November 2003 Archives
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "May be," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "May be," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "May be," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "May be," said the farmer.
Now that I have been working with LOAF for several days, I have the feeling that the technology is not completely finished yet. I have studied many LOAF implementations, but have the feeling that most implementations are just too difficult to implement. A lot of implementations are written in obscure programming languages, and need a powerful server to run on. But this way the LOAF technology is kept away from the big audience, who know nothing about programming. In my opinion, LOAF should be more easy to use, Joe Sixpack should be able to use it on his blog. And that preferably by only changing a single setting in his weblogging software.
So, I decided to create a LOAF implementation in CSS. Notice that this stylesheet is XHTML1.1 ready, since it also styles the <html> element. You only need to copy the file to your server and your site is completely LOAF-compliant.
To use the LOAF CSS implementation on your site, follow the steps below:
- Download the LOAF CSS file;
- Replace the stylesheet for your site with the contents of the file you just downloaded (MT users: read the instructions on the Movable Type site).
That's all!
The latest trick spammers have is setting up fake blogs, usually with the design copied from another site. Though these sites look harmless, all links direct you to pr0n sites. To get visitors to their 'webblogs', they use a trick known as referer spam. They request pages from other sites, pretending to come from a link on their weblog.
Since many sites display the referers on one of their pages ---home page or statistics page---, the spammer effectively creates links to his site this way. And the more links to your site you have, the higher you get in Google's search results, which results automatically in more visitors!!! You can read more about all this at idly.org .
Just for the record: at this moment we have planned two short visits to Holland.
The first visit will be at X-mas time. We already have the tickets, and will stay in the cold part of Europe from December 25 until December 28.
In spring we plan to come at Easter time, probably from Friday 'til Monday. If everything goes alright, we'll bring some people from over here with us.
As usual, invitations for a coffee or a beer are very welcome, though I cannot guarantee that we will accept your offer --- it is our holiday after all.
To be honest, there are not a lot of great concerts to visit in Lleida. The main reason is that Barcelona works as a huge magnet and has all the goodies. But for me 160 kilometers is too far away to do regulary on a mid week's evening.
But today finally I can see a big name in Lleida: John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers. For those who don't know John: he is mostly famous for having some great talent in his Bluesbrekers as Clapton and Jack Bruce (Cream), Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac), Andy Fraser (Free), and Mick Taylor (Rolling Stones). Besides that he also knows quite well how to play the blues.
I am really looking forward to this concert, though he could have chosen a better concert hall than the Wonder mega disco outside the city. I prefer to listen my Chicago-style blues in a place with more atmosphere as the Escorxador.
After reading about it at Russell Beattie's Notebook, I just had to add LOAF support to this site. You know, I always like to try out new technology. If anybody encounters strange behaviour in LOAF, please drop me a message.
[Update 2003.11.14]: Changed LOAF link to the 'official' LOAF wiki.
Just when we were cooking our evening meal yesterday, we were suddenly without electricity. "No problem", I said to Maria José, since we have these handy earth leakage switches. I was able to find my small Jong Nederland torchlight in the dark, and went to the entrance to flip the guilty switch.
But all switches were in the correct position. I went outside our apartment to the stairs, and turned on the light; it switched on immediately. I noticed that our neighbours upstairs also had light, so the problem was definitely only in our apartment.
Then I noticed a box high on the walls in the stairs, with two cables coming from it, entering our apartment. I got some stairs, opened the box and found two old-fashioned fuses. One of them was clearly burned and still hot. Found it!
Now we had to find a replacement fuse. I remember having seen some when we were reconstructing our house, but I was very afraid that we threw them away, since we had our fuses replaced by those modern switches. A quick look around in the most easy accessible places did not deliver us the fuses. We started getting a little bit worried about the things in our fridge and ---more important--- our meal. While Maria José was getting ready to bring the contents of our fridge to our neighbours, I decided to check the closet downstairs one more time.
And there they were; two fuses of at least 20 years old. They had a little bit less capacity than the old ones, but at least they would get us through the night. Today I checked two shops to buy new fuses, but so far I haven’t been lucky. Tomorrow I will contact an electrician, because in my eyes it is very ridiculous that we have these old fuses in front of our modern earth leakage switches, and I have a high suspicion that they are not necessary at all.
More and more mail I receive has some kind of legal disclaimer attached to it. And I am getting more and more annoyed by it. The typical disclaimer usually contains something like the following:
This E-mail and any attachments are private, intended solely for the use of the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, they have been sent to you in error: any use of information in them is strictly prohibited. Blah blah blah blah...
(Copied from the List of Stupid EMail Disclaimers)
So if I am not the intended recipient, this text tells me that I may not use the information in the e-mail. But I only know about these conditions when I am reading the disclaimer at the end of the message; too late. If you want to force these conditions on me, I'll have to accept them before reading the message, in the same way a licence is presented to me before I install software, right?
And imagine that I am not the intended recipient, why can't I use the information inside the message to find out who is the intended recipient and forward the message to this person? You clearly forbid this. The same rule also forbids me to tell the sender of his mistake.
I just noticed that the Command prompt is one of the six most used applications on my computer:
There are two conclusions to be made from this: I am a senile old MS-DOS lover and I definitely need Linux ---or at least Cygwin--- to have more powerful command-line options.
Exactly two years ago, I woke up in the morning, thought: Well, that's it. Here I am
, and kissed Maria José.
That was the start of the first day of my new life in another country. Since that day many things have happened: I started working here, got used to the way of living, received visits from friends from all over Europe, we moved into our own little house, I got to know the nice ---and not so nice--- parts of Lleida, we brought some visits to Harmelen, ...
In those two years I got settled here, and I am really happy with my life here. Of course I look back to my time in Harmelen once in a while and certainly miss my family and friends, but I have not regretted my decision to move to Lleida for a single second.
