Jeroen Sangers

Just when we were cooking our evening meal yesterday, we were suddenly without electricity.

“No problem”, I said to Maria José, since we have these handy earth leakage switches. I was able to find my small Jong Nederland torchlight in the dark, and went to the entrance to flip the guilty switch.

But all switches were in the correct position. I went outside our apartment to the stairs, and turned on the light; it switched on immediately. I noticed that our neighbours upstairs also had light, so the problem was definitely only in our apartment.

Then I noticed a box high on the walls in the stairs, with two cables coming from it, entering our apartment. I got some stairs, opened the box and found two old-fashioned fuses. One of them was clearly burned and still hot. Found it!

Now we had to find a replacement fuse. I remember having seen some when we were reconstructing our house, but I was very afraid that we threw them away, since we had our fuses replaced by those modern switches. A quick look around in the most easy accessible places did not deliver us the fuses. We started getting a little bit worried about the things in our fridge and, more important, our meal. While Maria José was getting ready to bring the contents of our fridge to our neighbours, I decided to check the closet downstairs one more time.

And there they were; two fuses of at least 20 years old. They had a little bit less capacity than the old ones, but at least they would get us through the night.

Today I checked two shops to buy new fuses, but so far I haven’t been lucky. Tomorrow I will contact an electrician, because in my eyes it is very ridiculous that we have these old fuses in front of our modern earth leakage switches, and I have a high suspicion that they are not necessary at all.

More and more mail I receive has some kind of legal disclaimer attached to it. And I am getting more and more annoyed by it. The typical disclaimer usually contains something like the following:

This E-mail and any attachments are private, intended solely for the use of the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, they have been sent to you in error: any use of information in them is strictly prohibited. Blah blah blah blah... (Copied from the List of Stupid EMail Disclaimers)

So if I am not the intended recipient, this text tells me that I may not use the information in the e-mail. But I only know about these conditions when I am reading the disclaimer at the end of the message; too late. If you want to force these conditions on me, I’ll have to accept them before reading the message, in the same way a licence is presented to me before I install software, right?

And imagine that I am not the intended recipient, why can’t I use the information inside the message to find out who is the intended recipient and forward the message to this person? You clearly forbid this. The same rule also forbids me to tell the sender of his mistake.

Besides the kind of problems described above, such a statement should have no force of law. The sender can’t in general unilaterally stipulate conditions on what the recipient may or may not do with the email. In specific cases, such as copyright, the author may, of course, stipulate what rights are granted to the recipient. There are other instances where there is an implied contract of confidentiality, but those are not created merely by the sender sticking the word ‘confidential’ on a message.

Just compare it to your communication on paper. Do you add a disclaimer to every memo you send out? I don’t think so! So why on earth do you want to add this text to e-mail? Usually the answer is: “Because my boss told me to do it”. Your boss is of course worried about the consequences of your writings, which I can understand, and he thinks that this problem can be solved by adding a disclaimer. So to get rid of these useless disclaimers, we’ll have to educate your boss.

Explain them the possible conflicts caused by disclaimers as I described above.

And tell them that the value of disclaimers is limited, since the courts normally attach more weight to the substantive content of the communication and the circumstances in which it is made than to any disclaimer.

The real solution to his problem cannot be obtained by technology or legal disclaimers.

The real solution is about the people, so train them! Most companies have special communication trainings for the phone support staff, why not do the same thing for those people communicating by e-mail? And of course you have customer relations guidelines for email, don’t you?

And if your boss is not listening to you, there is one more option: fight them with their own means! Each time I receive a message containing a disclaimer, I add the following disclaimer to my replies:

Disclaimer: By sending an email to ANY of my addresses you are agreeing that:

• I am by definition, ‘the intended recipient’
• All information in the email is mine to do with as I see fit and make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends itself to. In particular, I may quote it on the Internet.
• I may take the contents as representing the views of your company.
• This overrides any disclaimer or statement of confidentiality that may be included on your message.

(From a newsgroup article by John Sullivan)

This disclaimer is just as ridiculous as any other disclaimer, and has no legal value. But it might show the uselessness of disclaimers to people using them.

I just noticed that the Command prompt is one of the six most used applications on my computer:

There are two conclusions to be made from this: I am a senile old MS-DOS lover and I definitely need Linux, or at least Cygwin, to have more powerful command-line options.

Exactly two years ago, I woke up in the morning, thought: Well, that’s it. Here I am, and kissed Maria José.

That was the start of the first day of my new life in another country. Since that day many things have happened: I started working here, got used to the way of living, received visits from friends from all over Europe, we moved into our own little house, I got to know the nice, and not so nice, parts of Lleida, we brought some visits to Harmelen, …

In those two years I got settled here, and I am really happy with my life here. Of course I look back to my time in Harmelen once in a while and certainly miss my family and friends, but I have not regretted my decision to move to Lleida for a single second.

Finally there is an emblem for me! Full-time hacker Eric S. Raymond created a Hacker Emblem based on the famous game of life:

For all people misguided by the popular media: a hacker is not somebody who is breaking into your computer (that is a cracker), but rather somebody who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities (The Jargon File: Hacker).

La Pelota Vasca is a documentary movie about the situation in the Basque Country.

In this movie, a lot of people involved with (both sides of) the situation like politicians, musicians, professors and victims are interviewed to give a view of how hopeless the situation is.

Two important groups are absent: the party currently governing Spain (PP) and the ETA; exactly the two groups who could make a difference in the situation.

I saw this movie last Saturday and was very impressed and decided to write about it on my site. But of course I did not have time for it, so I forgot it until I saw the news yesterday.

The PP has the opinion that the movie gives a one-sided view of the problem (mainly because they refused to participate in the first place), and is doing everything they can to prevent people from watching this movie.

So when this week a British film festival decided to show the movie, Spain withdrawed their yearly support for this festival to bring the festival into financial problems.

I was amazed to hear that a modern country which considers freedom of speech one of the basic human rights is trying to prevent British festival visitors from seeing another opinion than the government’s.

In the same news block I heard the news that the government refuses to talk with the governor of the Basque Country about his plans for a better relation between the central government and the autonomous regions.

So they do not only refuse his plans, but refuse to talk with him at all!!!! Once again, I cannot believe some of the things this government is doing, and getting away with.

If you ever get the chance to watch ‘La pelota vasca’, do it quickly. Though a little bit depressed, it certainly is worth your time. And you’re teasing the Spanish government at the same time!!!

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????