Jeroen Sangers

The hosting provider for this site, bloghosts is stopping. Anybody knows a good provider?

Several technical problems with our backend have corrupted critical portions of our billing and support databases. While we have tried to recover this data several times and enlisted the help of an outside agency our efforts have been in vain. Although security has been very good we've found several discrepancies in our logs indicating the damage may have been intentional. For these reasons we have decided to stop taking new orders and will eventually cease operation altogether.

All servers will be monitored and remain online until January 1, 2005. At this time each server will be shut down. Henceforth orders for new service will not be accepted and current customers will not have their credit cards charged for these final two months. We regret this decision but after putting our best resources to work it has become obvious that the damage caused by the corruption is irreversible.

We would like to thank everyone that has made the last year and a half a great one.

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

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

Now that I have burned my first DVD with material we recorded last summer, I want to show it to our friends and family.

But I notice a great difference between the people here and in Holland. All our family and friends here have a DVD player. Videotape is dead; DVD is the current device to use. It is almost impossible to rent a recent movie on tape. However, none of the Dutch people I have recently spoken have a DVD player! This includes my parents and my sister, probably the persons that are the most interested in our recordings.

This weekend I will have to spend some time to copy the DVD contents to tape, so I will be able to show them our adventures in Thailand when we visit them in November.

I am wondering whether Spain really is more technically advanced than the Netherlands (who would have expected that?), whether my friends and family here are more gadget freaks than the people we know in the north of Europe, or whether I simply did not speak to the right people in the Netherlands. Do you have a DVD player?

I just installed the latest version (1.32) of the MTSimpleComments plugin, but receive the following error when scheduled posts are being built:

Undefined subroutine MTPlugins::simplecomments::SimpleCommentCount at lib/MT/Builder.pm line 139

The strange thing is that all files, both from index templates as archive templates, are created correctly, except for the main index.

Today I ran across three situations related to censorship. They are not related to each other, but the coincidence struck me.

First, I found out that my hosting provider bloghosts closed their support forum. Bloghosts gives excellent service and support and I recommend them to everybody looking for a reliable hosting provider. A few weeks ago they had some internal technical problems with their servers, resulting in lost support tickets. While normally support tickets were answered within a few hours, in that period tickets got lost and were not answered. To get the attention of the support staff, some customers started complaining in the support forum. Since normally this forum is very, very quiet, about one post a day, these few people completely took over the forum. The forum is now closed…

Directly after that, I read the comments on Robert Scoble’s Are you afraid to blog?, which suffer from a troll called J.Toran. Some commenters requested Robert to remove these comments, but until now they are still there and I expect them to stay there.

And finally D. Keith Robinson wrote about Comment Moderation and Censorship after having to remove a whole thread.

As for censorship on this site, until now I only removed commercial comments (spam), but I reserve the right to moderate comments in some other situations as well, as is explained in the Comment posting policy of this site.

Movable Type version 3.12 was released today, and as usual I immediately installed it. The feature I wanted was the promised fasted build times, but I also encountered some undocumented new buttons in the edit screen:

I uploaded the image above using the Upload File button, but was a little bit disappointed that this feature did not copy the corresponding <img /> element into my entry. Shall I wait for version 3.13?

In the pas years I have written 375 entries, linkdump excluded, for this site, of which only 21, 6%, are related to my professional life. Does that mean that nothing interesting is happening during the hours I spend in the office? Does that mean I am not enthusiastic about my job?

Of course not. I don’t write about my job because I don’t know how my colleagues are going to react. The things happening here simply don’t pass to my personal filter; the same filter that blocks all subjects that are too personal.

Lately I have been thinking about writing more about my job, since we are doing very interesting things, and I don’t know anybody else writing about POS software, warehouse software and financial software. I thought about mentioning the idea to my colleagues before I start writing more, but is that really necessary???

I am clearly not the only person having these thoughts, and today Robert Scoble tried to convince all of us to not be afraid to blog. He is absolutely right, corporate blogging can give another face to your company. I’ll have to think it over a little bit more, and maybe soon you will find more news about ICG software on this site. If that would happen, Robert Scoble can be satisfied about his work.

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

I just looked into the log files, and found out that people got blocked for trying to open old MP3 files from the jukebox.

The jukebox is supposed to handle all requests for MP3 files on Brain Tags. If the requested file exists and the time-out period has not passed yet, the file is served; in all other occasions a list of currently available files is presented.

However, after forwarding MP3 requests to the jukebox, all requests for old MP3 files got redirected to my spamtrap, effectively blocking visitors looking for MP3 files. Of course, I immediately fixed the problem.