Jeroen Sangers

Just a small message to give you the possibility to congratulate me. 😉

Sometimes I post comments on my own pages, usually in reaction to other comments. I usually use only my first name ‘Jeroen’ to post these comments, but everybody is free to use any name he/she wishes, including my first name. After all, I am not the only Jeroen in the world.

But how do you know that it was really me who posted the comment? From now on all my comments are PGP signed, so you can verify them with my public key. This way you know for sure that the poster of the message is the same guy as the one who created this site.

Of course you are free to sign your own comments as well.

How wonderful!!! In these times of stress we receive an extra day for free!

Let’s enjoy it… 😀

Today it is raining in Lleida. So what? Well, the problem is that the people over here are not used to rain. When it is raining, the people simply stay inside until the rain is over.

When I drove this morning past the market square, I could see all merchants waiting inside their cars, still packed. They were waiting for the rain to stop, because their clients won’t show up when it is raining. I was imagining that Dutch merchants would have the same mentality; they would only be able to sell during some weeks in summer! But that is mainly because the Dutch clients are used to the rain; they simply have to.

Of course there are situations in which even the Dutch people stay at home, and the amount of snow today created such a situation. The Dutch only stay at home when it is impossible to get out.

Unfortunately, my parents have to catch a flight to Barcelona in a few hours, so at this moment they are desperately trying to get to the airport. I just checked the news, but there are no trains going to Amsterdam and there are huge traffic jams on all highways. I really hope they are able to make it in time!!! 😱

[Update 2004.02.26]: They managed to get to Schiphol airport by train, and I assume they have arrived safely in Barcelona. Just a few hours more, and I will meet them. 😉

Today I received the following message in my mailbox:

an improper scan has caused a ban on your site date: Tue Feb 24 18:30:20 2004 ip: 66.77.73.32 host: shop-gw.sac.overture.com agent: Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler

I regulary receive this kind of messages, usually created because bad robots or script kiddies access my spam trap. But Yahoo and Overture are well respected companies, and I would assume that they would have respected my robots.txt file, in which I explicitly deny access to the /private folder:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /dummy/dummy.html Disallow: /errors Disallow: /fimcap Disallow: /js Disallow: /mailtemplates Disallow: /mt-static Disallow: /private Disallow: /spam

So I looked in my access log and found that they indeed violated my robots file!!

66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:20:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 758 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:17:57:22 -0500] "GET /private/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4815 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler" 66.77.73.32 - - [24/Feb/2004:18:30:20 -0500] "GET /private/welcome.html HTTP/1.0" 200 351 "-" "Yahoo-VerticalCrawler-FormerWebCrawler/3.9 crawler at trd dot overture dot com; http://www.alltheweb.com/help/webmaster/crawler"

Notice that the page mentioned in the User Agent string states that Yahoo-Overture does support the robots exclusion protocol!

That is an awfully big gray area!!! I guess I still have some traveling to do 😀

Notice that a holiday in a small part of the US of A made a big difference, since the whole country is marked red after visiting only 2 states: The fastest way to fill my map would be to make some strategical visits to Canada, Russia, Greenland, Brazil or China.

The other way would be to go for the biggest number of countries, and in that case traveling through Europe is the way to go:

(Hat tip: hightext)

[Update 2004.02.23]: Added USA and Europe maps. [Update 2004.09.27]: Added Cyprus and Thailand.

It has been very silent on this site lately.

This was not because I did not have time to write; it only takes about five minutes to write some lines.

This was not because I did not have anything to write about; I could have written about using Zempt for posting on this site, about the political situation in Spain, about my parents coming to visit me this week, about the fimcap.org server migration…

The only reason for my silence is that I did not feel like writing. But now I’m back again! I promise

That the pixies are going to tour again is old news. The problem is finding the tour schedule, it simply does not exist. So I googled a little bit, and made the following scheme. Surely it is still incomplete, so if you have any additions or corrections, please let me know.

[Update 2004.02.10]: Added links and comments [Update 2004.02.12]: Added US & Canada tour dates [Update 2004.03.03]: Added more gigs [Update 2004.03.03]: I just found out that the pixies finally have an unofficial tour page, so I won’t update this scheme anymore.

Sometimes people ask me why this site is called ‘Brain Tags’.

Well, the origin comes from a nice song of Bettie Serveert called Brain Tag. Of course the word Tag links nicely to my interest in web development, while people knowing me only a little bit realise that the word Brain has no link to me at all…

How does this rhyme, cause every time I see you well, I could swear, must've met you somewhere Down under lock and key, there's a brain-tag to every secret If I could keep my mind shut, there's a chance that I might even keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before This must sound weird, it's like you peered inside me cause every time, you recognise my state of mind Down under lock and key, we put a brain-tag to every secret Now comes the time to figure out whether we should keep it You feel familiar and I wanna feel some more Have I ever laid my hands on you before Total freedom beneath the waves Floating through the arcane waves Synchronised in space and time Leaving all desire behind

When entering a comment in a Movable Type powered site, a radio button is available telling you that it is going to ‘Remember personal info’. However, sometimes when you come back to the same site and want to write another comment, all fields are empty. Your personal info has not been saved… 🙁

The problem I described above appears regularly on the Movable Type support forum, and since the answer is always the same, I created this explanation, so I only have to point here to answer the question.

First a small explanation on how the system is supposed to work. If you enter a comment and select the ‘Remember personal info’ radio button, your name, address and URL are stored in a so-called cookie on your computer. This cookie contains the domain of the site, the directory for which the cookie is valid, an expiration date, and of course the stored value. For example, if I post a comment on an entry of this site, a cookie with the name mtcmdhome will be created with the following information:

Name: mtcmdhome Content: http%3A//example.com/ Domain: .jeroensangers.com Path: / Expires: 28-01-2005

This will make sure that the URL I entered (http://example.com/) will be stored for one year, and can be used by any page on the .jeroensangers.com sites.

MT sets this cookie using JavaScript, which you can find in the Individual Entry Archive template. You can find this script at line 29 of the default template.

By default, the script does not specify a path for the cookie, so that the cookie is stored using the path of the individual entry page. So the cookie of this page would only be valid for pages in /2004/01/mt_does_not_remember_personal_info, which is only one page. Since the cookie is not valid for my other pages, the details I filled in when commenting on this page won’t show up in other pages. Note that the default MT installation places all archives in a single directory (e.g. /archives), so this problem does not appear.

If you do place your archives into different directories, you’ll have to need to adjust the JavaScript in the template to fit your situation. The key is that you need to specify the directory for the cookie depending on the set-up of your site. If you have your own domain like I have, you can set it to ‘/’ to be valid for the whole domain. If you use a directory on the domain of your provider (e.g. http://example.com/username/), you can set it to ‘/username’.

To set the directory for the cookies, edit the functions rememberMe and forgetMe in your template. The location for the path has to be inserted between the two apostrophes before HOST. The original code is:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

The code for http://example.com/username/ becomes:

function rememberMe (f) { var now = new Date(); fixDate(now); now.setTime(now.getTime() + 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000); setCookie('mtcmtauth', f.author.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmtmail', f.email.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); setCookie('mtcmthome', f.url.value, now, '/username', HOST, ''); } function forgetMe (f) { deleteCookie('mtcmtmail', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmthome', '/username', HOST); deleteCookie('mtcmtauth', '/username', HOST); f.email.value = ''; f.author.value = ''; f.url.value = ''; }

After making these small changes, the cookie is valid for your whole site, and the details filled in when creating a comment show up on all the pages.

I am going to the CeBIT!

This year will be the first year that our company will have a stand at Europe’s biggest technology fair in Germany. And I can tell you that it takes a lot of work to organise everything.

As we are a do-it-ourselves shop, I’ve had many meetings in which we were making sketches for the stand, writing texts for press announcements and thinking about all details involved in this project.

At this moment we are finishing the product catalogue, which is being translated into English and German. Our main interest is finding new European dealers for our software , but in case end-users visit our stand, we have some Dutch and German dealers present to help them with a complete solution.

We still have a lot of preparations to do, but I am sure that we will be able to make some impact over there. For those readers who are going to visit the CeBIT this year: you can find us in hall 1, at stand 7N8.

Configure a (Windows) computer to use a DHCP and static IP address at the same time.

Today version 2.66 of Movable Type has been released, which addresses amongs others some of the comment spam issues.

I installed the update, and wrote a test comment to see how it works, but the entry did not show up anymore. Mozilla told me that there was a XML parsing error, and since I am serving my pages as application/xhtml+xml, Moz did not parse the page at all. I quickly changed my server settings so that my pages are served as text/html, and looked into the code.

The problem is that MT is now using a proxy script to link to the sites mentioned in comments, so spammers do not receive any ‘Google Karma’ by posting comments. The problem lies in the use of & in the URL, while they should have used &. For example, a link to this site appears as:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

while they should have used:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

I did a quick search in the new files, and found the error in the file lib/MT/Template/Context.pm at line 1189. Just add 4 characters, and MT produces valid HTML again.

[Update 2004.01.16]: Six Apart published MT version 2.661 to fix this problem.

Using the service from Mfop2 I am now able to post my messages from any place I want.

All I have to do is send an e-mail (including images if I want) with some special fields to Mfop2, and it will automagically appear on my site!

Now that I have my GPRS connection activated on my cellphone, this means that I can even do this from my phone.

After 7 years of intensive use, time has come to say goodbye to my old PC. It simply has too much technical problems: I assume problems with the power supply, the memory and the CPU! As a result, my screen freezes frequently, usually when I am using Microsoft software.

So last Saturday I took the step and ordered a new PC. Just like the one I have now it is a low-budget (€500) white label box, which I hope will also last the same number of years. The box I ordered has the following specifications:

• Intel Celeron 2,4 MHz
• 512Mb RAM
• 80Gb Hard disk
• DVD player
• DVD/CD-RW writer

As everybody knows, WAP is not the mobile killer protocol, nor will it ever be. However, it has its uses. I use it for example to consult my bank account when I’m on the road.

For Telefonica,- the Spanish phone monopolist, WAP also has its uses, since they offer Emoción; WAP-based services of which some bring in some money for every minute it is used.

The thing I never understood is that they sell packages with modern phones like my T200 with badly configured WAP access. If it doesn’t work directly, many people won’t try it again!

The case is that the phone comes preconfigured with WAP over GPRS, but to use GPRS you’ll have to buy a separate contract or pre-paid card, which nobody does. But Telefonica finally got smart. Saturday, when I was taking a beer on a sunny terrace I suddenly noticed a new icon on my phone’s screen; I had GPRS access!!!

Of course I immediately changed my WAP configuration and tried it out. I surfed around in WAP space a little, until I came to my own WML feed, which failed miserably. One more point on my todo list…

A small experiment to start the year 😉

I installed SnagIt on my computer, which I configured to upload each 30 minutes a screendump of my desktop. Now everybody can see what I am doing during the day. As soon as I have a more powerful computer at home, I will do the same from there.

Happy 2004!!!!

I am absolutely sure that this year is going to be a fabulous year. And with a new year come resolutions. Now I think that this is something crazy, because you can make your resolutions any day you want, and don’t have to wait for new year. The past period I made some resolutions in my mind and already started working on some, but nevertheless I will post them today:

• learn to speak Spanish;
• say “ja”;
• call old friends;
• finish work in the house;
• be less afraid of risks;
• think about the future;
• spend more time in the nature;
• learn to program in python.

A while ago I mentioned Big Medium as a possible CMS for the Fimcap site. Today I finally had some time to lurk on the Support forum to find answers to some of my questions. Already after reading only a few messages I found out that Big Medium is not what I was looking for. 🙁

• The user interface of the produced site has some hard-coded English texts; so internationalisation (I18L) is out of the question;
• Big Medium only supports two document levels: the category and the subcategory. Only with an ugly hack it is possible to go deeper. This is also by design, and won't be solved in the near future;
• The text editing area is too much a ‘guestbook’ styled page and not enough a text processor. For use by people without any HTML knowledge it is absolutely necessary that the interface has the buttons to change the text properties (bold, italics, headers,…);
• There currently is no search feature; so I'll have to implement a separate search script. It is a big pity that you can't search directly in the BM database;
• To edit a document you'll have to go to the management interface and look up the document. I would prefer to have an ‘Edit’ button right on the page if my machine contains the BM cookie with the appropriate rights;
• Another thing I miss is the plug-in flexibility of Movable Type. Since BM does not support plug-ins, I'll have to wait for a new release to have extra functionality.

Most of the point mentioned above are on the roadmap, but in general I miss the flexibility of systems like MT.

Christmas is already finished, but I still would like to wish everybody a very merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.

Even though we live far away from my family, we were able to spend Christmas with both families. On Christmas Eve we had a wonderful traditional Catalan family supper over here, and the day after we jumped in the airplane to celebrate a Dutch Christmas (I am not going to compare the two ways of celebrating; they do not differ that much and I like them both).

Anyway, as usual my time in Holland was way too short. I would have liked to spend more time with my family and friends and maybe visited some nice places together, but that will have to wait for my next visit. We have planned to go again with Easter, but maybe I will book another flight earlier.

• • Big Medium I still have to try how to make templates, but this looks like the most usable CMS for club sites;
  • Plone Watch out! Steep learning curve;
  • CMS Directory Overview of Free Systems;
  • Coranto The new NewsPro;
  • Drupal Community plumbing;
  • Open Source CMS Try it before you install;
  • mezzoblue, Wanted: CMS Guess I'm not the only one searching for this;
  • eZ Publish They mention the use of their product as webshop, corporate website, news site, intranet, extranet, forum, picture gallery, personal site and weblog;
  • Mamboserver People say the next release will be able to create valid XHTML.

[Update 2004.01.12]: Added some more links

I have a problem. Now that we are halfway in December, I would like to have some christmas decoration in our house.

But I found out that my taste is completely different from the taste of the people her. The trend seems to be many colours and a lot of blinking lights. In other sitiations I don’t mind Blinkenlights but I prefer that the lights in my christmas tree, which of course is not plastic, do not blink and have one one colour: white. I also don’t want any decoration that plays music.

I guess I’ll just have to wait until I am in Holland again and do my shoppings for next year over there. Until that moment, our house will only have a little bit of Christmas decoration.

A lot of people come here looking for information on The Pixies, so I better give those people what they want.

The big news is that my favourite band is going to come to Europe in 2004!!! Rock Werchter confirmed this week that they have contracted my favourite band. I really hope that the irresponsibles of the Benicassim festival have their eye on the pixies as well, so I can see them close to home.

[Update 2004.03.03]: For a complete tour schedule, have a look at Pixies 2004 Tour Dates.

It has been really quiet on this site; I just did not have the time to write.

I could have written about how we put a christmas tree in our house, and why we have a real tree and don’t want plastic.

I could have written about the fire my company had which destroyed the warehouse and covered the rest of the building with a black blanket. Now we have placed our support department in a small cabin in the garden.

I could have pointed you to some nice sites about web design or tell you some jokes.

I could have told you that BlogShares is up again.

Anyway, I hope I will have more time to write now.

Eight months ago I discovered BlogShares, a fantasy blog shares market. During these months I have spend my bored moments trying to convert my initial $500 into a fortune by trading virtual stocks. As far as I now, my account passed $90.000.000 this week, so I was really close to the ‘magical’ 100 million limit.

But I won’t reach that limit, since BlogShares is closed. Seyed, the creator and administrator of this game cannot support it anymore; the database crashed and won’t be restored anymore.

Game over.