Jeroen Sangers

Today I will fly to the Netherlands for work. I will have some meetings with (potential) distributors and clients in the Netherlands and Germany. My schedule is quite full, which is a good sign for the future sales ;-).

Flickr is a great service for storing your photos, as everybody already found out. As the last person on the internet, I finally got to try their service out today, and just like everybody else I am very impressed.

I have uploaded a bunch of photos and started playing around. thing I like most is the tagging feature, allowing me to link keywords to photos. I like Flickr so much, that I am probably going to replace my existing photo gallery which I maintain in Movable Type by Flickr.

I will maintain the photos with Flickr, which will automagically create entries on my blog. The only thing I am not sure about is how to deal with comments, since both MT as Flickr allow visitors to comment on photos and I don't want my sparse comments split over two sites.

For the coming period I will be uploading and tagging photos, in preparation of the new gallery. You can follow the progress at my Flickr page.

Until yesterday I stayed away from social networks like friendster. Yesterday it changed when I saw that Volker Weber had been able to build a network of more than 10.000 second degree contacts, contacts of your contacts, in only six days. So I entered openBC and am now taking the first steps to build my own business network.

Windows XP has a nice function to keep your task bar organised by grouping windows of the same application. Apparently Windows considers Firefox to be the same application as Windows Explorer :-D

In my quest for a good CMS I have been looking at eZ Publish this week, and my first reaction is: "wow!"

It looks very slick, very complete, very customisable, well thought out, … but also looks very daunting to implement.

The sky is the limit, since you can create your own content classes, but this involves also a lot of scripting templates to get the functionality to work. Previously I have been looking at Mambo Open Source, which is very easy to use, but has no fine-grained control; I just want to decide what HTML elements are used in templates. eZ Publish does give me this low-level control, but at a price: template design is more complicated.

Still I guess that I am willing to invest the time to learn the template scripting language, since eZ Publish has many benefits. The biggest benefit is that it can handle everything I do with external scripts: searching, guest book, forum, … Secondly, its multi-language implementation is great; the properties of each object can be entered in several languages, which will be shown to the visitor depending on the site access used.

I still have to play around a lot more to get to know its possibilities better, but I certainly have a very good feeling about this software.

The easiest way for a club, company or organisation to have a webshop is CafePress. You can upload your logo and select which products you want to offer, and they take care about taking orders, printing the products and shipment. Works like a charm, but they are USA-based. That means that European customers will ahve to pay extra shipment costs, which makes the items rather expensive. So I am looking for companies like CafePress with facilities in Europe to lower the costs.

So far I have found T-Shirt Zoo and spreadshirt, both of which look reasonable, but not as slick as CafePress. T-Shirt Zoo has a very small assortiment, and spreadshirt is only available in German. Are there any other companies like these available in Europe?

It’s time for some punk!!! Dirty Girl from Boobie Trap.

Each year I look at the artists playing at the Dutch Noorderslag festival, since those are the artists that are very likely to break through during the coming year.

I just received a message from Apesjit in which they state that they are going to play on that important festival. I really hope that they are one of the bands that are going to break through next year!

Although I am not a fan of these 80x15 buttons, I noticed that TotalChoice Hosting does not have them. So I went to the Button Maker page, and made some buttons.

They are free to use for everybody.

One of the nicest traditions in Catalonia is the ‘correfoc’: corre = run and foc = fire.

The Catalans love any excuse to have a correfoc, a riotous fiesta of sparklers, firecrackers, and roman candles, where colles de diables, or brigades of devils and dragons, dance threateningly to the strains of an accompanying percussion band as they weave through a startled and delighted public. In order to save your clothes, there is only one remedy: jump so the sparks roll off. We filmed a correfoc at October 8 in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, so you can see a little bit how it is:

Video file: Correfoc.mpg (5,93 Mb)

Tomorrow evening we will take the plane to the Netherlands for a short holiday. We will stay there until Wednesday.

I’m afraid that we don’t have a lot of opportunities to meet you, since we will spend the weekend with my parents and my sister. In the little time left after the weekend we have many obligations, but will try to meet as much friends as possible. We will bring the DVD of our holidays to keep you away from meeting us. :-D

Wednesday we will also take the photos from our wedding with us to Spain, so there is little time left if you did not see it yet.

This week the most important IT fair in Spain takes place: the Simo TCI. Of course ICG Software is present; we have a big stand together with our Master Providers. As a result, the office is very empty this week, since most of our commercial department is in Madrid.

We will be presenting version 5 of our software, which brings real-time communication between shops or restaurants and the central office.

I just installed Firefox, the Spanish version, which went flawlessly. It placed the files and updated my extensions. But after one hour I saw a new icon on my screen:

Apparently there are updates available, only one hour after I installed it. Almost surely this is an external extension that has quickly been updated after the new release of Firefox, but it will confuse new users.

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.