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. But I managed to stick to my plan:
Everything is fully operational, but it has a horrible design. I hope to fix all that this week, take my summer holidays and open the site on August 1st.
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.”
The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his IBM Thinkpad and connected it to a cell phone, then he surfed to a NASA page on the internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and then opened up a database and an Excel spreadsheet with complex formulas. He sent an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he prints out a 130 page report on his miniaturized printer then turns to the shepherd and says… “You have exactly 1586 sheep.”
“That is correct; take one of the sheep.”said the shepherd.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and bundle it into his car. Then the shepherd says: “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?”
“OK, why not.” answered the young man.
“Clearly, you are a consultant.” said the shepherd.
“That’s correct.” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answers the shepherd. “You turned up here although nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business… Now give me back my dog.”
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. We will probably end up buying a new car, unless we are lucky enough to buy a showroom model.
The second question, what kind of car?, was also easily answered: we live in the city centre, so big cars are out of the question. And considered my length and the fact that we regularly use the car to go away with our friends, really small cars are also not suited for us. So that leaves us with the regular tourist cars and MPVs.
Since every brand offers these models, we made up a list of all dealers in Lleida and started to visit them last Saturday. Unfortunately, almost all of them were closed, since the day before was a bank holiday! In the end we managed to visit the dealers for Peugeot and Renault, and came home with a lot of information about these cars.
We also bought some magazines with the typical list of all brands and models in the back, and while browsing all that information I quickly noticed that I simply had way too much information. I need a way to get rid of all surplus of information, I won’t buy a Ferrari and don’t have the slightest idea whether 150 Nm is OK or not, so fired up Google to search for the table in the car magazines in text or Excel format to play with.
Without success. It seems like all the car sites have been made only for car-enthusiasts. Usually the first selection you have to make is the brand and the model, which is exactly the information I want the site to give me! I am very disappointed in what I found.
When I am looking for a mobile phone of €50, I have hundreds of sites to help me, but when I am making one of the biggest purchases of my life, I fall into the hands of the salesmen without any help from the Internet.
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? Should be easy enough, I already us cPanel to manage the site, and I know that an additional script called WebHost Manager is available in which I can create new users and assign hosting packages. I could easily implement this without any additional cost.
What else should I need? A way to receive payments.… Most hosting providers I dealt with use 2CheckOut to receive credit card payments, and I could open a Paypal account as well. Both payment services take a percentage of the sales amount, both come without any set-up costs or monthly charges, so that’s free of risk.
What else? I need to communicate with my clients. Some kind of helpdesk software, which also manages the client’s orders and invoices and which can be linked to the two services above to cash in and preferably to WHM so accounts are generated automatically, after all, I rather spend my time on the beach.
There are some very good and complex packages available, but at this moment I am still dreaming, so I don’t want to spend too much money, and certainly don’t want to pay monthly charges. Google found phpCoin, which looks like it could be a good face towards my clients.
Mmmm, sounds like I could do it. Of course I have to spend some more time on the beach to think about details as the composition of the hosting packages I am going to offer and the name of my little hosting company (I already have some ideasj, and after that I need even more hours to implement all this and make a stunning design for the site. Will this dream ever come true???
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? MyBlogLog gives my that information by tracking the external links you click on. Not with a clumsy redirect, but with elegant java-script. My addiction for statistics is fed again.
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! On this site I will publish news about Point Of Sale (POS) hardware and software and everything related to it. Please have a look at it, and let me know what you think about it.
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. Besides moving and aiming the pointer, they know how to use the three buttons and the scroll wheel at the right moment. Advanced mouse users sometimes use mouse-gesture enabled applications to perform even more functions with the mouse.
Experienced keyboard users are able to reach high key rates using all ten fingers. Besides high speed data entry, they also use the CTRL and ALT keys to navigate through applications.
I rarely meet persons who have reached the highest levels in using both devices. Mouse–wizards usually type with two (or three or four) fingers, while keyboard enthusiast loose time navigating. The problem is that we do not have enough hands. Efficient use of both devices requires three hands: two for the keyboard and on for the mouse. Depending on the type of work done mostly frequently, people become either mouse–addicted or keyboard–bound.
In my work, I receive many interrupts and rarely work more than five minutes in the same application. As a result, my primary input device is the mouse. In the past I have tried to learn to type with ten fingers on the old mechanical typewriter of my mother, but due to my mouse use I have fallen back to a two finger system.
But things are changing. As my work slowly shifts from technical support to marketing and sales, I find myself writing more texts. And the more I write, the more I feel limited by my two–finger technique. I write slow and make many nmistakes. So I decided to use the mouse less and improve my typing skills, preferably using all ten fingers. I am aware that this is going to be very difficult, since old habits are hard to shake off and starting to write with ten fingers will initially decrease my typing speed even more, but I am convinced that I will be more efficient in the long term.
I do not have time to do a special training, but would rather learn it be gradually changing my habits. And of course a gadget freak like me needs some tools to help me. So the first step I took was to install ActiveWords on my computer. ActiveWords is a wonderful application in which you configure words to trigger events. To open the Firefox browser, I simply type firefox and my favourite browser starts. The trick for me is that ActiveWords lets me start applications faster by keyboard than by mouse, even if I use ten fingers to type. Another benefit of ActiveWords is that the Misspellings plug-in corrects my mistypings within any application! It works exactly like the auto correct feature of Microsoft Word, but is works system wide. I have been using ActiveWords for some days now, and even though I sometimes enter the keywords with only two fingers, I am very happy about it.
Another tool which I am planning to use more is Emacs, the amazing extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. Emacs interests me for its huge range of features, which all can be controlled by keyboard. In the past I have met some Emacs-wizards who were able to write and edit very efficiently and I have used it a little bit in my UNIX days. I am aware that Emacs has a steep learning curve but it looks like a long-term winner for me.
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. This saves me about 15 minutes of work every week!
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!) which also made MMS active. After talking 5 minutes with customer support they also told me that they have activated roaming, so the next time I go abroad I can call home. In theory, everything should be alright now, but… somehow I still can’t send nor receive e-mail. And that is exactly the feature I want most!!!
To be continued…
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:
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. But now I want to send my photos, so I checked the Amena site for instructions. Without success. So tonight I will try out the support department. And when I speak to them I can also activate roaming, since they have decided to deactivate it by default since most people never leave the country anyway ;-).
It’s not that difficult to do it right!