Jeroen Sangers

Since my parents are here to celebrate Christmas with us, we took them to a living nativity scene in Sudanell on the 25^th of December. Each year they show some on the television, but I never actually visited one, so it was interesting for me as well. After buying the entrance tickets, I browsed through the leaflet, and found out that it was not exactly what I expected. I had imagined a place where the main figures would walk around with some animals, but in reality it was a lot more. There were 60 scenes in total with over 250 figures. Furthermore, the figures did not walk around, but stood still as statues. Each scene had been elaborated to the smallest details; everything looked right.

From the clothes to the tools they used! It took us an hour to see all scenes and reach the nativity scene. Besides biblical scenes from the christmas story, there were many scenes showing the life in that era: how to make baskets and soap, the work on the field, etc. We were very impressed. It was a pity that we were not allowed to make photo’s, the flash would disturb the figures, but my parents bought a video tape showing all scenes. It is difficult to explain it to others, but we really felt like we were walking around in another era. Next year we surely try to visit another living nativity scene.

It just had to happen one day: a mix up of the Beatles and the Beastie Boys. I have put three tracks in the Jukebox: Whatcha Want, Lady?, Tripper Trouble and Hold It Together Now.

After the recent messages about comment spam, I have upgraded both Movable Type and MT-Blacklist. Not that my comment spam problem became bigger, since my setup is different enough from the regular MT site to stop them. I have renamed my comment script and, more important, I force commenters to preview. This alone blocks all spam coming in through the comments.

The problem is that once in a while I receive spam through the trackback interface. Since trackbacks, comments on my writings left on other sites, are always generated automatically, I have no way to force a preview and have to use the default workflow. As a result, once in a while a spammer gets through and manages to place many spam on my site before I have the time to add his URL to the blacklist. Of course, after that all spam is deleted with a single click.

Conclusion: So far I am still winning the spam war, but only because I am on top of it with upgrades and by quickly removing spam.

I just installed Skype on my PC to have a look at it, but really wonder what it adds. I am already available through ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo and IRC, and most of these services also support audio chats with reasonable quality. In my opinion Skype is just another IM client. I don't want to have yet another client, I only want that the existing clients work together. Of course, I don't have five applications running, I use Trillian, but it does open five network connections over different ports.

For the moment, you can Skype me at icg-jeroen. If I find it useful, I will keep on using it.

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