June 2003 Archives

The car has been thoroughly checked, my colleague has been informed of ongoing issues at my job,... I guess I am almost ready for holidays. There are only three things left to arrange before I will dissapear for two weeks.

First at home. Tomorrow I will clean our house and do some shoppings (we only have yoghurt and beer in the fridge!). I also have to ask our neighbours to take care about our plants; they are very thirsty with this weather.

Then I have Fimcap. I need to finish the on-line edition of the Link magazine June edition. Besides that I need to activate a page I already created on which you can read live news from the World Camp, a Fimcap activity for youth animators in the Philipines. During the world camp, participants will write their stories on this page. Photos will be added later by the webmasters (of which I am one), since editing pictures, uploading them and creating the right HTML code is too difficult. I could have used some advanced blogging tool, but decided that for the moment NewsPro will do the job.

And finally I have to prepare the trip. We decided to go by car to Croatia, with a stop in Milano to visit Roberto. And that is about all we decided and have prepared so far. We don't know which road to take, what we can visit and where to stay in Croatia. I hope that MJ was able to buy a copy of the Lonely Planet guide, because than I will have good faith in our trip.

Anyway, I am almost ready. The next two weeks it will be very quiet on this web site!

28.00789% - Total Geek

Today is Sant Joan, a free day in Catalonia. The night before Sant Joan is celebrated with big fires, fireworks and eating coca, and that's exactly what we did.
Today we celebrate Sant Joan on our own way, in our favourite quiet swimming pool in Alpicat. Tonight we will meet our friends and have a drink on a terras. That is our way of celebrating the start of the summer!

The good thing of buying a cellphone pack is that everything comes pre-configured. I have chosen the Movistar Activa pack with a Sony Ericsson T200 phone. One small box containing the phone, a power adaptor, a manual for the phone, the Movistar Activa SIM card and the accompanying manual. In the shop they placed the SIM card in the phone, activated it and selected the right rate. I could use it immediately, everything was configured. Everything? Well, no. I couldn't use WAP. Not that I really need WAP, but I prefer that everything works when I buy something. I intent to use WAP for only two tasks: check my bank balance if I want to purchase something expensive and to do some emergency browsing in case www.fimcap.org is having problems.

Both manuals I received are user-level manuals (how do I send a SMS message) and hardly contain any technical details. So I changed the language from Spanish to English (somehow technical terms are easier to understand in English) and started browsing through the settings. After trying out some options I found it: the phone was configured to use WAP over GPRS, while the prepaid Movistar Activa I use does not support GPRS by default. This is really stupid, they deliver a phone and a SIM card bundled with WAP settings that don't function in this configuration!!!! It would be more logical to configure the phone by default to use WAP over GSM, and let the few people who do contract for GPRS configure their phones later!!!

Relax, relax, relax...
I really needed to relax, and that is exactly what I have done. Friday after work we met with some friends at the Tapas Gallery. First I had to convince them to sit outside in the comfortable terras, while they preferred the air conditiotioning inside. Even though we were eating some Patatas Bravas, Maria Jos� and I were still hungry, so we headed to Telepizza for a pizza. What a horrible dirty place is that!!!! Next time we will phone them from home or go to the Burger King.

On Saturday morning I was supposed to clean our house, but instead of that I walked into town to buy me a new cellphone. I already figured out that I wanted a Telefonica Movistar prepaid number, since I am not using the phone that much and mostly to phone Maria Jos� who also has Movistar. For the phone I only knew that I wanted one of the major brands, except for Motorola. After looking at the options in the shop, I chose the Sony Ericsson T200, a beautiful small device.

At lunch time, the temperature had risen to 38--40�C. With these temperatures, there are only two things you can do: stay at home (if you have airconditioning) or go to the swimming pool. We chose the last option as we don't have air conditioning. We headed to the amazing pool of Alpicat and bought a season ticket. To my shock I received a reduction because of my age, I am definitely getting old!!!! For only €15 I can swim the whole summer.

When around 7 o'clock the temperature was a little bit more bearable, we took a shower and haeded to Carrer Major for some shopping. Maria Jos� was in a buying mood, and as usual that meaned that she could not find anything while I easily bought some new clothes.

The Sunday started late. I went downstairs to Lo Panet to buy some croisants for breakfast and bought a newspaper, while Maria Jos� made the coffee. After this slow start we cleaned the house and headed to Alpicat to help my in-laws preparing the lunch. The rest of the day... swimming pool!!!

I always thought that the Internet would not be suited to learn a language, because it is better to learn from a real teacher who can explain things to you.

Once again Mark Pilgrim is two steps aheadt of everybody. First, he started a spanish site, to practice his Spanish a little bit (I know, I should also write in Spanish on this site), and I suspect also to have a good excuse to design a new site.

After anouncing this new site, a second message for the Spanish speaking readers appeared, asking for Spanish curse words, dirty words and insults. I guess he just wants to built a filter for the comments on his new site.

Anyway, the amount of reactions and the contents of these reactions is impressive! I learned some wonderfull new expressions (the best/worst untill now: "Estás tan buena que te comería la regla a cucharadas"), and surely will keep on watching the new comments on this post!!!

[Update 2004.01.21]: Removed broken links to Mark's site.

The temperature is around 35°C for over a week now, during the day you hear a lot of complains about the heat, in the evening people live on the cool streets. Everybody runs to the beach in the weekend, Lleida is getting empty. And not only here, Russell Beattie made the same observations in his entry Small Spanish Towns.

The holiday season is approaching, so we are thinking about what to do. We have two short periods to get away: the first two weeks of July and the first two weeks of September. We were planning to visit the Netherlands in July together with my in-laws (they never went abroad), but we are not sure if they recovered enough from their car accident. If not, we will try to go in September. The other short holiday we plan to take our car and drive to Croatia, with a short stop in Milano to visit our friends Roberto and Francesca. Maybe we will also stop in Venetia. Besides travelling we also want to have some days to stay at home and relax, since lately we hardly have time to be at home.

Then there are also some people visiting us. The most important ones are my parents, who will be here on August 12--19. My mother has not seen our finished house yet; the last time she was here was in July 2002, when we just started the reconstruction of our house. My father has visted us two times more, mainly to work in our house. The truth is that we haven't made a lot of progress since he last visited us. Therefore we plan to finish some more small things, so my father doesn't get the impression that we don't do anything (keeping up appearances)...

Yesterday Roberto phoned us from Italy to tell that he and Francesca are going to spend some time in the begining of August in Catalonia, and surely will visit us. Yes, we are definitely looking forward to the summer!

Yesterday a new webblog was born in Lleida. That is something quite special, since until now I haven't found many people writing about Lleida. So I decided to make a short overview:

Albert Alcaine i Peralta

After some persistant clicking you will find an outdated but beautifully designed blog

Braintags

I guess I don't have to explain anything about my site.

Connexions Internes

Xavier is another Linux user, who started his own web log recently.

Ecografia

The milk bottles blog of Sinfry (in Spanish).

El Manicomi

About overclocking, watercooling, networks, internet and Lleida

Aleix Portell Llobetó

Unfortunately he hasn't updated his site since February.

Postals des del frenopatic

The new weblog created yesterday. Spookie writes in Catalan about her life in Lleida.

Quien Pone La Polla

Fellow geeks!

stee

Stee is surely the most active blogger in Lleida. Although she is Catalan, she writes in Spanish to reach more people. I found her site after she wrote about The Cramps.

Underlog

GeoURL tels me that the owner of this blog lives 3 miles west of me.

Do you know any other bloggers is Lleida? Just let me know, and I will add you to my list.

[Update 2003.07.22]: Added Albert Alcaine i Peralta
[Update 2003.08.13]: Added Connexions Internes
[Update 2003.09.05]: Added Underlog

I love technology. I just love it. And I love computers, cellphones, PDA's, digital camera's and other geek toys. The only thing is... I don't have them!!! I used to have some fine toys, but they have been stolen some months ago.

My biggest proud and usefull gadget was my Palm III PDA, shown above. It contained my agenda, addresses of friends, family and clients, books to read at lost moments, games and passwords (encrypted of course!). Without realising it, I used my Palm daily, and was very happy with it. But... no Palm at the moment!

The other gadget I owned was a Samsung SGH-N400 cellphone. I specially liked the design of this phone (by Pininfarina). But is was easy to use and had all the functions I need (vibration, WAP, small size, ...). But... no cellphone at the moment!

I do have some computers, three in total. It is not the quality of them but the amount that make them geek toys. My desktop computer is the most advanced of the three, with a Cyrix P-133+ processor and 48Mb of memory. Yes, I know it is not that impressive. But after I reinstalled everything lately it runs faster that the mega computer I use at work. I did keep some room on the harddisk to install Linux to have even more pleasure. But... no Linux at the moment!

You might think that I must be a sad geek without any toys, but that is certainly not the case. I don't have any toys, because I am looking around to decide what toys I am going to buy. Alright, I could go into a shop and buy the latest and the greates phone, PDA and computer, but that is gonna cost me an awful lot of money. First of all I decided that I don't need a fancy cellphone. If I have time I will buy a prepaid number this weekend, and I will probably start using a second hand phone. For the moment that will be enough, since I don't phone a lot and neither plan to use any other functions. I will also keep on using my old computer. It is fast enough, and with a little bit of extra memory, a wireless connection to the ADSL router and Linux installed I sure will have lots of pleasure of it.

That leaves me without PDA. Palm recently released a new model, the Zire 71, which kicks ass! It has a built-in camera, so it gives me two toys for the price of one. The only problem is the price, which is around €300. I will have to think it over a few more times, but I am afraid that I am going to buy it...

Lately a lot of talk has been going on around Microsoft's web browser Internet Explorer (IE). This is my contribution.

First I want to go back in history. The first graphical browser NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was available in 1993 (I was one of its happy users). After a little bit of hesistation Microsoft jumped on the internet train with their Internet Explorer. Between that moment and the year 2000 Microsoft came with 6 versions of their IE browser. At that moment they had a huge monopoly in the browsermarket because of their monopoly in the OS market, and they sat back and relaxed. Now three years later (30% of the time since the creation of the World Wide Web!!!), we are still stuck with the same version, and it looks like we will have to deal with it for two more years, since Microsoft announced that they will only deliver their browsers together with Windows, and the next version of Windows (Longhorn) is scheduled for 2005.

I think thay are making a mistake. It is true that they have the monopoly, but more and more people are switching to other browsers. Furthermore, technology is advancing. More and more sites appear that make use of features that IE doesn't support, giving users a less than perfect browsing experience. At this moment the majority of the sites still uses code specially tweaked for IE, but little by little site designers start using standards complient code. And everybody knows that conforming to standards is not Microsofts strongest point. Their philosophy is 'what the monopolist uses is the standard'. That is why IE6 does not fully support CSS2, a standard created two(!) years before they created IE6.

But this is not why they are loosing users. After all, users don't care about these things, the web designers have to make sure their pages are coded well. But IE6 is also behind on the user interface side. Mozilla has nice features as a pop-up killer, an image manager to block unwanted images and a site navigation toolbar which lets me navigate through this site using the arrow keys on my browser.

Everybody is free to choose their browser, but I prefer a more modern browser than IE, which misses one third of the development of the Internet. At home I have installed Mozilla Firebird which has an install file of only 6 MB. Although is is still beta software, it runs perfectly on my old computer and gives me a lot more browsing pleasure than the browser installed by default.

It has been a while since I changed the backend of my site fron NewsPro to Movable Type. A side effect of this change was that all pages changed URL, which I considered a minor problem since most people enter the site through the home page (which did not change). Normally I try to keep URL's the same, but the old system used horrible filenames like 1025286960,58049,.html and stored all files in a single directory.

Like I said, most visitors enter the site through the fronpage, but there are some people looking for specific information with search engines. Until today these visitors were presented a '404 Page not found' error page of my provider directly followed by the homepage of my provider. In other words, these visitors end up at a completely useless page, and won't ever visit my site anymore!!!!

Something had to change. First, I wanted to change the error message from 404 (Not Found) to 410 (Gone), since the latter message is more precise. All visitors looking for never-existing files will still get the old 404 message. I read about this code a while ago on dive into mark, and I kept it in mind for using it on m own site.

Secondly, I want to show them another page, which at least links to my site. For the moment I chose to present them the search page, so at least they can search my site for the information they are looking for. I am planning to create a separate error page explaing what has happened in more detail, but until now I will just show the search page.

With fancy e-mail I mean HTML mail. Most mail applications are able to send (and receive) messages in two formats: text only or HTML, and most applications use HTML by default, which is a BAD THING. People like to use HTML e-mail, because it looks nicer with all those colors, fonts, pictures,... and therefore most software companies like it. But for writing a simple 'Hello, how is life in Lleida?' message you don't need bold words nor blue titles. Plain text is probably better readable than that piece of art some people create.
There are of course always cases in which HTML mail is better, but usually that has to do with Viagra marketing, and those messages are deleted immediately. You might think that even if you don't use fancy effects, HTML mail could not harm anybody, could it? Wrong! There are a number of reasons why I (and many other people) consider HTML mail harmful:

The reason we went to Harmelen last weekend was of course the wedding of Berry and Manon. Besides that, we took the opportunity to rest a little bit after the last busy weeks. As a result, we have spent most of our time (except for Friday) on the terras in the garden of the house of my parents.

But Friday was different, since that was the *big* day; the day we came for. After getting up late, taking a north european breakfast, and waking up under the shower we realised that most of the morning already has passed, so we started to run to get ready in time. Thursday we had a lot of time to wrap our presents in paper and prepare our contribution to the book with personal notes from the guests, but as usual I waited with these things untill the very last moment. With a little bit of running we arrived exactly on time at the house of Manon's parents. Together with the family of Berry and Manon and some of their best friends we drunk a cup of coffee with some cake. We talked a little bit with Ton and Mirjam, who had brought their two children, of which I haven't seen the youngest (Daphne) yet. As you can imagine there were lots of things to talk about. After a while Berry and Manon arrived from their photo tour, and they looked gorgeous! Of course they were really happy to see us, and we had a small opportunity to talk a little bit.

A while ago I wrote about my old Image gallery, and gave a link to the gallery since I didn't create the navigation tabs yet. The gallery was created using a script called 'Image Arcadia' which is not supported on a public site anymore. Although it worked alright, it still needed a lot of customization to fit into the rest of the site.

Recently I run across PhotoBlog from Quixotic Pixels. This is a set of Movable Type templates, allowing me to manage my images the same way I manage my texts, without having to install extra scripts.

I uploaded some photo's from my old Photo Gallery and used the default blue style, and it looks alright. The next time I will add all other photo's and I will adjust the look of the pages little by little untill it fits with the rest of the site. There is still a lot to be done...

Two more days working and we will go for a short trip to Holland!!! The reason is of course the wedding of Berry and Manon on Friday. We will leave Thursday early in the morning, giving us one day to travel, shop, talk with my parents and of course to prepare us (physically and mentally) for the big day.

Berry and Manon will get married 'for the law' in Restaurant de Kloosterhoeve, which I consider a good choice, since it has a lot more atmosphere than the townhall in Woerden and is situated in the centre of Harmelen. The religious part of the day will take place in the St. Bavo church, and the party will be in Restaurant De Putkop. I am really looking forward to this day, firstly because it is an important day for some of my best friends and secondly because I will meet a lot of people to whom I haven't spoken for some time. And finally, I always like to go back to Harmelen.