January 2003 Archives
The site you are reading now is my 3rd personal web site. You might think that it is not /that/ great, but you have to keep in mind that I created it in less than an hour. When I was making it, I was busy with my move to Lleida, and didn't have a lot of time to hack code. In fact, my intention never was to keep it this long, it should already have been replaced with something better!!! In my mind I am already designing V4, but it maight take half a year more before you will be able to see it (first I have to finish our working room, so I can put a decent computer to work with).
One of the things I want to implement in V4 is a history of my sites, in other words, I will copy V3 as it is now (with only removing some interactive options), add V2 (I still have it on disk) and recreate V1 from my memories. The nice thing of the four sites together is that they show the development of personal web sites through the years:
- V1: I created my first site in 1993 when I was still studying. Internet was new and after playing with gopher I installed Mosaic on my Macintosh and made my first page. In fact it was nothing more that a bulleted list with my favourite sites.
- V2: In 1997 I bought myself a new computer with modem. With my internetconnection came some space on the server for my personal homepage. I installed FrontPage (like everybody in that time), chose a nice theme and typed in my texts. Later I linked my CD database to this site, gaining a lot of links from music lovers.
- V3: The site you are reading now, created in 2001. In the meantime I had learned that FrontPage creates bloated, non-standard pages, so I created this site as a pure site. Written completely on Notepad. I installed two perl scripts (NewsPro and Image Gallery) to handle the dynamical content, and that's it!
- V4: As my sites always have been used mainly for testing purposes, I will go one step further. V4 will be hosted on my own server, and I will probably use the Zope Application Server, with Plone on top of it. Besides my old sites, I will probably continue to write short stories about my life (even though I know that I am not the greates writer), but I will probably split them into personal and technical stories. The comments feature is almost never used, so I will replace it by a conventional guestbook. I have a lot of other ideas, but I won't bother you with it now...
Besides my personal sites, I have been working on three more sites. After V2 was up and running, I created (also with FrontPage) Youth Games, a collection of games in Dutch and English. The site was a big success, but I didn't have the time to maintain it. Another FrontPage site was the DDC (Dooie Donders Club) site. In fact is was the same site as V2, but with another theme. I hope that after I have created V4 I will have tim eto make another DDC site, but for this I need some help from my brothers. The site I currently spent the most time on is Fimcap, but I'm sure you all ahve visited this site already...
Update 2003.06.11: In the mean time I have updated this site and imported all news items. Although in this message was written that you are looking at V3, in fact I would consider this V3.5 or even V4.
After five days of hard work, my father has gone home again. The result of all this hard work? Four painted doors!!! I know, it doesn't sound like it was a lot of work, but trust me, he did a lot! I have been wrestlingwith those doors myself before, and I can tell you that it takes a lot of time. The biggest problem is removing the old paint. The doors have been painted at least three times before, with three different types of paint. The oldest layer turns into some sticky mess as soon as you try to remove it, and turns into stone on your tools. Besides that, the fine structure carved into the doors don't make it easier to clean them...
Because of the hard work, my father did not have a lot of time for social contacts, which is a big crime in this country! Therefor all social activities were propped into Saturday. In the morning we had breakfast in the house of a friend of the parents on Maria José. Since this was a special occasion, they'd fired up the grill to prepare a big pile of meat (and that for breakfast!!!!) After the breakfast we took a short walk through the yards and went home to prepare ourselves for lunch. After being home for only one our, we went to the house of the parent of Maria José, te eat soup, french fries and... a chicken!! I wasn't really hungry when I went for lunch (understatement), but after lunch I felt just as stuffed as the chicken I had been eating. I was happy to sleep a little after lunch (my father of course continued working), knowing that in the evening we would go to a nice restaurant to eat some more...
The work in our house is making big progress... Yesterday my father arrived to fix the last important things, like removign the paint from the doors and painting them. When I came home for lunch today I was surprised: he almost finished the first door already! And he is staying untill Sunday, can you imagine how happy we are!
Tomorrow will be a busy day in 'Casa Sangers', since Lilian and Ruud will visit us. They are having a short holiday in Barcelona this week, and will drop by for a day...
I spend quite some time behind the computer, at work as well as at home. Mostly I use the computer for only four things: read my e-mail, read some web pages, create web pages and write documents. Over years I have tried to make my life as easy as possible, and I would like to share here with you hoiw I am doing. Although I use both Windows (98 & XP) as Linux, I will focus here on Windows.
Reading e-mail
Did you know that there are two protocols to read your e-mail? We have POP3 and IMAP. Most people use POP3, but IMAP is far better. Why? First of all, because IMAP leaves messages on the server, so you can see all your e-mail from any location (I know, web-based mail can also do this, but has a lot of other inconveniences). You can also create folders on the server. At home I am still using a 28k8 modem to connect to the internet. If I want to read an important mail, but somebody has sent me a big file just before it, I'll have to wait for the big mail to enter first. Not with IMAP!! With IMAP, first the headers of the messages are downloaded, and then I can decide which message I want to download to my computer. So I can skip the big message and read the important message first.
Like most people I am using Outlook Express for my e-mail. I know that I can install a better mail program, but why should I if OE comes preinstalled? There are however some things that I really don't like about OE, but fortunately they are easily fixed. The biggest problem is quoting. When replying to a message, Outlook puts the cursor and my signature above the original message. If after a whil I want to read the entire thread of the message, I'll have to scroll down to the first message, read it, go up to the next message, read it, go up... Anyway, it would be a lot easier if everybody would write their messages under the original message (and trim the message!!!!). I am using a very simple program that fixes this problem automagically: OE-QuoteFix. By the way, when reading a threaded message, it uses colour coding to show the different replies. Really handy!!!
Read web pages
Lets continue with Internet Explorer. I use it not because it is the best, but because I can't deinstall it and don't have diskspace for a better browser (Mozilla). As somebody who designs web pages I can tell you how horrible IE is... Even though it is a bad browser, it has some features that are unknown to many people. For example, I really hate pop-up screens (I know, this site has them, but read on...). To disable them, I chnaged the security settings of IE so that JavaScript will be disabled (tools -- internet options -- security -- internet -- high). Javascript is used by many web sites, but mostly for features that I am not interested in (pop-up screens, tracking of my behaviour, fancy menus, etc..). If I notice that a site really requires JavaScript, I simply add the site to my trusted sites. But untill now that was only necessary for four sites.
Create web pages
I know that not many of you create web pages, so I'll keep it short. The greatest tool I have found is HTML-Kit. It is free and can do a lot more than its name says (HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB, C/C++, C#, Delphi / Pascal, Lisp, SQL, and more). But if I need to quickly change something, I usually use Notepad (see below).
Write documents
One tip: You don't need Microsoft Word for everything!!! Why not? Because the application is way too big (I only use 5% of the options), because Word files are way too big (ever received a Word document under 200k?) and more important: Word documents can only be read by Microsoft Word. In other words, if I send somebody a Word document I force him to use a really expensive text editor!! Most texts I simply write in Notepad, since most texts are short and don't need any make-up. If I want my headers to appear in another font, I'll switch to WordPad. Easy enough, isn't it??
Today at lunchtime we have removed all the christmas decoration from our house; the holiday season is definitely over. As this was our first winter in our own house, we have bought the decoration little by little, some things even in Holland. But after the Three Kings (if you want to know how we celebrated it, read my story of last year) it was time to remove everything. The result of this first year is a big box with decorations. The only thing we have to do is find a place for our tree. It is quite big (way too big for our little balcony or our patio) and at this moment it is blocking the entrance of the house. We will try to find a home for it next Saturday, and hope that it will survive untill next year.
At least our living room looks a lot bigger now...
A new year has started, and it has started very well for me. This was the first time that we celebrated New Year in Lleida. We spend the last evening of the year with our family; eating, drinking, talking, watching television...
At midnight I participated in a typical (hilarious) custom: eat a grape on every bang of the clock, and thus ending up with twelve grapes in your mouth!!! Maria José was not able to finish her twelve grapes, because she was rolling on the floor laughing.
A little after midnight we went to visit a friend at home. She was supposed to go with us to the pub, but got ill that day (poor girl...). We had some more glases of cava, parked our car at home and went off to the Pentagrama. I always like to go to the 'Penta' because they play a lot of music from the eighties.
The next day we woke up incredably early, at twelve o'clock. We had a short breakfast and a quick shower and went off to the new year's lunch. In the afternoon we were painting in our house. Since we are living there we haven't worked a lot, so it still isn't finished yet. This extra free day gave us the opportunity to work a little bit.
