August 2003 Archives

You might already have noticed it: I added some advertisements to this site. Since now I am paying a hosting provider to host this site, I thought that I might try to get back at least some of the money I spend for it. The advertisements are related to the contents of the page, so I only added them the pages of the individual items. This makes the chance bigger that they may actually be useful for my visitors as well. I decided to give it a try for about two months; if I notice at that moment that they are not working, I will remove them.

People using a modern browser won't see the advertisements, since the advertisement script does not work when the page is processed ad XML.

One more week to go, and we have our second short vacation of this year!!!
After going to Croatia in July, we will visit the good ol' Netherlands this time. From September 9 until 16 you will have a bigger than normal chance of seeing us in the north of Europe. We didn't make an exact planning of what we are going to do, but we have made two short lists. One with some practical things I have to arrange, and one with some places we want to visit. The first list has to be followed, and the second list will almost surely change on a day-by-day basis.

The moment I changed the looks of this site, I also changed the version of the code used for these pages. My site is now made up in XHTML version 1.1. I only forgot to change one thing. I did change some tags elements to their new variants, and of course I included the right DTD. But my pages were still served to your browser with the text/html MIME type, while the specification tells me that I should serve my pages as application/xhtml+xml.

Throught the wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I was able to visit my old site again. My biggest proud of that site was the big list of all the CD's I own. So here it is, the list of March 12, 2001!

Today I noticed something strange in the access report of this site. In the error codes list I found error 411. Since I haven't seen this error code before, I googled on internet for some more information.

The official RFC 2616 says the following: The server refuses to accept the request without a defined Content-Length. The client MAY repeat the request if it adds a valid Content-Length header field containing the length of the message-body in the request message.

It appears that a server is returning code 411 when a client (=browser) tries to send data to the server without specifying the size of the data. Normally a client only receives data from the server (reading pages), and all common modern browsers are programmed in such a way that they include the data length when sending data. Therefore I suspected that somebody with a home-grown application had tried to mess with my site.

I did a quick grep in my Apache log files and found out that somebody had accessed the file mt-xmlrpc.cgi with an application that identified itself as Java/1.4.1_01. This file is a XML-RPC interface to Movable Type, allowing other applications to interact with MT, for example to publish entries on this site from a special desktop client. Since I am the only responsible for this site, nobody but me has any reason to use this file. This visitor also triggered my Spam trap, and was already blocked from my system, but if not, his badly programmed application did ring the alarm bell.

I just found a small list on my desk, and remembered that I wrote it last Friday --- or better: Saturday morning --- to publish it later on this site. The aim was to make it clear that I had a great night, visiting my favourite club Pentagrama again. These are the titles and artists of some songs they played, and people who know me and these songs can imaging that I was enjoying a lot.

• London calling -- Clash
• Personal Jesus -- Depeche Mode
• Black Betty -- Ram Jam
• Tunnel of love -- Dire Straits
• Should I stay or should I go -- Clash
• Entre dos tierras -- Héroes del Silencio

I have been thinking about making this list into a small contest, but I have no idea what to give to the person who knows all corresponding artists. Maybe I can come up with something later, so go ahead and tell me who you think the performers are.

[Update 2003.08.28]: Coen van Kuijk sent me a list which contained only one mistake. After a small hint he was able to give me all the names of the artists. Somebody wants to try to solve it in a single try????

[Update 2003.09.03]: Since I haven't received any other messages, I decided to fill in the artists and close the competition.

When I designed this site, I of course tested the layout on my Windows computer. I know that it looks alright with IE6 and Mozilla, and I suspect that it looks acceptable in most other OS/browser combinations. If I would be a professional designer, I would run it through the famous BrowserCam, but my little site is not worth the money.

Of course there are some emulators available, which might give you an idea of how your site looks --- but remember that if something looks wrong you never know for sure whether it is your code or the emulator. A new emulator I found today, shows how this site looks on an iPaq PDA.

Mmmm. Header to big, no skip navigation link, useless side column, font too big, ... But still readable. I also loaded the Fimcap site, which still has a tables based layout, and that looked way worse. To read the text you have to keep on scrolling.

I guess I will have to make a new stylesheet, or maybe serve PDA's the print stylesheet. But the print stylesheet removes all the navigational elements... Anyway, the coming days I will tweak this site so it will look better for my mobile readers --- do I have any?

First a question for the music industry: "What the heck are you doing?"

Yesterday MJ gave me a present; the CD Fleshwounds from Skin. Of course I was really happy with it, but I immediately noticed a big label on both sides with the words COPY CONTROLLED. In the specifications I read that this CD would work in any CD-player, the latest Macs and PCs with minimal Pentium II, 233 MHz and 64MB RAM. I am perfectly happy with my Cyrix P133+ with 48MB RAM, and until now I was able to play any CD I liked. Of course I tried to play the CD, but my computer could not find the CD. :-(

I really like buying CD's; I prefer to buy one to using a copied CD. Because for me the CD is more than just the disk with the bits and bytes. I like to look at the artwork in the booklet, and no inkjet printed paper gives me the same feeling as the original CD. And because I usually buy older CD's, I never feel that I pay a lot --- of course I wouldn't complain if they became cheaper. So I buy the original CD's because of the better quality of the total product.

But now the record companies are throwing in their own windows, because they decrease the quality of their product. And why would I want to pay a lot for something that is broken? I don't have any problem yet, since there are so many old CD's out there that I still want to buy. But I can assure that I am never ever going to buy a copy protected CD anymore. Not because I want to copy it --- which I feel is my right --- but because it is essentially a broken product.

You can read more about copy-protected CD's at Kuro5hin or if you truely want to know everything you can go to the UK campain for Digital Rights.

Most viruses that replicate themselves through e-mail forge the from: field of their messages. Usually they take a random address, or pick one from your address book or web cache. Therefore, a virus appearing to come from jeroen@example.com, rarely really originates from this address.

I can image that some users don't know this, and when they receive a virus from me they send me a reply with a warning that I have a virus. Usually I explain these people the story above and tell them --- of course after checking that my anti-virus software is up-to-date --- that I don't have a virus. No problem for me.

What I don't understand is that some people who are responsible for really big mail servers also don't understand that viruses forge headers, and have their servers configured in such a way that they reply to me. Of course they have the right to block a message with a virus to protect their customers. But please don't bother me with these messages. I can assure you that I am not the one sending these messages; just check the mail headers and you will see that they originate from a completely different server.

This morning somebody who apparently had visited my site cached a virus and started sending out the virus in my name. Luckily for him, his provider scans all incoming SMTP mail and intercepted all messages. Instead of simply not accepting these messages, they had configured procmail to send a warning to the address mentioned in the from-field (me) including the virus!!!!! As a result, my inbox is flooded with viruses from this server (mail.infosys.tuwien.ac.at).

Once again, none of my computers is infected with a virus.

I have written before about the Movable Type plug-ins I use for this site; at this moment I am using seven different plug-ins. The more plug-ins you use, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the site. Because once in a while new versions appear, and I don't want to scan seven (eight if you include MT itself) sites to see if updates are available.

But now there is the MT Plug-ins Manager. I downloaded the files, placed them on the server and fired up the page. A neat list with all available plug-ins appeared.

Since I didn't install my plug-ins with this tool, the plug-in manager did not know yet which plug-ins I already have installed. So I went to the Manual Registration section, where I could specify the version number and plug-in name of each file in my plugins directory. After entering these details I went back to my main page, and noticed an update button next to the IfEmpty plug-in. I was using version 1.1, while the latest version is 1.11. I clicked the button, waited some seconds and my plug-in was updated. This is great!!! No more downloading from different sites, unzipping, FTP-ing,... One click on the button does the job.

Tomorrow evening my parents will be flying back home. They have been living with us for one week now, and it has been really wonderful. At this moment they are enjoying the weather in the swimming pool, just like most other afternoons. Before going home, they will say goodbye to my in-laws. They can get along very well, despite of the huge communication problems they have.

Tonight we will surely play some cards (for the last time) and have a small dinner. Tomorrow they will pack their backs, go one more time to the swimming pool, and catch the airplane.

We will surely miss them; our house will be more empty without them. But the good news is that we will see them again when we will visit the Netherlands next month.

I am having some problems in the comment form of my individual archives.

After entering a comment, the form correctly sets the mtcmtauth, mtcmtmail and mtcmthome cookies.

But if I view the page later, the contents of these cookies are not loaded into their respective fields (I've tried it with Moz and IE6). My browser tells me that document.comments_form.email is zero or not an object. Of course I checked my template, but I cannot find anything strange. The <form> tag element has id="comments_form", and the field is also nicely called email.

I don't know where to look further anymore. Can somebody have a look at this page, and help me with the solution?

Yesterday evening my parents arrived for a short holiday in our house. I came home from work a little bit late, so I had to run a little bit to be ready before they arrived. I cleaned the last things, ironed our clothes and prepared a spinach/salmon quiche and a salad with cheese and apple.

When MJ arrived with them, I showed them around in our house. My mother only had seen it before we started the reconstruction, and though my father had visited us in January, enough things have changed in the mean time. At half past ten we started our supper, which was even for us a little bit late. Fortunately my parents had eaten some krentenbollen (anybody knows the translation?) in the airplane. After supper we talked a little bit and we showed them our holiday photo's from Croatia.

This morning before going to work, I prepared the table for breakfast. While they were eating, I gave them our map of Lleida and explained them where our house is and where they can find interesting things. I also explained them how to make coffee and gave them the keys of the house. I am sure that they will be alright.

Some of you receive a message whenever I update this site. You can become a member of my update list by filling in your details on the form on my first page. I am using an external service (Bloglet) to handle these messages.

But now that I have my new provider, I am taking things in my own hands again. I have created a MailMan mailing list to which I will add all people receiving messages . At this moment I am still testing --- in fact, this post is a test to see whether the notifications arrive to the list --- and as soon as everything works, I will change the form on my site, so new subscription will automatically be added to the list.

Movable Type supports a notification list, but has no mechanism to manage this list. I will have to add, remove and change all addresses by hand, and since I am lazy I looked for a way to automate this. So now the only e-mail address in the MT notification list is the mailing list address. After that, MailMan will take care about distributing the message to all interested persons. MailMan also provides a management interface where the recipients of my messages can configure their accounts.

[Update 12.08.2003] The test performed by this message worked flawlessly, so I deleted the Bloglet service and replaced the subscription form by a MailMan form. In the mean time I was able to help some other people setting up MailMan for their subscriptions by pointing them to the FAQ How do I create a newsletter/announcement/one-way list?.

After a quiet weekend in the swimming pool, the time has come to work a little bit. This week we will receive four visitor from abroad: my parents from August 12 'till 19 and Roberto and Francesca on Wednesday and Thursday.

So that means preparing the beds, thinking about what we are going to eat, shopping, inviting my in-laws to have a supper at our house, ... Fortunately, Maria José is working on a summer schedule, so she has a little bit more time than I have for these kind of things.

The thing that we don't know yet is what to do this weekend --- we have three free days --- since it is too hot to stay in the city. The options are beach or mountains, my parents can decide.

It has been three days ago since I switched my site to the new server. Little by little the visitors switched as DNS servers synchronised all over the world. And little by little I noticed some problems on my site.

These problems were related the two changes I made in the set-up of my site: I moved my photo gallery from its subdirectory /photos to its own sub-domain photos.braintags.com and I changed all URLs of the individual archives from entry_name.html to entry_name/index.shtml.

The first change broke all links to the photos --- and what is a photo gallery without photos? --- which I corrected by editing all 51 entries. Furthermore I still have to create a symbolic link to some files from my main site, like robots.txt.

The second change broke nothing on my site, but some links to my pages on other sites (Google!) broke terribly. Therefore I decided to us my good friend mod_rewrite to serve people the right page. All I had to do was to create a rule to redirect requests for /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name.html to /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name/. So I created the following rule:

# Redirect old URI's to future-proof directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

This did a good job, except for two problems: it also redirected the URI of my monthly archives to archives/yyyy/mm/index/ and it added a slash in front of the URI, so the URL would look like http://jeroensangers.com//archives/.... The first problem was easily solved:

# Redirect old URI's to future-proof directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.s?html$
RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

For the second problem I am still looking for a solution.

Welcome!

If you're reading this message, the server transfer was successfully finished. Exporting and importing all entries went without problems. Within 15 minutes I had copied all my texts to the new server. For sure there are some broken links (the coming period I am going to make them future-proof), but I will fix that the coming days.

Now all I have to do is wait until the DNS settings have been copied to all DNS servers over the world, and ask my old provider to drop jeroensangers.com.

Change of plans...

Yesterday I told that I was going to redesign my templates and style before switching to the new hosting provider. After one day of design work, I realise that I want so many changes that the rewrite is going to take weeks. The style I was using until now was based on the default templates of Movable Type, which I adapted by adding and deleting some things, until it looked almost like what I wanted. What I am doing now, is starting with an empty file and adding one by one the elements I want to see. This is a slowly process, since I cannot spend the whole day working on this --- I wish I could!

So now I decided that I am going to copy everything as it is now to the new location, and continue the rewrite on the background. Therefore I disabled comments on the most popular entries (to disable comments on all entries I need to edit them one-by-one. There is a script that can do this, but is requires PHP and MySQL, two of the reasons I am switching to another provider). Now I have to copy the templates and do an export and import of the data. If everything works well, you will read the next message from the new server.

After I purchased an account for this site last weekend, I have been exploring the possibilities and planning how to switch my site to the new server. I prefer to think a little bit before I start copying recklessly.

The thing that took most of my time is making choices, since I have now so many more options than I had before. For example, I have three options to access my e-mail with a web client (NeoMail, horde or SquirrelMail), and three options to analyse the access statistics (AWStats, webalizer, Urchin). Besides making choices, I have been experimenting on setting up a mailing list for the notifications, created a subdomain for my photo gallery, blocked some IP addresses, activated SpamAssasin on my e-mail, ... All these options are comfortably available through cPanel, something I have never seen before, but which I liked immediately.

Of course I started installing Movable Type, this time using a MySQL database to store all the information. This gave me also the opportunity to play a little bit with MySQL. After setting up MT, I configured my three weblogs (Braintags, Braintags Gallery and Braintags Static Content), but did not yet copy the style sheets. I want to use this site conversion to update all my templates and styles. I am thinking about using a three-column layout for my main page, since the current sidebar is too long. Besides that I want to integrate my photo gallery by using a likewise style. So the next week I will be playing HTML-Kit and TopStyle Pro. Once this is done, I will export and import all the date and change the DNS record so you all can see the new site (without pop-up banners!!).

FOAF provides an execellent vocabulary for describing people and the relation between people. It is a way to describe yourself -- your name, email address, and the people you're friends with -- using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you're a member.

Of course I created a FOAF description of myself, using the FOAF-a-Matic. You can find my FOAF at http://braintags.com/foaf.rdf. If you link your FOAF to mine, please let me know, so I can update my file.

[Update 03.08.2003]: After seeing 23 404-errors in my logfile, I came to the conclusion that I must have saved the FOAF file with the wrong name. It is now fixed, so it should work alright.

For those people who are too lazy to look into the file, my FOAF description looks as follows:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
    xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <foaf:Person>
    <foaf:name>Jeroen Sangers</foaf:name>
    <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
    <foaf:firstName>Jeroen</foaf:firstName>
    <foaf:surname>Sangers</foaf:surname>
    <foaf:nick>Beltza</foaf:nick>
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>6fe5a1c9a2f3ce9d6a53d4f82d0e4a92254bba2b</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
    <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://braintags.com/"/>
    <foaf:phone rdf:resource="tel:+34-6-19204630"/>
    <foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.icg.es/"/>
    <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.uu.nl/"/>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

I don't notice the pop-up advertisements on this site anymore, since the browsers I am normally using (Mozilla & Firebird) block them, but I know that they irritate quite some visitors of this site. But as they say: you get what you pay for. I pay nothing for hosting this site, and in return I'll have to accept that my provider adds these horrible things to my pages. :-(

But I have good news for you: today I arranged a new hosting provider, and since I am paying a little bit, they will host my site banner free!!!!!!. I could have upgraded my current account, but I have found a provider who gives me a lot more for less!!! Here are the specs:

• 75mb disk space
• 5gb/month bandwidth
• Unlimited e-mail accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited MySQL 4 databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• 4 mailing lists
• One domain
• PHP 4.3.1
• CGI-Bin (Perl)
• POP3, SMTP, IMAP, & Webmail
• Unlimited e-mail forwarders
• Unlimited autoresponders
• crontab
• ...

For me, the biggest advancements are the MySQL database, unlimited POP3 boxes and PHP. I don't know anything about PHP, but I have seen a lot of handy code that I would like to copy & paste in my templates. Another benefit is that without the banner code, my pages will contain valid XHTML 1.1 code.

For the coming period, I'm afraid that I will still serve my site from the old location with pop-ups, since I want to set up the new server really, really good, and like to fix some design flaws in the current site.

Be patient, dear visitors