English

When replacing my old high-school Kipling backpack with a new backpack, I didn't thought I would use that new backpack even longer than the 12 years I used the Kipling. I didn't use that for work - I don't really remember that well, but I don't think I used that Samsonite Pro-DLX 3 shoulder bag that long, and have replaced it with a Samsonite Pro-DLX 3 backpack around 2011 - I still use that backpack as my main work backpack, although I am searching for a somewhat smaller and lighter bag, as nowadays I travel by train instead of car, and as I don't go daily to the office anymore, I have less need of dragging a lot of things with me.

I've been using an e-reader for 16 years, now. I started with a BeBook Mini. After 4 years, I replaced it with a Kobo Aura HD. And now was the time to replace it with my newest e-reader.

I confess, I sometimes make really stupid mistakes. I backed a Neeo back in the day. At first it looked like a nice device, but after broken promise after broken promise, they suddenly wanted more money ('oh, btw, the original price was without taxes' (and to the US readers: no, that is not how it works in Europe)), and I was stupid enough (fell for the sunken cost fallacy) to pay up, even though I had the option to get out, and get my money back.

I have been searching for a practical way to manage my documents at home. While the amount of paper documents (letters, bank statements, etc) that I get is decreasing, I still like to have a way to archive them in a proper way.

So, my 'new laptop' was still working perfectly fine, and there was no real reason to replace it (although my daughter was using my old laptop a bit too much - so now she has her own laptop :)). But still, since I saw the video on Linus Tech Tips I really supported the idea. And as I am not going to invest 224993.37 dollars, but still believe in the put-the-money-where-your-mouth is, I did buy the Framework 13 one-and-a-half years ago.

I've used Dropbox for a long time; I used it to sync my photos from my phone, to automatically download books from publishers, and to just store random documents. I've been a user on the free tier, and I bumped more and more into limits - having to move old photos manually out of Dropbox to get more space for new photos. So, started looking for alternatives, and as I already had my home server running, looked mostly at self hosting it.

With my new NAS, it was also time to rethink my backup strategy. I used to have a simple strategy on the NAS itself:

• Stored all data at a RAID-1 array
• Once a day, ran a small rsync script that would create a snapshot (at a separate disk), using --link-dest to only store the actual changes (and hardlinks to unchanged files)
• Once a week, used rclone to sync the backup to Backblaze B2 (and had Backblaze configured to perform deletes after 6 months)

I use Gnome as my desktop environment for my private laptop. As a Linux user, at the moment I was distro-hopping, I also tried different desktop environments:

• started with KDE: as everything is customizable, this gives a lot of options and possibilities. But also a lot of possibilities to screw-up (or at least, make everything inconsistent). For my use-case I found it a bit too customizable.
• then Gnome: maybe a bit too minimalistic. As far as I know, they have really thought about the workflow. But as someone who uses multiple operating systems, I found the default gnome workflow too different from what I expect.
• Mate: didn't like the Gnome 2 look, can imagine when you're really used to that, you like it, but as I don't have an intimate history with Gnome 2, I don't care about that feel.
• Cinnamon: liked the defaults. But in the end didn't go for it, but to be honest, don't really know anymore why

At this moment, I have an HP Microserver Gen8 as a NAS. Next to it, I have my old homeserver that I bought 10 years ago, to host Home Assistant and some Docker containers.

My first NAS was a Synology DS109. Apart from the fact that it didn't have redundant disks (I actually bought a DS109j as well, to give to my parents and act as a replica, but in practice, I've never set up the replication), I really liked it. Synology's support is outstanding, their latest firmware release is from 2017, 8 years after the device came to the market . But in 2015 support officially ended, still an impressive 6 years.

I've bought my first SSD 13 years ago, in October 2009. For 199.98 euro, I bought the 80 GB Intel X25-M, to be used in my work laptop. Just before that, I had a chat with someone from our infra department, and asked them casually how much trouble I would get into if I swapped my harddrive in my laptop for an SSD (I learned - they didn't really like it when I bridged my ethernet connection to connect my PDA to the network...). The answer was: not really, they were quite interested in the speed improvement themselves.

Somebody at work asked my input for good books for starting (Java) developers. As this is something that might be useful for others as well, I'll post my list here as well. This list contains books that I found to be the most influencal to me - and are timeless. So, by design, I won't include really specific books (the 'how to use scrum' of 'spring 5.0' type of books) and books that were really good, but I would not recommend in 2022 anymore (eg, 'The Pragmatic Programmer', 'Extreme Programming Explained').

There are a lot of good Youtube videos on steaming milk with your espresso machine. For example, these videos by James Hoffmann or Lance Hedrick.

When I learned Java 22 years ago, I could not know how much impact it would have on my career. At that time the language was only 3 years old (I certainly didn't know that at that time...), but the University of Twente used it already for teaching their Object Oriented and Imperative Programming class (a lot of AWT (Swing didn't exists yet), and Applets - that will be the future!). I still have my copy of Deitel & Deitel - Java: How to program, 2nd edition.

"Do you really want a new hobby? Because that is what espresso at home is." - James Hoffmann. Apparently I do, as I just bought an espresso machine, and don't really like coffee...

Ok, for a few years I'm irritated by the following:

After a few years, my box of sugar cubes started to become a bit empty. So, it was time to buy a new box. And this obviously means some research. It didn't take long (hey, there are not that many options...) till I stumbled upon this claim:

At Jibes I was in the fortunate situation that I was provided with a top-of-the-line laptop with full rights that I could also use privately. And at Quinity I still used a regular PC at home. So, until recently, I never had to buy a private laptop (I did bought some private laptops in the past, but those were always as an 'extra').

Some time ago, we needed some new containers to store food leftovers. And we we're at Ikea to buy - I don't know anymore, but I'm sure it was something else :)

After using the same hosting provider for the weblog for 16 years, I finally switched to a new one. 16 years ago I registered the domain and got a hosting package at freerider.nl. After a few renamed and takeovers, the company is now called oxilion.nl.

So, that migration to Medium didn't really worked out in the end. Never got the custom domain working, and I really didn't like the password-less-login (every time you login, you have to request a mail...)

After a 5-year hiatus, I ‘rebooted’ my blog… so, welcome back ;)

As a Winamp user since 1998, today I replaced it with Songbird. Winamp has all the features I need (basically FLAC support and last.fm scrobbling :)), but it lacks an important feature I need in the near future: MacOS support.

Recently, I stumbled upon “Rework” by 37signals in my local bookshop. As an avid reader of Signal vs. Noise, buying it was a non-decision.

Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Joshua Bloch:

When I bought my Miele Black Pearl 2000 back in 2005, I thought that that would be my only vacuum cleaner I would buy for a long time… But, apparently, I was wrong, because this week I bought a new one…

Marc (for some reason you can only address another blogger by his first name, even if that other blogger did almost invent the Internet…) points to an article that describes why hybrid cars aren’t the future.

[lang_nl]Vanwege *ahem* ‘hoge vraag’ *ahem* heb ik de Top Commentator widget weer terug geplaatst. Ik heb zelf de source een beetje aangepast zodat hij mezelf nu niet meer toont. Dus vanaf nu: in de widget zie je de meest actieve commentatoren afgezien van mij![/lang_nl]

The first two posts on this weblog already stated the question: post in Dutch, or in English? The last English post is already 1.5 years old. The last few months I’m more and more posting on my personal live, and I didn’t really wanted an English (technical) post intervene. I thought about splitting the weblog into two, but I realized that I don’t have enough content to justify that. So, this weekend, I installed the plugin Polyglot. Using this plugin I can write posts both in English and in Dutch. I still don’t know whether I will post all blogs both in English and in Dutch (I fear that my English is not good enough so I could translate my dull stupid funny-to-be texts well enough to be enjoyable in English), but we will see…

Although I use Firefox for quite a while now, now and then you still learn useful things. For example, the usage of the middle-mouse-button (or more commonly: clicking the scroll wheel). Not long after I started using Firefox 1.5 and I couldn’t use the Tabbrowser Preferences extension anymore I learned that clicking on a tab with your scroll wheel closes it. A very nice feature indeed (before that, I right clicked on the tab to close it).

Today, I learned a new word: Hackpology. Google doesn’t seem to know the word (at least, not yet :)), but that doesn’t matter: I like the term.

After our monthly meeting at work I was tricked (after a beer of course :)) to play a game of Antigrav. To those who don’t know: Antigrav is a game that uses EyeToy: a camera that is connected to a playstation 2, so you have to to behave as an idiot in front of the TV in order to move your in-game character.

While I was eating today, I was watching ‘Ready Steady Cook‘ on the BBC. During their 10 minutes session they create absolutely astonishing meals, the cooks also answered a question from a viewer. A Dutch viewer. She stated that as everyone knows one should never reheat spinach, but she asked whether it was ok to reheat spinach soup?

About a year ago I wrote a small piece over using VOIP and UMTS, stating that that might be a cheap alternative over calling, but it wouldn’t probably work because of high delay (and jitter).

Yesterday, I downloaded, installed and played with Google Earth, just like half of the internet population. I then found it a very nice toy. Exceptionally cool. The streaming technology is so beautifully implemented. But still, a toy. I couldn’t really see the real usefulness. As a technical person, I really have deep respect for the way the program works, but hey, unfortunally in the real world, you also need to have a business case in order to make things happen, and at that moment I didn’t see it.

Frans wrote a piece about using an I as a prefix when using interfaces. I agree to him that differentiating between classes and interfaces by a naming convention is a useful thing. But instead of using a prefixed I for the interface, one can also use a postfixed Impl for the implementing class. Because normally you program to an interface, the code that uses the interface becomes much more clean:

Today it is 5 years ago that a firework factory in Enschede exploded. At that time I lived in Enschede, about 2 km from the scene. Although no one I knew was injured or killed, I know some people who lost all their possessions.

I bought (the Dutch translation) this book almost a year ago at the local supermarket (hey, it was cheap, and it looked better than the other cheap books, and it was next to the waiting line for the cash register :)), but until recently I’ve never read it. Only on the trip to Prague I started to read it (I also took ‘Managing Software Requirements’ [Leffingwell, Widrig] with me, but that book was a bit too heavy for a holiday).

Last week I was on holiday in Prague, mainly to meet my family there. It was a nice week, although Kreslice (where we stayed) was a bit too far from the centre and the weather was not that nice (the first day was about 30 degrees, but after that it became colder and it started to rain).

Almost a year after I blogged about my fourth birthday of my old camera, I bought a new one: a Canon 350D.

It has been a while since I posted on the blog, and with good reason. I was very busy moving to my new home. Two weeks ago I finally stayed here for the first time overnight, and since then I’m completely moved.

I was just browsing around a bit, and on one page I noticed something weird: an ad.

Zef talks about the difference between webapps and ‘normal’ apps. One interesting statement that he makes:

I just read in the Computable that Telfort (one of the telcos in The Netherlands) will start rolling out an UMTS network using Huawei equipment, as the first one in europe. A few months ago, Telfort said that the in the current state UMTS is worthless and that until the arrival of HSDPA with its 8-10MBit bandwidth, it doesn’t make sense using it and that they will use EDGE instead. At that time I wrote that the CEO of Telfort was overestimating the speed of HSDPA and I didn’t understand why he made that statement (but that it made sense to use EDGE as a temporary solution).

While half the world is talking about Konfabulator, I don’t really see why. Ok, it looks good (ok, even better: great!), but what about the usefulness? My desktop is hidden by the programs I run all the time, so I don’t see the nice clock on the background anyway. Another thing that I disliked was that it wasn’t linked to Outlook. Sure, I’d like to see my to-do list, but no, I don’t want to keep two to-do lists…

Today, I updated my weblog to WordPress. Mainly because I am really tired of having to manually delete spam-comments, and I hope that WordPress can handle these better than b2. The upgrading process was quite simple: downloading the .zip, unzipping, inserting the database connection settings, uploading everything, pointing to an URL, pressing next a few times, and that was that.

Gizmodo talks about a SIM card with 256 MB of memory on it, and they like it.

Adam Curry talks about RSS enclosures and automagically downloading them.

I noticed that Google doesn’t work here anymore (for at least half an hour now, weird thing is that I don’t see any people posting ‘google doesn’t work anymore’ anywhere).

Speaking of profiling in WSAD. The following error was quite funny:

This is realy one of the weirest bugs I’ve ever seen (well, ok, the bug isn’t weird, the workaround is).

According to nu.nl Vodafone has reduced their prices for UMTS today. Traffic will cost 0.50 euro/MB (I assume that their usage of Mb is ignorance). Compared to ‘normal’ traffic, this is obviously quite expensive, but this is obviously not a fair comparison. When you compare it to other types of mobile costs it is quit affordable (for example one SMS message of 160 bytes: about 23 9 8 cents).

I just installed a new 160GB 7200rpm 8MB cache WD harddisk, which I bought yesterday for just 105 euro. This new harddisk brings my total storage space to about 425GB (for the 5 ‘old’ disks keeping 265 GB I paid significantly more than 150 euro…).

Everybody receives it. In the last few weeks my university account was functioning I received about 100 emails per day. Less than 1 of them (on average) was ‘valid’ email, the rest was spam. OK, I admit: In the 5 years I’ve used that account I did nothing to prevent spam (back in ’98 the amount of spam was not that high), but still: it shouldn’t be the case that spam completely ruins a communication channel…

I don’t really get the point on the Google IPO. To my knowledge (but I’m just a Computer Scientist, not an economist, so shoot me), the tihng about an IPO is going public (hence the name) and getting money (but you loose your company (or at least a part of it)).

Last week I bought a new subscription for my mobile phone. Apparently, even when you call very infrequent it is cheaper to get a subscription instead of using pre-paid cards. So I switched from my T-Mobile pre-paid card (calling costs .33 euro/minute) to a Telfort subscription (90 minutes/month for 3.28 euro).

I just watched WinFS Overview – Significant New Storage Innovation for Longhorn on MSDN TV. I must say I’m very surprised by the very dramatic changes that are made. Apparently, things like files and directories will be replaced by ‘Items’, ‘Relationships’ and ‘Libraries’.

I just read at http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/17064.phtml (Dutch) that Sun and IBM no longer negotiate (huh? Did I mis something?) with each other about developing an opensource IDE together.