Jeroen Sangers

Hoewel ik uit de provincie Utrecht kom, heb ik het Uterechs nooit echt onder de knie gekregen. En dat is soms best wel jammer. Ik moest dan ook hard lachen toen ik de tekst van het Utrechts dictee zag en ik de tekst in mijn hoofd hoorde.

Technorati has launched a new service: Top MP3s. They monitor which MP3 files have the most references in the last 48 hours, and publish their results as a handy list. I used the list to add two songs to the jukebox: Wonderwall from Oasis and White Wedding from Billy Idol.

This is the obligatory “If you can read this, the move was successful” message. Moving to the new server was very easy, I only had to give my cPanel details to the support staff, and ten minutes later they had my site and e-mail up and running.

There was only one Perl module missing to get my applications going, which was fixed in another two minutes. Now I have to wait for the new DNS settings to propagate. This was a lot easier than I thought!

I have made my choice: this site is moving to TotalChoice Hosting. I have looked at many hosting providers, and TCH appeared to be the best choice for me.

I was looking for a hosting provider with more or less the same characteristics as my current provider; I only want a little bit bigger company to prevent problems. In the past I have read good comments about TCH's performance and service, and their prices are incredible. I now have 1Gb of space waiting to be filled!

This is probably the last post I publish on the old server. Once my new account becomes active I will check it, since both providers use cPanel, they are able to copy the whole site for me, and pull the switch. See you on the other side!

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.

The latest CD I bought is “The Sound of Science” from the Beastie Boys. I was thinking of ripping a song and putting it in the Jukebox, when I saw that Lijn had put them in her jukebox. A download and an upload later, Intergalactic is available.

Another one for the jukebox: Satisfied from Bettie Serveert, a dark track with lyrics like, Callous on the soul/ There’s a tale untold/ About how you spend your life/ In a place where no one goes. I like this track a lot, and used it for the DVD about our holiday in Thailand that I am still trying to render.

After CasaSpider and Dudesh Ramadhin.

After all problems I encountered last week, I laid my little video project to rest for a while. Until yesterday; when I felt the itch of an unfinished project. In the mean time I found on the internet how to get around the rendering problem: I simply created another project that contained the problematic scene plus some footage before and after, rendered it to an AVI file, and included this file in my project. A few hours of rendering later I had my DVD!

Happily I inserted the precious disk into our DVD player to admire the result. But… all sound editing, sound levels and background music, I had done in the project had disappeared and in some scenes the sound was out of sync. Once again I was very disappointed! :-(

I got back on the internet, and search the Pinnacle support forums. There was a huge thread about this problem, which lead me to the FAQ. I have to update my software to version 9.0.8 to fix this problem. On the download page I found a huge patch (46 Mb) to update to version 9.1.2. What bothered me most is that this fix is from June, while I purchased the software in September. They simply sold me a defect product, while they had already solved these problems!

I am downloading the patch now, and this afternoon I will buy a DVD+RW disk to try to burn my project again.

Just a few weeks after Microsoft acquired LookOut to provide advanced search for Outlook, Google released Google Desktop Search. LookOut is mainly focused on OutLook, but also does a little bit with other files, while Google focuses on Office files and also does Outlook.

At the moment I have both tools installed, to see which one I prefer. Of course I expect Google to expand their application very soon, while an upgrade from Microsoft might take a while.

To get you all through the weekend, I placed some Dutch punk rock in the jukebox: We’re All Fucked Up from De Heideroosjes. Enjoy it!

The PalmOne Zire 31 comes with a SD slot and a default, small, card of 16 Mb. It's basic use is to put MP3 songs on it, to be played with the RealOne player. Putting files on the SD card is very easy; you only have to drag the file to the QuickInstall icon, and the next time you synchronise it will put the file on the card.

However, you can only access the file from the Palm, there is no way to copy it back to a PC. I would like such a function, to keep some important documents with me, which I can access from any PC.

Therefore I was really happy when I found Card Export II. This little application emulates a USB mass storage device on the Palm, so you can access it as a flash drive. But after installing it, I received an error message when connecting to my PC: Cannot open USB port 0307. I e-mailed the Softick support department, and two days later they presented a new version, which also works on the PalmOne Zire 31. Great!

Nick Bradbury likes them, so I put Green Day in the jukebox. For your ears only: Extraordinary Girl. As usual, you have 4 days to listen.

The Dooie Donders Club is an infamous club in Harmelen, formed by four self proclaimed brothers. Until some years ago, they had a nice web site with plastic ducks and other toys as decoration. I made this site using Microsoft Frontpage, and maintained it for some years. It contained stories about the activities of this club, which had its highlight in 2000, with an appearance in the Dutch men magazine the Panorama and the production of their CD Dagobert, de heerser hier. Shortly after, the site disappeared, and the club became dormant.

Last week I accidentally found the text published in the Panorama, and thought that it was a pity that the history of the DDC is not available on the internet. But wait, maybe the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has saved something of that site. Indeed, it was all there. I quickly installed Mambo Open Source on my server, created a new subdomain, configured Mambo and copied the texts into new entries. And there it is: the DDC is back!!!

At the moment is a pretty default Mambo site, but I plan to make some custom templates to give the site some Dooie Donders sauce.

The past few weeks I have been working myself into a completely new world: video editing. It all started with the camera we received this spring. Of course we took it with us on holidays, and back home we wondered what to do with the tapes. They contained some nice material, but also a lot of ‘crap’ produced when trying out the functions of the camera. I wanted to edit the video, and copy the result to a DVD for easy play back.

So I installed the tools that came with the camera on my PC, and connected it to an USB port, only to find out that the software is useless and that USB only supports low quality video. After looking around on the internet a little bit I ordered Pinnacle Studio DV, a software suit that comes with a FireWire (IEEE-1394) PCI-card.

After installing the card, I set to work: I copied the tapes to my hard disk, and selected the scenes to be included. I made some dark scenes a little bit lighter, and adjusted the audio levels. After adding some smooth transitions and background music my video was ready for DVD. I set my PC to render for a few hours, and the next morning I had… an error message! I figured that it must be a full disk, so I cleaned up the disk and set it to render again. The next morning, I found the same error at the exactly same scene; a photo I included in the video.

After a little bit looking around, I found a log file, giving me a more detailed error message: Max Video Bitrate:8494000 for disc output. Mmmm. bit rate, that must have something to do with data throughput. Since the problem appeared in a photo, I decided to increase the JPG compression of the file and give it another try. Half a day later I found the same rendering error again. I was getting frustrated, and started to search on the internet, without results. Then I looked in the configuration of Pinnacle Studio, and saw that you could configure the bit rate for DVDs. It was set at automatically, which gave me 60 minutes of video per DVD. Since the error message mentioned a bit rate a little bit above 8Mb, I fixed the bit rate to 8Mb, and let my PC work again… with the same result as before. Now, I lowered it to 7Mb, and pushed the Create button again. In a few hours I will know whether that has solved the problem, but I have a bad feeling about it…

[Update 2004.10.06]: I was right, the error is still there. I did a short test with a project containing only the photos involved, and it rendered correctly. It’s time to see how good the support department of Pinnacle is.

There is new music available in the jukebox: Allermooiste Fout from Poels & Giessen. You have 96 hours to download it. Enjoy it!