Jeroen Sangers

Ik wil geen loopbaan, ik wil een glijbaan

(Remy van Green Lizard)

I like computers… as long as they work.

But lately I’ve had too much problems with them. I still didn’t have time to fix them all, so the cover of my PC lies next to my computer, and my desk is full with computer parts and little screws. People knowing me a little bit can imagine my feelings about this, since I always prefer to work in a clean and organized environment.

The problems started when the hosting provider for fimcap had been taken over by another company, and the server migrated to a new platform. As a result, our scripts were broken, and SSI worked in another way, so we had to change the extension of all files. All in all a lot of work, which I still haven’t completely finished.

Besides that, I can only download the access logs from a password protected site, almost impossible to automate. I have contacted the support desk many times, but answers are typically slow. Anyway, for the moment things are almost running as before again, but we will surely move to another provider after the current paid term expires.

While I was working hard to fix all the problems described above, the hard disk of my own computer started having problems. Each time after working for about half an hour, the disk started making an awful noise and the computer halted. After waiting an hour, I could start up the computer again for another thirty minutes of work.

In the cooling down period, I used my laptop computer, which also has some problems since I dropped it on the floor. I cannot use it while the batteries are recharging, and the batteries only last for (again) thirty minutes.

You have to know that both computers are very old, my desktop is seven years old and my laptop probably 8. You could say that they are way too old, but I disagree.

My desktop with its Cyrix P133+ processor is more than fast enough for me, since all I do is read my e-mail, visit some web pages (no problem as long is you don’t have Flash installed), and create HTML and CSS files.

Anyway, since I just bought a new computer for my in-laws, I took their old machine, took out the hard disk and started installing.

At this moment I have installed just the basics to start working again: Windows 98SE, Microsoft Office, HTML-kit, TopStyle Pro, WS_FTP Pro, Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird.

It is not ready yet, I still have to install Trillian, Acrobat Reader and Xenu Link Sleuth, and there is some more configuration to be done.

But at least I am working again. And after all, that’s why I have a computer, isn’t it?

A List Apart is the resource for the latest trends in web design. Today the third version of their site became available, with no more than three new articles.

How disappointed was I when I noticed that they use a fixed width for their pages, a really small font by default, a font colour that lacks contrast and that some parts of the text are rendered unreadable with the blue background instead of white. I don’t know whether the last problem is a bug in Firebird or a coding problem, since it disappears when I reload the page.

Fortunately the content is much better than their new design!

Imagine that I would have a lot of spare time. And imagine that I still remember how to program applications, and know all the ins and outs of Perl, PHP or Python. Imagine all that…

If all that would be true, I would create a Content Management System. A CMS is an application in which you can enter your texts in a very easy manner, and after that the application does all sorts of things with permissions, rules and templates to create for example a web site and/or a PDF document.

One example of a CMS is Movable Type, which I use to create this site. I only have to enter the text of my article, and MT creates a page with this text and a comment form, adds a summary to the main page, updates the monthly archive overview, etc.

MT is made especially for sites that post texts in a chronological order. There are also other types of CMS applications like MMBase for multimedia content and Plone for general content. There are many CMS systems out there, so why do I want to create another one?

Simple because the CMS I am looking for does not exist. I am not looking for this site, I am perfectly happy with MT, but I am looking for a solution for the Fimcap site. This site is basically a collection or relatively statically documents, which are ordered in folders. Something very simple.

What I am looking for is a tool that gives the users a simple screen in which they can enter their text, and something to specify its location. After saving, the tool should automatically create the folders and add the new document in the navigation menus.

I know that there are some CMS applications that can do this, but I am looking for something very easy to configure and use, without spending months tweaking my application.

The best example I have is Microsoft FrontPage. Although it produces horrible code, they do have an easy way to manage your site with their organizational chart view. I only have to select the parent page, press the Insert button, change the name and start typing my text.

It is that way of working that I am looking for, only implemented as a server-based CMS system, so I can work from every computer. I also don’t want to work in preview mode, but just enter my text in a text box with a limited set of buttons to add some basic mark-up (Textile?). I can imagine starting from a sitemap page to enter new pages, or adding an ‘Edit’ and ‘Add new page’ button to pages when a user is logged in.

If this solution would be easy enough to set up, I can imagine that a lot of hobby sites, local clubs, churches and schools would start using it; in fact, everybody with a basic site made with FrontPage.

The template system could be set up like in Movable Type, specifying different templates for different types of content. Of course it would come with a basic set of predefined document types (agenda, product description, event, news,…) and several style sheets to choose from.

Yes, if I really had a lot of time and programming knowledge, I would create such a CMS. Or does it already exist????

Last week I made some changes to this site to prevent spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses from this site and from posting spammy comments.

Unfortunately I made some mistakes, which made that visitors posting comments last week were automatically blocked from my site.

Last Thursday I fixed that problem, but also accidently introduced a new problem, so that comment posters received a 404 error.

As far as I know now, all issues have been solved, so go ahead and type your comments!

I am receiving quite some spam, which fortunately gets filtered out at my mail server. And there it sits quietly in my spam folder, waiting for the moment that I will delete it forever.

Sometimes I’ve had the feeling that I have to do something with it, but I never knew what. Alright, once in a while I report my spam to SpamCop, but that makes that I have to spend even more time on my spam. I want to do something with my spam, without having to spend a lot of time on it. Something like this Spamblog.

Brilliant! That’s it! I want that too!! I am going to create another weblog, and forward all my spam to an e-mail to Movable Type gateway. Let’s share my spam with the world!

I am not the only having the opinion that there is nothing but buying a real CD. Favourite quote from the comments:

Download is voor pubers met een budgetair probleem en een te snelle Internet-verbinding…

I also think that CD’s are way too expensive, but there are so many good CD’s missing in my collection, that I usually end up buying three old ones for the same price as a new CD.

[Update 2004.01.21]: Removed broken link

Today we turned on the heater for the first time, since the temperature dropped below 20°C.

Summer’s over…

There are some sites, whose content only consists of answers to Which XXXXX are you? contests.

To me it looks as a very cheap way to generate content, and tell something about yourself without telling anything concrete.

I never added this kind of stuff to my site, untill I found What Pixies song are you? Of course, if they mention my favourite band, I’ll have to do it:

In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine You got your good thing, and I've got mine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine In Heaven, everything is fine You got your good thing, and you've got mine

In Heaven

You’re mysterious, picky, and a bit aloof. Some people say you have a very cheery personality, but it’s hard to say because you mask your emotions behind dark pretenses. You enjoy watching obscure movies and going to plays, but by the end of the day you’re usually too wound-up by the ironies of your life to relax.

Mmmm… that doesn’t sound like me. Guess this will be the last post of this kind of contest results.

[Update 2004.01.21] Removed broken link

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

In het Nederlands:

Vlgones een oznrdeeok op een Eglnese uvinretsiet mkaat het neit uit in wlkee vloogdre de ltteers in een wrood saatn, het einge wat blegnaijrk is is dat de eretse en de ltaatse ltteer op de jiutse patals saatn. De rset van de ltteers mgoen wllikueirg gpletaast wdoren en je knut vrelvogens gwoeon lzeen wat er saatt. Dit kmot odmat we neit ekle ltteer op zcih lzeen maar het wrood als gheeel.

I guess everybody has received the message above, but it is not true.

I just love numbers, and check the access statistics of my sites almost on a daily basis. Sometimes when I visit a site, I also check the statistics of that site. What kind of people are reading that site? Where do they come from? What were they looking for? All very interesting information…

My own visitors could not have a look behind the screens of this site, since my access statistics are located on the management control panel, safely protected by a password.

The application to generate these statistics is called AWStats, which I was using already before I moved to my current hosting provider. Since I knew the structure of the application, I figured that it should be possible to install AWStats myself, and have my copy point to the data files that are generated automatically by my provider's copy of AWStats.

And that is exactly what I've done. I only needed to copy the main awstats.pl file, the lib directory and the icons directories, and could use the existing configuration file (after changing the DirCgi parameter) to have everything working.

So now everybody can check my access statistics!!!

Maybe someday I will create an About this site page, on which I will put a permanent link to my statistics. Some people put this link on their home page, but in my opinion this feature is of no use to the general visitor, and only adds bloat to the home page.

There are many ways to keep contact with the rest of the world.

By far the best way is to meet them in a bar, drinking a beer together. Unfortunately, this is not always a viable solution, so I also make use of electronics to keep contact.

Number two on my list is the good ol' phone, which has the benefit of meta-communication (emotions, emphasis,…) over the other electronic methods.

Then I use of course the internet to communicate, I am using e-mail (more personal), Usenet newsgroups (good for technical problems) and this site.

However, it might take a while before I receive feedback to the things I express using these media. Then we have the two I’s: IRC and IM. The first I use when I have a technical problem that needs to be fixed urgently, the second for all personal communication for which using the telephone would be overkill.

Considering IM, at work I use Microsoft Messenger a lot. We have a lot of contacts abroad, and small companies are not able to hang on the phone to talk with the other side of the world for half the day.

Since we are basically a Microsoft shop, and most people have Messenger already installed on their machines, we are using this.

Personally, I am not a big fan of Messenger, mainly because you have no option of connecting without giving away your e-mail address. For business use this is no problem, but for my personal use, I prefer a solution that does not give away more than strictly necessary.

Until I moved to Spain I have been using ICQ at home, and today I started using it again to be able to solve some problems on the fimcap site.

So back to ICQ! I installed the Lite version at home, and everywhere else I can use the web version. For those people who also use ICQ: my number is 11807773. Everybody else can use my Messaging Center to send me a message when I’m on-line.

Visitors using older browsers like IE might have noticed that I recently started serving advertisements through Google.

People using more modern browsers as Mozilla or Firebird might not have noticed this, since these advertisements are not visible for them. This is not because I want to tease IE users (everybody is free to use any software to visit my site), or give compliments to Moz users (their clicks are also worth some money), but only because Google’s scripts are not working when send as application/xhtml+xml. I found the following errors in my Javascript console:

Error: w.google_ad_client has no properties Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Line: 37 Error: google_ad_width is not defined Source File: http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Line: 128

Of course I reported these errors to Google, but all I received was the following reply:

Hello Jeroen,

The errors that you were experiencing last night were due to an AdSense system upgrade yesterday evening. This upgrade unfortunately created some technical difficulties and were temporarily unable to serve ads to sites in certain browsers. Not all browsers were effected.

However, our engineers have identified the problem, and I am happy to inform you that the issue is now resolved. Ads are now running on AdSense websites and you should not be seeing these errors anymore.

We value you as an AdSense publisher, and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you. If you are continuing to have problems with this or have any other questions or concerns, please let us know by replying to this email. One of our AdSense specialists would be happy to assist you. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Of course I answered them that the problem still exists, but until now I haven’t received an answer.

[Update 2003.09.26] Answer from Google:

Hello Jeroen,

Thank you for writing us about this issue you are experiencing with your AdSense code. Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem. We taking your page, http://braintags.com/archives/2003/08/applicationxhtmlxml/, and running it through the W3C’s XML validator tool ( http://validator.w3.org/), we find that the entire page including our JavaScript code is currently XML complaint. (See Results: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2Farchives%2F2003%2F08%2Fapplicationxhtmlxml%2F). Unfortunately we are unable to replicate this problem you are experiencing.

From previous emails it appears you state you are having this problem in Mozilla 1.4. Here is a list of browsers that supports our code https://www.google.com/adsense/faq-tech#q10. Are there other browsers on this list that you are having difficulty with? Also can you include a screenshot of the error since we are unable to replicate this problem on our end. Please include any additional information you may find may be useful in helping to resolve this issue.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

It looks like they don’t understand anything about specifying the MIME type when sending a page, so I send the following reply.

Hello,

I know that my page is XML compliant, that surely is not the problem.

You have not been able to replicate the problem, because you have not used a gecko-based browser. Normally I send my pages with MIME type text/html. This is what IE and the W3C validator get. Only to browsers which tell me in their request headers that they accept the MIME type application/xhtml+xml (like Mozilla and Firebird), I use this MIME type to send my files.

Note that even though the validator did not complain, I did not send it a valid page, since the specification tells that XHTML1.1 should be delivered as application/xhtml+xml.

To reproduce the error, just visit my page with Mozilla or Firebird, and you will see that the AdSense box will not appear. The only screenshot I can send you is the JavaScript console, but it only contains the two messages I have send before.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Sangers

[Update 2003.10.01] And finally Google realises that their script is not working:

Hello Jeroen,

We appreciate your taking the time to offer us this feedback and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve Google AdSense. As AdSense is still a young program, new features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful. This information has been passed on to our engineers and they will look into allowing our ads to be served in xhtml+xml pages.

Sincerely, The Google Team

It took them almost a month (I reported this problem on September 4^th) to realise that something is wrong. Let’s see how long it will take them to fix this problem.

How could I have missed the news! One of my favourite bands is getting together again.

Although the Pixies are not well-known by the general public, they have greatly influenced many big bands as Nirvana and the Distillers.

I was lucky enough to see them perform life in Vredenburg, Utrecht during their Doolittle tour, and later have seen spin-offs Frank Black & the Catholics and the Breeders; all very impressive concerts.

I surely hope that they will cross the Atlantic with their new tour.

So many things to do, and only 24 hours in a day. I guess everybody sometimes has the feeling that too many things lie around unfinished.

For me, these are some small, usually technical, things as fixing the stylesheet of this site so the menu appears on the right place in IE, converting this site to PHP (so I can degrade pages to XHTML1.0 for IE), fix the light in the stairway, reading hundreds of pages I have bookmarked lately, look for a new computer for my in-laws, build a wireless network at home, put the latest Link on the Fimcap site, paint our front door, learn how to use ZOPE for future use for Fimcap, install freeBSD on my laptop…

Looking at this list, I wonder where all my time is going. Lets see: 9 hours sleeping, 9 hours working, 1.5 hours household (cooking, cleaning, ironing), 2.5 quality time (hours drinking beers on a terrace, watching TV on the sofa, reading the newspaper), 1 hour taking care about myself (eating & shower)… that leaves me 1 hour each day to be productive! I definitely need more hours in a day.

A good holiday is a holiday without internet connection. I had a quite good holiday, so you haven’t read any news from me lately. I did connect to the internet once in a while, but that was only to fix the computer of my parents and to install Mozilla Firebird (if you’re learning to surf the internet, you better do it right). I won’t bother you with my holiday stories, since we didn’t do that much. I was happy to see my friends and family again, and for those that I could not meet: sorry, maybe next time better.

For them moment I have plenty of things to arrange, so I won’t fix the menu bar on this site to work with IE and probably I won’t write a lot neither. That’s all for the moment, I better continue processing my overly full inbox…

I use this site a lot for testing out things. You could say that this site is Forever under construction. Today I have been testing again, and as a result, it looks more horrible in Internet Explorer. And since I am going on holidays, I am not going to fix it until next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have been working on the menu. The whole page header is situated inside a <div>, with an inline ordered list with bottom border as menu. Until today, I did nothing to position the menu, which resulted that the menu walked outside the header if you changed the font size. Not too beautiful…

So today I relatively positioned the header, and specified an absolute position of the menu, so it is always at the border of the containing positioned element, the header.

It solves the problem perfectly, but not in IE. I tested the new stylesheet in IE6, and the menu appeared at the bottom of the screen instead of the bottom of the header. I don’t know yet why IE is behaving like this, but promise to look further into it next week.

Braintags is also available in WML format, so you can read your favourite 😉 site using your WAP enabled telephone. Just point your telephone to http://wap.braintags.com/.

As this is the first time I tried to create something in WML, it surely is full with mistakes. Just let me know, so I can change it and learn something more.

If you are creating (X)HTML code, you always have to make sure that you use the right elements to specify the meaning of certain parts of the text. After that you can use stylesheets to determine how these parts will look. This is what they call the semantics of the text.

A lot of web designers abuse tags to accomplish a certain look. If they want a bigger text, they use the <h2> element, while the text is not a header at all, if they want to indent a text, they use <blockquote>, even though they are not quoting. I won’t go into detail why this is a bad thing, there are plenty of resources explaining this better than I could. But a lot of designers like me who try to do it correctly still make some mistakes. Today I realised that my pages have two semantically errors:

For my navigation lists, I use—as many other sites—unordered lists ( <ul><li>XXX</li></ul>). But my navigation links do have an order! My archive links are ordered chronological, so the correct thing would be to use the ordered list (<ol><li>XXX</li></ol>) instead.

By default, an ordered list is shown with numbers in front of each item, but it is very easy to remove them, just as I removed the bullets from my unordered navigation lists. I have seen many sites doing this wrong, and most examples of you will find on internet also use unordered lists.

Another thing I thought about today is that when I display trackbacks (comments on another site about my text) I am quoting another site. Therefore, I should be using the <blockquote> element (or <q>). I have looked around at other sites, but nowhere have I found trackbacks marked up as quotes.

You might think that these are minor issues, but since I am rewriting my templates anyway, I better do it right, not?

You might already have noticed it: I added some advertisements to this site.

Since now I am paying a hosting provider to host this site, I thought that I might try to get back at least some of the money I spend for it.

The advertisements are related to the contents of the page, so I only added them the pages of the individual items. This makes the chance bigger that they may actually be useful for my visitors as well.

I decided to give it a try for about two months; if I notice at that moment that they are not working, I will remove them.

People using a modern browser won’t see the advertisements, since the advertisement script does not work when the page is processed ad XML.

One more week to go, and we have our second short vacation of this year!!!

After going to Croatia in July, we will visit the good ol' Netherlands this time. From September 9 until 16 you will have a bigger than normal chance of seeing us in the north of Europe.

We didn’t make an exact planning of what we are going to do, but we have made two short lists.

One with some practical things I have to arrange, and one with some places we want to visit. The first list has to be followed, and the second list will almost surely change on a day-by-day basis.

The moment I changed the looks of this site, I also changed the version of the code used for these pages.

My site is now made up in XHTML version 1.1. I only forgot to change one thing.

I did change some elements to their new variants, and of course I included the right DTD. But my pages were still served to your browser with the text/html MIME type, while the specification tells me that I should serve my pages as application/xhtml+xml.

The specification is quite clear in this, but as usual the reality is more complicated. I could simple change the file extensions to .xhtml, which are automatically send with the right MIME type. But at this moment a lot of browsers (including IE6) are not able to handle this kind of documents.

So I need to distinguish browsers that can handle application/xhtml+xml from those that cannot handle it. Fortunately, most browsers send a list of MIME types they can handle each time they request a file from the server; so all I have to do is look at this list, and change the MIME type for modern browsers.

Therefore I added the following lines to my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml+xml RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml+xml\s;\sq=0 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .html$ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} HTTP/1.1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !photos.braintags.com RewriteRule .* - [T=application/xhtml+xml]

The first line looks whether the MIME type is in the accepted list of the browser.

The second lines looks whether it does not have q=0 (q stands for quality), which means that the browser does not want to use this MIME type.

The third line limits the requests to .html files only, since we do not want to change the MIME type for images, stylesheets and other files.

The fourth line limits the requests to HTTP version 1.1.

The fifth line excludes my photo pages, since I haven’t updated them to XHTML1.1 yet.

And the last line finally specifies the right MIME type for requests that satisfy all conditions above.

Throught the wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I was able to visit my old site again.

My biggest proud of that site was the big list of all the CD’s I own. So here it is, the list of March 12, 2001!

Today I noticed something strange in the access report of this site. In the error codes list I found error 411.

Since I haven’t seen this error code before, I googled on internet for some more information.

The official RFC 2616 says the following: The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content-Length. The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.

It appears that a server is returning code 411 when a client (=browser) tries to send data to the server without specifying the size of the data. Normally a client only receives data from the server (reading pages), and all common modern browsers are programmed in such a way that they include the data length when sending data.

Therefore I suspected that somebody with a home-grown application had tried to mess with my site. I did a quick grep in my Apache log files and found out that somebody had accessed the file mt-xmlrpc.cgi with an application that identified itself as Java/1.4.1_01.

This file is a XML-RPC interface to Movable Type, allowing other applications to interact with MT, for example to publish entries on this site from a special desktop client.

Since I am the only responsible for this site, nobody but me has any reason to use this file. This visitor also triggered my Spam trap, and was already blocked from my system, but if not, his badly programmed application did ring the alarm bell.