Jeroen Sangers

Here is Johnny’s guitar solo on the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated”: E-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0 B—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— G—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— D—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— A—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— E—————————————————|—————————————————|—————————————————|———————————————— (Via BoingBoing)

If you want to leave a comment on this site, you have the option to identify yourself using your TypeKey account. TypeKey is a centralized authentication service from Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type. It was developed as a measure against comment spam, and made available in version 3.0 of MT. After TypeKey was released I changed my templates to include this system. I do not force commenters to use TypeKey, since my spam problem is not that big.

This was in May. Now after some months more, I have some observations:

• Besides me, only onetwo commenters used TypeKey to comment on this site;
• No other MT–powered site I comment on has TypeKey activated;
• A Google search on the default TypeKey comment link — TypeKey Profile Page — returns only 21000 hits. So only 21000 pages on the whole web have TypeKey authenticated comments — remember that some sites have many pages, with many posts.

To me it looks like TypeKey is not used a lot.

Why can that be?

I think the main reason is that most of the sites using Movable Type never update their templates. They might update to a newer version of MT, but leave their templates alone. And they are right in doing so; I remember that it was quite a puzzle to add the TypeKey code to my template.

So TypeKey is a failure?

After only four months, it is very early to make this kind of conclusions. Every new site that starts using MT will probably have TypeKey activated, so I expect more and more sites to use is. And when the base grows, other sites might benefit more from this service as well.

I have plenty of bandwidth, and have been thinking about ways to use it. It appears to me that the best way to burn up my bandwidth is to serve MP3 files.

So as an experiment I offer you Ain’t That Pretty At All from the Pixies, since this is becoming a Pixies site anyway.

Keep in mind that it is an experiment; I might withdraw the file at any moment.

[Update 2004.09.17] I guess a week is more than enough for this experiment, so I removed the file. I have obtained the desired overview on how MP3 downloads affect bandwidth useage. I also found out that Pixies fans are highly interconnected: until 2 days ago, the file was hardly downloaded, but after somebody published a link on a buletin board, the link was copied to many other buletin boards within a few hours, and downloads skyrocked.

[Update 2004.09.22] With the addition of the Brain Tags Jukebox to this site, I also returned the Pixies file. It will be available for another 96 hours.

Within one week I encountered two computers showing the same problem, which I haven’t been able to solve. This concerns me, since one of these machines is mine. What happened is the following:

Both machines run Windows XP, and use a modem — in one case an ADSL modem — to connect to internet. Everything works just fine, until I added a network card to these machines. After that, the modem seems to connect just fine, but DNS is not working. The computer has received the IP addresses of the DNS servers, and I can ping to these addresses. Furthermore, when I try a tracert, I receive the error No hay recursos — no resources. I have checked all possible corners of Windows XP to find a place where

I can disable or cripple DNS, but haven’t found a solution yet. Does anybody know how to solve this?

Recently my server logs show a big increase in requests for a single image, the one shown above. Somebody must be hotlinking this image! Hotlinking is when somebody uses an image on their page, but does not put a copy of the image on their server. Each time somebody views that page, the image is requested from my server. In general, hotlinking images is not polite, since you use bandwidth of somebody else.

This specific image is not mine, I found it on somebody else’s page and copied it to my server to use it.

There are several methods to stop hotlinking. You can block all requests that do not come from your own site, so all visitors of that site will see is a red x. Or you can serve another image instead, with a text explaining why hotlinking is bad, or with the Goatse man… I decided not to do so. First of all, since I have enough bandwidth to serve these sites, and secondly because I thought it would be better to use the image to make some advertising for my site. So I added this site’s address to the image, so it will be shown on all sites using this image from my site.

I finally also have a GMail account! Even though I already have many @jeroensangers.com and @braintags.com mail addresses, I opted for beltza@gmail.com, just to see what it is and what it does. You don't have to update your address books, since I will continue to use the old addresses, and will check this one rarely. I only posted the address here, since I need some mail to see what I can do with GMail.

That’s it! The upgrade went flawless. Everything seems to work fine until now. Of course I haven’t tried out any of the new features yet. There are two features I would like to have a look at.

The ability to create subcategories look really sexy, however I have doubts whether my writings need a more complex category structure. I will have to review all items to decide on that.

The feature everybody waited a long time for is dynamic publishing. It simply means that the pages are created on the fly, which makes posting entries and comments more faster since you don’t have to wait for all pages to generate. However, the downside is that each normal view will be slightly slower, since the pages are not cached on the server. I will have to play a little bit with this to see what works best.

Today, six apart launched version 3.1 of Movable Type, the software I use as the motor of this site. Since I am an early adaptor, I immediately downloaded the latest version, and will install it as soon as possible. I already heard about some problems in the update scripts, so we’ll see how it goes…

Almost a week ago we returned from our holiday in Thailand. The fact that I did not write anything about it yet has two reasons:

1. 1. We have been too busy taking up our social life again, meeting friends and family, supper here, coffee/beer there... I simply did not touch my computers last week.
2. I find it difficult to write about things that happened more than a day ago. And during my stay abroad I prefer to visit temples and markets over writing in an internet café.

But since the first page of this site looks very empty, I will write a little bit about our trip.

Unlike all our previous vacations, we did not prepare the trip ourselves, but we decided to get ’luxury’ and have a travel agency work out the details for us. That means that we didn’t have to think for a single second when we were in Thailand. The planes and the hotels were booked, and each morning they picked us up for yet another interesting excursion. Of course the downside of this is that we only ended up in places cramped with other tourists and did not make any unexpected discovery.

We visited Bangkok, Chang Rai, Chang Mai and Ko Samui. Each of these places offered basically the same: souvenirs, temples, souvenirs, tuk-tuks, souvenirs, great food, souvenirs, massages, souvenirs, fake watches, souvenirs, canals, souvenirs and souvenirs. Besides these basics, each of the places had something special: Bangkok is a true metropolis, Chang Rai has beautiful hills and their tribes, Chang Mai has a lot of traditional handicraft and Ko Samui has of course the beach.

There is much more to tell about our holiday. Maybe I will tell you about it over a good glass of beer, or someday I will write it down here…

Great party, I love Thailand, much to do…

Until later!