In the Jukebox: Björk
Copied from Zezunja: Joga from Björk.
Copied from Zezunja: Joga from Björk.
It is amazing how many talented people there are. And many of them closer to you than you can imagine!
Yesterday we went to see EnFado in the city concert hall. EnFado is a quartet playing traditional portuguese fado music. The concert yesterday was given in co-operation with dancers of the citie's dance school, which gave the performance more to see. Between the songs they explained what fado is, and where it comes from.
The hall was completely filled, mainly with family and friends of the performers. Though I know them personally, I had never visited a concert before, and I have to admit that I liked it very much. Not that I am going to be a big fado fan from now on, but I was certainly enjoying the concert. Carol, the singer is such a personality on stage; she looks very comfortable standing on stage and doing her thing.
It wouldn't surprise me if we will visit a concert of EnFado again.
For people who don’t know where Lleida is: it lies about 160 km south-west of Barcelona, in the centre of the Segre valley, surrounded by hills. These hills make that Lleida usually is free of wind, which has great influence on the weather in Lleida.
In summer, the lack of wind makes it 5-10°C hotter than e.g. Barcelona, with weeks of 40°C. The inhabitants prefer to spend their free time in the nearby pyrenees or beaches, which have a more pleasant temperature. As a result, Lleida turns into an empty ghost town in summer.
In winter, the lack of wind together with the lower temperatures create a dense fog, which stays for many days. At this moment we haven’t seen a single ray of sun during almost two weeks. The frustrating of the fog is that is is very local. 20km outside of Lleida, in any direction, the sun is shining each day, and the temperature is 15-20° higher! Every day the news shows a clear wheather map, with one small white dot about 160 km south-west of Barcelona. :-(
We desperately want a little bit of wind, which will blow away the fog and show us that the sun still exists. If not, we will leave town in the weekend to get some sun and leave Lleida as a ghost town just like in summer.
To enjoy the Three Kings tomorrow: Sunburn from Muse.
Tomorrow will be the day that many Dutch blogs will show the special action page. The list of participating bloggers is getting bigger and bigger, and includes some prominent bloggers. You can read all about it on the action page.
Today I received the instructions, which consist of simply replacing the index.html page with the action page. This won’t work for Movable Type blogs, since MT will overwrite the index.html page when a comment is posted to an entry. Furthermore, I wanted the page to show up for all requests, since many visitors enter the site through Google, and won’t see the home page. And finally, I am a lazy person, so I want this to happen automagically.
Therefore I uploaded the file as actie.html and changed my .htaccess file to (temporary) redirect all requests for html pages to the action page. I used the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} >20050105
RewriteCond %{TIME_YEAR}%{TIME_MON}%{TIME_DAY} <20050107
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} index.s?html$
RewriteRule ^(.*) /actie.html [L,R]
Furthermore I hace changed the action page a little bit. The page basically consisted of a table-based layout, with a single image showing the text. For once I won’t complain about table-based layout, since we are working for a good cause, and I value the work they have put into this project. But I did take the freedom to add an alternative text to the image, so that visitors that cannot see the image also know what is going on.
Some nice music: Iron Flower from K’s Choice.
My good ol' club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source (MOS) CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change.
It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning. Of course the horrible “Designed for Internet Explorer” disclaimer has to go!!!
Further tips to make the site better:
.htaccess file;As a regular contributor to the old guestbook, I need to browse my old JN stuff to find my membership number, so I can access the new forum.
The year of the rooster has officially begun. I wish everybody all the best and a lot of love in this year. May all your wishes come through!!!
For obvious reasons: Tsunami from the Manic Street Preachers.
The year 2004 is almost over, which means that it is time for reviews. All important media have a review, so Brain Tags as wel!
Lets start with the most important day of this year: August 7. For us the greatest thing of that day was to see all our friends and all our family together. Even though they could not understand each other, it was great to see how they tried to help.
Another personal highlight of 2004 was of course our holidays in Thailand. I still have to upload the pictures, but promise that I will do it.
2004 has also been the year of new technology. It started with a a new computer after cursing on the old one for over two years. I chose a cheap but decent white label box, and expect that it will last seven years as well.
After that came a new cellphone since my ‘old’ one landed under a car. I am still very happy with my Siemens M55.
And to bring back some structure in my life, I searched eBay for a PalmOne Zire 31 PDA. It is used daily, and can’t image how I got things done without.
Also my professional life became more interesting, with our participation at the CeBIT, and trips to Cyprus, the Netherlands and Germany.
And finally, this site. Since it is my hobby, I spend a lot of time tweaking it. This year, I have upgraded the CMS to version 3, added a Link Dump section to store links to interesting sites and texts, changed hosting provider since my old provider is going out of business and added a Music Jukebox to offer MP3 files.
Quite a good year, don’t you think?
Once in a while I put a song in the Jukebox. Some songs are popular, others won’t be downloaded at all. That’s your choice. Today I put a file in the box of which I was sure that it would be popular. Why? Because the famous Boing Boing links to it.
And while I have enough bandwidth left for this month, I had no idea what to expect. 10 downloads? 100 downloads? 1000 downloads? More? In such a case, it is wise to monitor the traffic.
At this moment the file has been downloaded 170 times and has generated 835 Mb traffic on a little bit more than two hours:
If the downloads stay at this level, I can easily keep on sharing the file; but you never know what to expect when America gets active the next hours. I will keep on monitoring…
[Update 2004.12.30]: The biggest peak is over, everything is quite now. The file only consumed 1,5 Gb bandwidth:
This is our new entrance, with some chistmas decoration. The nativity scene is made from clay, with lead hands (clay fingers tend to break) and real textile clothes. The mark in the upper left corner contains dried mushrooms, hand-picked by my inlaws.
Found on Boing Boing: a Beatles Mash-up Medley.
Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!
A little bit of copy and paste work, and my Flickr page is up and running. At the moment it contains the same images in the same low resolution (400x300) as the original Brain Pics contained, but I will add more and higher quality photos soon.
I will remove the Brain Pics section from this site, and link to the Flickr site instead. For a DIY guy like me this is a big step, but Flickr offers so many advantages and features, that I decided to outsource this feature to them.
Since my parents are here to celebrate Christmas with us, we took them to a living nativity scene in Sudanell on the 25th 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?