Jeroen Sangers

How wonderful!!! In these times of stress we receive an extra day for free!

Let’s enjoy it… 😀

Today it is raining in Lleida. So what? Well, the problem is that the people over here are not used to rain. When it is raining, the people simply stay inside until the rain is over.

When I drove this morning past the market square, I could see all merchants waiting inside their cars, still packed. They were waiting for the rain to stop, because their clients won’t show up when it is raining. I was imagining that Dutch merchants would have the same mentality; they would only be able to sell during some weeks in summer! But that is mainly because the Dutch clients are used to the rain; they simply have to.

Of course there are situations in which even the Dutch people stay at home, and the amount of snow today created such a situation. The Dutch only stay at home when it is impossible to get out.

Unfortunately, my parents have to catch a flight to Barcelona in a few hours, so at this moment they are desperately trying to get to the airport. I just checked the news, but there are no trains going to Amsterdam and there are huge traffic jams on all highways. I really hope they are able to make it in time!!! 😱

[Update 2004.02.26]: They managed to get to Schiphol airport by train, and I assume they have arrived safely in Barcelona. Just a few hours more, and I will meet them. 😉

Today I received the following message in my mailbox:

an improper scan has caused a ban on your site date: Tue Feb 24 18:30:20 2004 ip: 66.77.73.32 host: shop-gw.sac.overture.com agent: Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler

I regulary receive this kind of messages, usually created because bad robots or script kiddies access my spam trap. But Yahoo and Overture are well respected companies, and I would assume that they would have respected my robots.txt file, in which I explicitly deny access to the /private folder:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /dummy/dummy.html Disallow: /errors Disallow: /fimcap Disallow: /js Disallow: /mailtemplates Disallow: /mt-static Disallow: /private Disallow: /spam

So I looked in my access log and found that they indeed violated my robots file!!

66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:20:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 758 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:57:22 -0500] "GET /private/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4815 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:18:30:20 -0500] "GET /private/welcome.html HTTP/1.0" 200 351 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"

Notice that the page mentioned in the User Agent string states that Yahoo-Overture does support the robots exclusion protocol!

That is an awfully big gray area!!! I guess I still have some traveling to do 😀

Notice that a holiday in a small part of the US of A made a big difference, since the whole country is marked red after visiting only 2 states: The fastest way to fill my map would be to make some strategical visits to Canada, Russia, Greenland, Brazil or China.

The other way would be to go for the biggest number of countries, and in that case traveling through Europe is the way to go:

(Hat tip: hightext)

[Update 2004.02.23]: Added USA and Europe maps. [Update 2004.09.27]: Added Cyprus and Thailand.

It has been very silent on this site lately.

This was not because I did not have time to write; it only takes about five minutes to write some lines.

This was not because I did not have anything to write about; I could have written about using Zempt for posting on this site, about the political situation in Spain, about my parents coming to visit me this week, about the fimcap.org server migration…

The only reason for my silence is that I did not feel like writing. But now I’m back again! I promise

That the pixies are going to tour again is old news. The problem is finding the tour schedule, it simply does not exist. So I googled a little bit, and made the following scheme. Surely it is still incomplete, so if you have any additions or corrections, please let me know.

[Update 2004.02.10]: Added links and comments [Update 2004.02.12]: Added US & Canada tour dates [Update 2004.03.03]: Added more gigs [Update 2004.03.03]: I just found out that the pixies finally have an unofficial tour page, so I won’t update this scheme anymore.

Sometimes people ask me why this site is called ‘Brain Tags’.

Well, the origin comes from a nice song of Bettie Serveert called Brain Tag. Of course the word Tag links nicely to my interest in web development, while people knowing me only a little bit realise that the word Brain has no link to me at all…

How does this rhyme, cause every time I see you well, I could swear, must've met you somewhere Down under lock and key, there's a brain-tag to every secret If I could keep my mind shut, there's a chance that I might even keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before This must sound weird, it's like you peered inside me cause every time, you recognise my state of mind Down under lock and key, we put a brain-tag to every secret Now comes the time to figure out whether we should keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before Total freedom beneath the waves Floating through the arcane waves Synchronised in space and time Leaving all desire behind

When entering a comment in a Movable Type powered site, a radio button is available telling you that it is going to ‘Remember personal info’. However, sometimes when you come back to the same site and want to write another comment, all fields are empty. Your personal info has not been saved… 🙁

The problem I described above appears regularly on the Movable Type support forum, and since the answer is always the same, I created this explanation, so I only have to point here to answer the question.

First a small explanation on how the system is supposed to work. If you enter a comment and select the ‘Remember personal info’ radio button, your name, address and URL are stored in a so-called cookie on your computer. This cookie contains the domain of the site, the directory for which the cookie is valid, an expiration date, and of course the stored value. For example, if I post a comment on an entry of this site, a cookie with the name mtcmdhome will be created with the following information:

Name: mtcmdhome Content: http%3A//example.com/ Domain: .jeroensangers.com Path: / Expires: 28-01-2005

This will make sure that the URL I entered (http://example.com/) will be stored for one year, and can be used by any page on the .jeroensangers.com sites.

MT sets this cookie using JavaScript, which you can find in the Individual Entry Archive template. You can find this script at line 29 of the default template.

By default, the script does not specify a path for the cookie, so that the cookie is stored using the path of the individual entry page. So the cookie of this page would only be valid for pages in /2004/01/mt_does_not_remember_personal_info, which is only one page. Since the cookie is not valid for my other pages, the details I filled in when commenting on this page won’t show up in other pages. Note that the default MT installation places all archives in a single directory (e.g. /archives), so this problem does not appear.

If you do place your archives into different directories, you’ll have to need to adjust the JavaScript in the template to fit your situation. The key is that you need to specify the directory for the cookie depending on the set-up of your site. If you have your own domain like I have, you can set it to ‘/’ to be valid for the whole domain. If you use a directory on the domain of your provider (e.g. http://example.com/username/), you can set it to ‘/username’.

To set the directory for the cookies, edit the functions rememberMe and forgetMe in your template. The location for the path has to be inserted between the two apostrophes before HOST. The original code is:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

The code for http://example.com/username/ becomes:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '/username', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

After making these small changes, the cookie is valid for your whole site, and the details filled in when creating a comment show up on all the pages.

I am going to the CeBIT!

This year will be the first year that our company will have a stand at Europe’s biggest technology fair in Germany. And I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to organise everything.

As we are a do-it-ourselves shop, I’ve had many meetings in which we were making sketches for the stand, writing texts for press announcements and thinking about all details involved in this project.

At this moment we are finishing the product catalogue, which is being translated into English and German. Our main interest is finding new European dealers for our software , but in case end-users visit our stand, we have some Dutch and German dealers present to help them with a complete solution.

We still have a lot of preparations to do, but I am sure that we will be able to make some impact over there. For those readers who are going to visit the CeBIT this year: you can find us in hall 1, at stand 7N8.

Configure a (Windows) computer to use a DHCP and static IP address at the same time.