Read this story from Werner, about insurance companies not willing to sell you an insurance if there's any risk involved. You know, Werner, we told our insurance company not to bother anymore, figuring out alternative schemes to sell us an income insurance - with a four year waiting period for a re-evaluation of my back, in order to decide on eventual future income coverage should I have another problem with my back. As I jokingly told the friendly lady who was trying to sell us this bad deal, I couldn't quite understand how women eventually get insured for anything, because of their built-in predestination for pregnancy, which can become a serious medical condition as well.
We also had another reason for dropping the income insurance offer. If you're a small company, and anybody gets sick or has to leave for an extended period, you'll get into problems anyhow: people do not only cost money to a company, they also add a lot of value to it. And that value cannot easily be guessed, let alone be insured.

(Some people post pictures of cats on their weblog. Some people are very secretive about their offspring or other private facts. Some post about what others post. Diversity is what distinguishes man from monkey. I post a picture of the second woman in my life.)

Overheard at a local camera shop yesterday: "Canon Europe hasn't confirmed any shipping dates for EOS 300-D back orders. At first, they promised 'next week', but now, it is more likely that the Nikon D70 will become available mid March, even before new orders of its Canon competitor will be available. The Nikon D70 will be shipped in a similar body+lens set, at a similar price as the Canon D-Rebel."

HP now includes Cocoon 2.0.4 in an XML add-on pack for their HP-branded version of the Apache webserver.

Jos Visser, die ik tijdens de vorige NLUUG conferentie een grappige, maar technisch eerder beperkte overview van JBoss zag geven, heeft een behoorlijk fijne column op de OSOSS site van de Nederlandse overheid staan - waarin hij de halfslachtig/mosselende mentaliteit van Nederlandse (én Belgische) bedrijven en overheden tegenover open source op de korrel neemt. Lezen maar!

From: "orkut" <admin@orkut.com>
To: "stevenn@outerthought.org" <stevenn@outerthought.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 13:49:12 -0800
Subject: orkut - We're back
Message-ID: <EDA3fc71fbfc96054271920f6691f2e44a34@eda3>

Dear Steven,

We're back! 

The response to orkut has been phenomenal, and we're

learning a lot about what people like and expect from

a service like this. Thanks for all your feedback so

far -- we've really loved your suggestions.

Huh. I did gave feedback and reported spamming and abuse of their system as it went life. I wasn't the only one, I guess, and there were many bloggers commenting on their speedy, but unsafe operations. Reading upsofar however, no real reason for puking yet. Although it is very discomforting that they acknowledge they have no clue about where this is heading neither.

We took orkut.com offline for a while to build some new

features and do some general tweaking. We hope you'll

keep sending your ideas to us, because we want to make

orkut great for you. That said, we may need to take

orkut offline again for short periods to update it, so

please bear with us if it's temporarily unavailable.

Hopefully the changes will be worth the wait. We'll

see you on orkut soon...


stay beautiful, 

  orkut.com team

      http://www.orkut.com

This is plain crap, folks. Your system had serious security flaws and you had to take things down to get them fixed. Don't you dare admitting this because it might ignite a lack of trust towards your service? Guess what, there's people on this globe who don't like to be thought off as fools. Especially the audience you were targeting. Grace period is almost over: one really expects better stuff from 2400 Bayshore Parkway.

Saw this comment on a Slashdot thread: "Why is vender lock-in for Apple ok when it's considered bad for anyone else?" Answer: "It's like being taken hostage initially against your will, then realizing your captors are the Swedish Bikini Team."
Ha.

Stirring up my technolust, Nikon has announced a competitor for Canon's Digital Rebel to be released in March: the Nikon D70. Having two halfway decent Nikon lenses, waiting a bit longer before acquiring one of both seems wise. In preparation of the switch to all-digital photography, I ordered an HP PSC 2510 all-in-one+Wifi printer yesterday. Since the shared OT camera will be away on holiday for the next 5 weeks, I'll spent some time printing pics rather than snapping away.

Update: more D70 links added. Lust!

My favourite Googler invited me early-on into Orkut, and from what I saw, the Googlies had been prepopulating some networks so that newcomers would feel welcome. Orkut seems to be hitting some sweet spot for me: it's fast and easy (LinkedIn is very sluggish and overcomplicated compared to that), and less dating-centric as Friendster. So I joined and went hunting for other Orkutters - all the usual suspects were already there, of course.
Much to my dismal however, and quite different from what one would expect from Google, the system is open to hacking ATM. I saw Jesus signing up, sending mail to all registered users. While it's fun to have a direct line with God, I assume that wasn't the goal of Orkut, so they'll have to fix that - soon. Other than that: fun. Still finding out what more there is to it than just signing up - but I'm not the only one with that problem. :-)

A so-called blogversation about open source and making money... As they say in Flemish: a fart in a bottle. A typical case of over-inflating personal experiences, presenting them as general wisdom and/or established trends. Frankly, I don't see any connection between open source development and making money. They seem parallel (and disconnected) activities to me. If there's a connection, it will be based on the individual participating in both activities. But if the person has no clue about both, he won't 'get it' automagically just because he does the one thing or the other. If you don't know how to make money, you won't make it because of open source.
It's frightening and a bit sad to see such non-statements being hyperlinked and quoted on TSS: a preference for form and style over content, apparently.
Fast-forward to the men's shower after the Sunday morning veteran football game: "Mine is 5 JSRs longer than yours." "Oh yeah, but mine has a JBoss logo on it." "Hey, let's suck." "Oh wait: are we sure enough people are watching?"

After Ted and Thom ignited my curiosity, I decided to try and build Subversion on my laptop. While DarwinPorts isn't as slick as Fink, installing it was easy enough. Typing sudo port install subversion brought me no joy however, complaining in usual autotools gibberish about some missing libtool. After hunting through the build directories, apr-util seemed to be the culprit, and I patched ~/darwinports/dports/devel/apr-util/work/httpd-2.0.48/srclib/apr-util/build/rules.mk manually by replacing the faulty apr_builddir variable by ~/darwinports/dports/devel/apr/work/httpd-2.0.48/srclib/apr, which seemed to do the trick. I guess the faulty path (which was somewhere along the lines of /usr/local/share blabla) should be automagically adjusted by the port scripts, but unfortunately, that didn't seem to be the case.

Late this morning, my copy of iLife '04 arrived. After a 10 minute install, I checked whether iPhoto is now as snappy as promised (it is), and then I went for a very brief look at the other apps that came with the package. 2.5 hours later, after skipping lunch, I can only warn you to not install GarageBand if you still have work to do. A great f*cking waste of time. Enjoy (hopefully).

Hm. Every time I hear the White Stripes on the radio, my neurons connect them to another famous duo. Or vice-versa. Looking closer at some pics, I'd swear Meg and Jack are the rock-n-roll alter ego of Ben and Mena. :-)

Gee. I just booked a gîte for our summer holiday in what appeared to be a little rural village, but now seems to be a community of Wifi geeks. Oh well.

Brigitte has been my faithful USR 8000 BroadBand router who has been providing our home with shared internet access for 2 years. Gathering dust in a corner, she was pumping packets across her innards, carefully forwarding them to the correct destination. Since a week however, and only after I already had made my mind up that she was due for a replacement, she started dropping packets, as if she felt her retirement was approaching. Yesterday, she stopped forwarding packets at all, keeping traffic inside the walls of this house - I'm sure she finally figured out the Internet was a big passing fad. She has been replaced with Jay, a Cisco/LinkSys WRT54G. Jay does broadband routing and wireless access, while Brigitte had an Orinoco companion for the latter. Jay comes in a poisonous blue and has two antennas proudly sticking up, while as Brigitte was a discrete black box. So far, Jay has been servicing me well. It will take still some time however until we bond like true men. Bye, Brigitte - and thanks for all the packets. Jay, Will Smith is to blame for your cheesy name - the movie we saw last night. Welcome anyhow!

I really don't have the courage to spend money on a new digital camera right now, but I'm going to collect some links to refer back to when this changes - perhaps finding some money on the streets: Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel reviews, and the exquisite lenses for the Canon EOS 300D.
Update: Hans has one already: Envy.

I was laughing out loud when reading Marc Twain's essay about the difficulties he had with the German language. Seems as if my Dutch (and English for that matter) is pretty "German", as I found myself resounding with this brilliant quote from Twain's essay:

There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech -- not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary -- six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam -- that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens; finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it -- after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb -- merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out -- the writer shovels in"haben sind gewesen gehabt haven geworden sein," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

Via Stefan.

Here. I'm still figuring out how to add an Apache-only feed of my blog to it, but there's plenty of stuff to read already.

Verge's author has been boasting a bit on TSS about a comparison matrix he put up on his site showing Verge side-by-side with Struts and Webwork. I'd love to see someone more capable than me adding Woody to that matrix - and see how Cocoon is measuring up these days.
Update: Looks like the matrix has since then been dropped from the site. Another lesson learnt, I guess.

I'm trying to make reservations for our summer holidays, and I'm amazed with the state of online holiday booking sites. It's been the third year in a row that I use www.resinfrance.com and the ITEA booking site of Gîtes de France, and there has been an impressive degradation in service quality over the course of these years. Stil, the renting prices of the gîtes have been doubling over that period. I wonder where that extra money goes to. Minitel services?

Ted and Thom are readying a Planet Apache blog aggregator. Let's see if I can get categorized feeds working in MT. Done.

As my loyal readership might know, I have been experiencing some pretty serious issues with my back over the past years, requiring surgical attention at two different occasions. A story of being tall and a bit overweight, and not enough physical exercise to go with that, plus breaking a leg when I was 6 years old, resulting in one of my legs being a tiny bit shorter than the other. I received surgery mid December of 2002, and have been recovering slowly since then. If you're stuck in the same unpleasant situation, and want to get on with your life, and have a decent state-funded medical insurance, you might look out for the possibility of receiving Documentation Based Care. There's centres all over the civilized world - luckily enough also one in Ghent where I live. It's just a matter of regular exercising using some specialized fitness equipment - I've been doing this intensively during 2003, and am now on a post-treatment schedule of weekly visits for the coming year. Highly recommended if you have such a center within your reach.

Fashion

Climate is warming up. Tops get shorter, and low-rise pants are the way to go. In the end, more skin is habitually exposed in casual daily wear. I wonder whether there's a direct relationship between the warming-up of our planet, and the fashion rules dictated to us. I also wonder about our state of (un)dress if we continue f*cking up the Kioto treaty in the next ten years.

Birth and Dead

After seeing my wife give birth to our three children, a strong emotional and physical experience, some of my techno-lust has died and oftentimes, I can hardly fathom why we are still all that excited about technology and software engineering. I cannot say I experience this as a loss - rather an observation. People, especially small and bloody ones, are so much more exciting. My 19-months-old toddler daughter is learning her first dozens of words since a month or so. Early in the morning, only minutes after picking her out of her bed, she iterates over all of her accumulated vocabulary, as if to check whether she hasn't forgotten any words overnight.

Personal Hero of 2003

Don Park, publicly admitting on the 29th of November of last year that he visited an adult store in 2001, when his wife was away on a trip.

Another techie with a great alter ego

Joe Gregorio, who has been blogging about his trip to China to adopt a beautiful new daughter.

Wankers

Peeps indulged in guns and republicotechnocratic thinking - just because they can. Go away - that's my air you're breathing. Mars seems to be an option.

Don's post about Color Wheel Pro 2 triggered me to go and hunt for a Mac OS X alternative. I've just installed Painter's Picker from Old Jewel Software. Bought it right away: yummy stuff.

Dear Steven Noels,

If you were a Hobbit, your name would be Friagrin Goldworthy,

and if you were a (male) Man, your name would be Duryn,

and if you were an Elf, your name would be Hebrilith,

and if you were a Dwarf, your name would be Fosur,

and if you were an Orc, your name would be Ruk,

Your nearest Tavern might be called The Inn of The Forsaken Souls,

and your sword would be called Anaithus.

(from http://www.lotruk.com/nametranslator/)

Silly, eh? :-)

Last Cocoon GetTogether's greatest surprise - Mr. Mystery Guest - has silently been blogging since Christmas. New domain name as well, and talk about his own LLC: I wonder what Vadim is up to. :-)

While trying to satisfy both a long withstanding customer request and finally providing a decent mail archive facility to the cocoondev.org users, I have been messing around with MHonArc and Hypermail for most of the day. MHonArc is a Perl mbox-to-webpages script, which is packaged with Namazu (a lightweight full-text indexer) under the denomination of mharc. While the idea of integrating 'make' and these other two tools into one neat little package sure must appeal to some hacker's minds, I found the setup on a box where I don't have full root access to be daunting and full of surprises, like Perl @INC paths mess-ups, native-code cgi-bin scripts that bomb without any meaningful error message - it made made me almost look forward to set up Eyebrowse instead. Eyebrowse wasn't an option, however, since I needed per-list archive access control settings, and that didn't seem possible upon my first inspection.

Since I wanted static HTML pages (for full-text searching, to be done later on, and simple .htaccess-based authorization), I figured I should go for the low-key approach of Hypermail. After carefully massaging my ezmlm archive dirs into mbox files, and translating these manually to HTML pages with hypermail, I went for the task of triggering automated archiving for new mails - procmail coming to the rescue!

Alas, no. I'm stuck with a test mailbox with contains 8 messages, of which hypermail correctly identifies the number of messages, but generates only four pages. So who's the culprit now? Procmail? Hypermail?

Sigh. UNIX sysadmin skills - it's just a world full of creepy little bastard tools with a gazillion switches and settings - outings of their creators sadistic tendencies.

Update: well, I learned a lot about email message headers, ezmlm and how Hypermail handles X-No-Archive headers (correctly, that is). Now onto adding some full-text search facility. Fun, fun, fun.

Snow in Belgium.

Been playing cards and drinking wine until 4AM with beloved friends who are leaving on the 4th for 7.5 months of world travel.

(Almost-not-baby-anymore) daughter slept peacefully, until 8:15. Ouch.

Watched and translated/explained the second half of the LOTR Two Towers DVD with the boys. Saw the third movie in the theatre some days ago. Enjoyed this and that.

Wished my wife to remember not to forget thinking about herself once in a while. She wished me self-confidence. I guess we both silently prayed this year won't be plagued by medical conditions like last year.

Can't wish much about my children. They're the finest crew around. May they be happy in what they do, and loved by the people they encounter.

I wish you the same as I wish myself: the time and willingness to enjoy what you are doing and to appreciate the people around you, the strength to stay true to yourself and the surroundings that allow you to do so, and finally a little luck/love/laughter along the road.

A very happy New Year.