Google. They pay whenever I pass $100, which in my case takes a while. But everytime the cheque arrives it is a happy moment. The arrival of my cheque also triggered a chain of thoughts about advertising on my site. A little bit more than a year ago, I added the Google AdWords to this site. I simply took the existing pages, and looked where I could fit in the AdWords box.

During my last visit to the Netherlands I bought the latest CD from Hallo Venray for a very good price. I have been listening it for two weeks now, and wanted to share some songs with you: Big Catch; Kicking; Paris; Weirdo.

Business blog It’s a small place has a very interesting series of articles describing how BryteNet has been set up technically and commercially. At this moment the series contains the following texts: Why does one start a hosting company? A business plan Setting up the server Business Management Eating our own dogfood

The past 48 hours I have been diving around in our brand new Toyota Corolla Verso, and I feel the King of the road. That feeling mainly comes because this car makes a lot more noise than our previous, old, car, and because it is so much higher. I can look over the cars in front of me, and see much more when I am passing dangerous crossing. In short, I feel more in control, and that is worth a lot when driving in a chaotic Catalan city.

I feel good! We just came back from a week’s holiday in the Netherlands. The aim of our holiday was to relax, and we succeeded. Instead of running from one ‘obligatory’ visit to another, as we usually do when visiting my home country, this time we put the emphasis on what we want. This visit to the Netherlands has been touristic than any previous visit, and we loved every minute of it.

This week our new car arrived in Lleida. It is waiting for us at the car dealer and we can take it home as soon as all paperwork has been arranged. And I hate paperwork! For some days we have been running around Lleida trying to get all necessary pieces of dead tree, but we won’t be able to meet our personal target, which was today. Why today? Well, since we leave tomorrow to spend a week in Harmelen, this means that we’ll only have our new car at the end of this month.

It’s a small place is a new blog I created today. You might be wondering why I am starting a new blog while I even haven’t got the time to update Brain tags regularly! The truth is that I am blogging just as much as always, but I spread my writings over several sites to prevent clutter. If you are interested in my personal life and general writings about technology and travelling, Brain Tags is the place to be.

The last two weeks I have made two business trips; I visited London and the Netherlands. The last two weeks there have been no changes to this site. The obvious conclusion is that travelling and writing don’t go together. I have encountered some reasons for this incompatibility: It is hard to find Internet connections. I spend most of my time in meeting rooms or in the car, without any computer in the neighbourhood.

When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other opportunity.

Street theatre is nice, since it is small-scale and personal. The acts are small, and the audience is small. That’s why they got out of the theatre, and onto the street. That’s why it is called street theatre. A great way to get to know street theatre is to visit a theatre festival. Edinburgh has the most famous theatre festival in the world, and Tàrrega has the most famous Spanish festival.

The street where I live is just inside the ‘blue zone’, the zone where you have to pay to park on the streets. The payment machines are activated on working days from 9-14 and 16-20, the other hours you don’t have to pay. I never pay, since these hours coincide more or less with my working hours, so I can park my car in front of our door for free.

Though we did receive a bid on eBay, the buyer yesterday told me that they decided not to buy the car. His ‘story’ was that he asked for some hours off at his office in order to travel to Lleida and pick up the car, when his boss offered him a lease car for only €90 per month. So now our little Fiat Punto is back on eBay. As I stated before, the car is old, 11 years, but in excellent state, and I am sure it will serve some years more for somebody who takes care about the car.

We all know that almost all comment spam is coming from virus infected PC’s turned into zombies. For a while I suspected that these zombies work with a list of URIs to attack, since attacks always follow the same pattern: suddenly I receive a lot of comments from various IP addresses, but all using the same referrer and posting more or less the same message. Usually attacks take about two days before the comment spam slows down.

BryteNet is growing, but could grow faster. Therefore we decided to offer a sponsoring package, with the following conditions: The size and bandwidth of the sponsored site must be within the limits of the BryteNet Presence package. Any additional resources used will be invoiced; We require a link back to BryteNet on the homepage of the sponsored site; The sponsored site must be non-commercial; There must be a relation between the sponsored site and BryteNet or its owner.

After I left Harmelen four years ago, I also stopped participating in youth activities. Of course I have done some work for Fimcap as their webmaster, but I never visited or participated in any activity. Last weekend we went to Vall d’Aran to spend 24 hours in a Roundabout camp. Roundabout is a Fimcap project in which two groups from different countries spend their summer camp together. This Roundabout was between three groups (Germany, Malta and Catalonia), and this was the third year of the project.

I will be making some changes under the hood of this site. As a result, you might find that you cannot reach the server or that e-mail is bounced. Of course I will try to get everything back in order as soon as possible, in order not to dsiturb your reading pleasure. Note: the maintenance only involves sites under the braintags.com and jeroensangers.com domains. No other sites hosted by BryteNet will be involved in the changes.

At this moment I am updating my MT sites to version 3.2. This is a huge update, and I am running into some issues. My dynamically published POS Blog is currently unavailable, because the core smarty libs are missing in the installation file. I receive the following error message when requesting a page: main(/home/jeroens/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/php/extlib/smarty/libs/core/core.load_plugins.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory My normal blog also gives me an error when rebuilding, stating that I used some tags in the wrong way:

The Internet is a very good medium to get to know new artists. On the site of George I found The Subways, and of course I just had to put them in my jukebox: I Want to Hear What You Have Got To Say and Rock and Roll Queen are waiting to be downloaded.

Fiat Punto TD SX Year: 1994 Exterior colour: White 290000 kilometres Diesel engine 5 doors ITV check until may 2006. Centralised closing, assisted steering, electrical windows. For sale on eBay.

A bloke is in a queue at the supermarket when he notices that the rather dishy blonde behind him has just raised her hand and smiled hello to him. He is rather taken aback that such a looker would be waving to him, and although familiar he can’t place where he might know her from, so he says “sorry do you know me?” She replies “I may be mistaken, but I thought you might be the father of one of my children!

This week we bought a very expensive gadget: a new car! After many visits to many car dealers we were very fed-up with searching. We are happy that we made a decission, mainly because that means that we can spend a Saturday at home, or just walking around. The car is expected to arrive at the end of September.

I just read ‘How to tip properly’ on lifehacker, and was very surprised to read about pre-tipping: In busy clubs or at crowded bars, it is acceptable to “pre-tip” the bartender. This encourages him to respond promptly to your needs, and it keeps you from waiting at the bar. A pre-tip is always at least 5 dollars (and more often 10 or above, depending on how crowded or upscale the bar is).

Today, I proudly present my latest work: BryteNet. BryteNet is going to be the name under which I am going to manage my hosting activities. I am certainly not going to be the cheapest hosting provider, but my prices are far lower than the average European hosting company (XS4ALL still asks €23 for only 50Mb space) and I can support you in English, Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. Furthermore, the only limits I put in my packages are disk space and bandwidth.

Coming back from my holidays, I found an awfully empty homepage on this site. For the moment it will stay like this, since I am wading through hundreds of e-mail messages (you will get your answer), comment spam (none of which made it to the live web), dirty cloths to wash, photos to develop, and a new site to launch today :-D. Stay tuned!

Just a small note to point you to a new feature on this site. As of today Brain Tags has a Folksonomy page, showing the most important themes I write about in a visual way.

To make dreams come true you need two things: focus and time. Without focus a project takes way too much time, and without time… Anyway, I had a dream that I wanted to come true. With some spare time in the weekend and in the lunch breaks, which are 2½ hours here, the second factor was available. I struggled a little bit more with the first factor, since I tend to jump from database design to logo design to testing out e-mail automation.

This is way too cool! Google released Google earth, a Windows desktop application to access their geographical data.

Saying java is better because it works on all platforms is like saying anal sex is better because it works on all genders. – Mike V.

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Broni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd… “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully-grazing flock and calmly answered, “Sure.

Our car is about to reach 300.000 km, and the bills of the garage tell us that it is time to say goodbye to our Fiat Punto and start looking for something else. The first question,new or second hand?, was quickly answered; as the second hand market is almost inexistent here in Spain. Everybody buys new and keeps driving it until the car reaches the same stage as our current car.

The temperature is slowly rising to a level where there are only two places to stay: inside an air-conditioned office or on the beach. This weekend I choose the latter, resulting in a lot of time to dream… I thought about this site, and how I am only using a fraction of the available disk space and bandwidth. What a waste! What if I just sold the space and bandwidth I am not using?

A trend I noticed on my sites lately: referrer spam is dying out, trackback spam is the main focus of spammers. This makes sense, since most sites only have one page showing their referrer statistics, if shown at all, while they usually accept trackback pings on every page. For me it changes little, since the only page showing my statistics is not indexed by the search engines, and my trackback pings are perfectly protected by the combo MT-Blacklist and SpamLookup.

I am a statistics junkie. I check the access statistics for this site at least once a day. Also the statistics FeedBurner offers get checked regularly, so I know what the interest of my feed readers is. Both statistics tell me where you come from and what you read while you are here. But that’s it! I miss information on that last little bit of information about my website. What do you find interesting and where do you go after reading my texts?

This small HTML file will on some computers drive Windows into a blue screen: Try it out if you want by clicking here. [via VoWe]

A little bit more than a year ago, I started dumping links on this site. In a year time I added 650 interesting links, which serve as my knowledge base. It happens more and more that I start looking for information in the linkdump before going to Google. If I know that I have read something before, the chances are quite big I have dumped it there. The linkdump is my little section of the internet, with only the themes I am interested in.

Wie werd wat, waar, wanneer, waarmee en wat hield hij boven zijn hoofd? Wat heeft het getal 1251 hiermee te maken?

My schedule for next week: Oslo — Vianen — Hannover — Dortmund — Frankfurt — Stuttgart. If you live close to any of these places, you might meet me, a phone call increases your chances. If you live further away, you might not hear/read from me for a while.

Know your rights!

With over seven years of blogging experience and after three years working in the international department of a POS software company, it is only logical to create a POS weblog. The point of sale world has a lot in common with normal PCs, but there are some differences. Old hardware (black and white terminals) goes hand-in-hand with the latest technologies (RFID), which make it a very interesting niche market. Ten minutes clicking around in cPanel and Movable Type, and POS blog was born!

Most computers have two input devices: a mouse and a keyboard. The mouse is mainly used to navigate in the GUI, while the keyboard is used to enter data. Both input devices need some training to get used to, though I still picture my father picking up the mouse from the table and moving it through the air. Experienced mouse users are ably to move the pointer from one side of the screen to the other side to click on a tiny button within a fraction of a second, which is becoming increasingly difficult as the screen resolutions get bigger.

Microsoft finally found out that it is not wise to use years as version numbers. Their latest server software called Windows 2003 Server sounds very old in 2005. This week microsoft announced two new products which follow up on a year–version: Microsoft Mobile 5.0, and Microsoft Office 12.

This is the feedmap for Lleida. I feel very lonely :-( They managed to locate my feed surprisingly precise!

Yes! I managed to get my phone configured, so now I am finally a member of the ‘moblog crew’. You can expect more pictures from now on. The trick was to define another GPRS connection, using another APN name. Does anybody know what this APN is? [Update 2005.05.03]: APN stands for Access Point Name, which is the name of the destination network.

Quack quack: Duck Ska.

In the last 12 months I haven’t found a single false positive in the spam folder of my mailbox. I still receive some false negatives, but that doesn’t bother me. No false positives means that I am able to change my processing workflow. Until now, all spam ended up in the spam folder, which I checked for false positives once a week. Today I changed my mail configuration to discard all messages flagged as spam.

One week ago I received my new mobile camera-phone. I was happy, since I wanted to use it for publishing photo’s on Flickr. How disappointed I was when I found out that Amena had delivered me a half configured phone. No international roaming, GPRS, MMS or e-mail configured. :-( In short, my wonderful multimedia phone was delivered with all the multimedia functions disabled. Now one week later, I have managed to get GPRS activated (I have to pay activation costs!

The idea has been lying on the shelves for over two months now, and today I finally did it. Besides a big all-in-one feed, I have created some more specific feeds: Brain <Tags> (weblog): http://braintags.com/index.xml. Brain <Links> (linkdump): http://braintags.com/links.xml. Brain <Pics> (photos): http://braintags.com/photos.xml. Brain <Life> (all-in-one): http://braintags.com/full.xml. All current subscribers will from now on get the weblog feed instead of the all-in-one feed. And of course, all these feeds have been outsourced to FeedBurner.

Why is it so difficult to do? When I buy a phone, I want all functions to work. Since yesterday I am using my new phone that came with the new contract. Since this phone has a camera, I would like to take pictures and send them to my friends or publish them on Flickr. Well, that is not possible, since I do not have GPRS. Last year I had exactly the same problem with Movistar, but that solved itself after a while.

People are individualists; we prefer to do things alone and don’t care about the others. Fortunately, we are also ‘intelligent’ and realise that we need other people in certain situations. But if this is not strictly necessary, we are selfish. This is a big pity, since we can do so much more when we co-operate! I was realising this when I was waiting at the luggage belt of the airport. As usual, everybody was bending over the belt to see whether his or her luggage was coming and thereby blocking the view of the people behind him or her, who in their turn had to bend even more over the belt to see something.

The main reason we went to the Netherlands last weekend was to visit our family. Finn is about a month old, so it was about time to meet him! And babies are such a great subject for photos, so I uploaded some to Brain Pics.

It’s a TV, it plays DVDs, and it’s a beer fridge, all-in-one! What else could you possibly want? [Via Gizmodo]

Tomorrow morning I will travel to Harmelen again. It will be a short visit to see Finn, the newborn son of Esther and Terry, and of course to visit the party of the ‘Vrienden van JN Harmelen’. Until next week!

Some weeks ago, we decided to change mobile provider. We have a contract with Telefonica Movistar, but most people we phone with are at Amena. We did some calculation and came to the conclusion that we could save on our bill by changing to Amena as well. This weekend we finally found the time to head to the Amena office, and we explained out plans. The nice lady in the shop asked us some questions on our phone behaviour, who, when and how much, and she explained us about all the possibilities of the different packages.

Will all these WordPress users now switch back to Movable Type?

Zie De Volkskrant: STAP merkt op dat de drinkschuren zich ontwikkelen tot geduchte concurrenten van de plaatselijke horeca. Hoewel alcoholverkoop zonder vergunning illegaal is, wordt er veelal niet tegen opgetreden door de controleurs van de Drank- en Horecawet. De Koninklijke Horeca Nederland (KHN) dringt dan ook aan op sluiting van de drinkschuren. Volgens een woordvoerder van de KHN werken de schuren alcoholmisbruik in de hand. Jongeren gaan op zoek naar alternatieven vanwege de slechte kwaliteit (en prijs!

Before: Now: After: ?????? The redesign of Brain Tags has officially started!

One of the songs I always play when I need to get rid of some excess energy: Million Dollar Love by Dub War.

Have a look at the following screen: This is the screen Firefox shows me when a site requires me to log in. Note that there is no information about the URL of the site or the realm requesting me to log in. You can imagine the problem this gives when I open many tabs at the same time: I have no idea of which site is going to receive my details.

It is Easter holiday for me, which means that I have a weekend of four days! I am very happy about it, though most of my friends here have two weeks of holidays. Anyway, we take the opportunity to leave town for some days. Tonight we will drive to la Seu d’Urgell, which is about 150km from here, and which will be our home for these days. Tomorrow we will visit Andorra to do some tax-free shopping and to enjoy the mountains.

Today is a very quiet day, so I have some time to upload some photo’s and write a short post. You can see the photo’s in my CeBIT set. Just like last year, the last two days of the CeBIT are very boring. The days are long since I spend most of it waiting or visitors. Even though, I have a positive feeling about this year’s show. We have made some very interesting contacts, which might turn out successful.

This view is very uncommon because of the geographic position of Lleida, shielded by mountains and a lot of land.

Two songs! Omaha from the Counting Crows and Believe from K’s Choice.

I just uploaded some photos from the Euroshop trade show. You can see the booth and the house I stayed in.

Six days with almost no internet connection gave me a backlag. I just waded through all e-mail and some RSS-feeds, and hope to process all that information today. As of today I will focus completely on the CeBIT show, show posting will probably stay on a low level for some more time. The EuroShop was in my opinion a moderate success. We made some good propaganda, but I would have liked to have more contacts.

The EuroShop trade fair starts Saturday, so you can imagine what is on my mind at this moment. I just finished packing my suitcase, and will take the airplane tomorrow morning at 8:00. Ai, that means I have to leave home at 4! As I wrote before, I will be in hall 6, stand G30, the stand of the company Wirth. Besides ICG Software, the hardware companies Star and AQSonic will be on the stand.

Instead of publishing, I have spend some time thinking about my site. The trigger was the article Stinky links by Matt Haughey. At that moment I had just created my FeedBurner feed combining my posts with my Flickr photo’s and my linkdump, and I knew that I had done something wrong. Readers following me because of my Movable Type writings are probably not interested in my holiday photo’s, and people who want to know about my life abroad don’t want to be bothered by my link dump.

Mmm! Flogging Molly! Tobacco Island

It’s trade show time! The coming weeks I will present our products in two trade shows in Germany. Note to self: start practising German. The first show is the EuroShop in Düsseldorf. Though this show is aimed at end-users, I will go to support our German distributor. We will share the stand with some hardware companies. At the moment I am working vary hard to make leaflets for fashion shops, shoe shops, perfume shops, supermarkets,… Besides that I am double checking the quality of our German software and arranging a thousand of small things.

While reading the great joke Google Maps find Weapons of Mass Destruction, I noticed something strange: all searches performed without specifying a state give results in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Not exactly the states where I expect many things to happen. I did some more tests, and each time the results were found in the centre of the country. I guess Google simply found too many results to display, and instead of showing the most significant results for the terms, it used some geographical parameters to decide what results to display…

Google is generous today! I have 50 invites for a Gmail account to give away. Mail, IM, phone me or leave a comment if your interested.

It took a while, but I finally uploaded the photo’s from our holidays in Thailand in August last year. I created a set, Thailand, to hold all of them, but since I have a limit of only three sets I probably will remove it in the future. You can always find these foto’s by the tag thailand, or simply look at the pictures from August 2005. I love the many ways of organizing photo’s that Flickr offers!

Maintaining a site like this takes a lot of effort. After successfully having outsourced pinging external sites to the Ping-o-Matic, and using Flickr to host my photo’s, I decided to start using the FeedBurner service for making sure that all aggregators get up-to-date information. Just as with the pings and photo’s, the reason is that FeedBurner offers additional advantages (statistics, feed optimization, Flickr integration, …) that I am currently unable to supply myself.

This week a vulnerability has been discovered in Movable Type. Until today, I did not have the time to upgrade my MT installation, and I hoped that my site had not yet been attacked. After upgrading I found an e-mail message from my hosting provider, stating that they had patched all MT installations on their servers!!!! Even though they don’t support any software installed by their clients, they already patched my system to prevent damage.

Referrer spam on this site is increasing daily. Until now I use a two-step method to block them, even though I don’t publish my referrers. First of all, I maintain a list of used domain names. I check my referrers every day, and add newly found domains to the list. If a visitor uses one of these domains as referrer, the request is automatically blocked, and the IP address of the visitor is automagically put on a second list, making sure that future visits will be blocked as well.

Copied from Zezunja: Joga from Björk.

It is amazing how many talented people there are. And many of them closer to you than you can imagine! Yesterday we went to see EnFado in the city concert hall. EnFado is a quartet playing traditional portuguese fado music. The concert yesterday was given in co-operation with dancers of the citie’s dance school, which gave the performance more to see. Between the songs they explained what fado is, and where it comes from.

For people who don’t know where Lleida is: it lies about 160 km south-west of Barcelona, in the centre of the Segre valley, surrounded by hills. These hills make that Lleida usually is free of wind, which has great influence on the weather in Lleida. In summer, the lack of wind makes it 5-10°C hotter than e.g. Barcelona, with weeks of 40°C. The inhabitants prefer to spend their free time in the nearby pyrenees or beaches, which have a more pleasant temperature.

To enjoy the Three Kings tomorrow: Sunburn from Muse.

Tomorrow will be the day that many Dutch blogs will show the special action page. The list of participating bloggers is getting bigger and bigger, and includes some prominent bloggers. You can read all about it on the action page. Today I received the instructions, which consist of simply replacing the index.html page with the action page. This won’t work for Movable Type blogs, since MT will overwrite the index.html page when a comment is posted to an entry.

Some nice music: Iron Flower from K’s Choice.

My good ol’ club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source (MOS) CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change. It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning.

The year of the rooster has officially begun. I wish everybody all the best and a lot of love in this year. May all your wishes come through!!!