News items for tag notablog - Koos van den Hout

Soms is er tussen de rants, hacks en ipv6 promotie tijd voor heel ander persoonlijk nieuws:

Ik hoop vader te worden in december van dit jaar.

Het is nu al een bijzondere ervaring, en dat zal het straks vast nog veel meer worden.

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Sometimes between all the rants, hacks and ipv6 promotion it is time for quite different personal news:

I hope to become a father in december of this year.

It is already a special experience, and it will probably get more special.

My job has changed, in that I moved within the university to a different place. The department of computer science decided to cut back budget and get rid of their own system administrator group. We got relocated to one level 'up' in the organisational tree at the science-ict group which does ict for all departments (pharmacy, biology, chemistry, math, physics, computer science).

Searching for "idefix.net" to see whether it was listed in some overview of websites with certain vulnerable software I found this gem: idefix-net on Facebook Indonesia. I guess I have some sort of second career I never knew about.

Yes, took the step. The homepage lives at http://idefix.net/ and the old url redirects. And will have to keep doing that for at least 10 years. Or maybe more, the url for my homepage that was valid until August 2000 still has a working redirect. I'm not moving anything else because that would confuse me too much. So the base href in the html source has to stay.

A ~ in your homepage URL is somewhat very nineties so I started making http://idefix.net/ also point at my homepage and I moved the original content of that page to idefix.net history. I'm now wondering whether I should redirect http://idefix.net/~koos/ to the new location (migrating all links in for example search engines) or let both point at the same page.. or what.
I found some discussions on the tilde in the url. Jukka Korpela has an article Why tilde (~) should not be used in Web addresses (URLs) which explains why this unixism is a bad idea in the modern web and the explanation Get Clues from URLs notes:

Most servers use the ~ symbol to represent the personal directories of individuals.
If the URL contains a tilde then be aware that you are probably (although not definitely) looking at a personal page with personal opinions rather than an official site giving the official line.

Well, as I am the owner of idefix.net there should not be any difference between my opinion and the official opinion of the site.
At work we also got rid of the tildes ages ago so maybe I should just follow the sign of the times. Being good webmasters the old urls still work: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~koos/ will redirect to http://people.cs.uu.nl/koos/.
Enough rambling, this change was to me reason for a bump in the minor version number of the homepage.

Tien jaar geleden haalde ik mijn rijbewijs (en gebruikte ik dus ook al newsitems op mijn homepage). Dus het was tijd voor vernieuwen. Ik kreeg daar keurig een brief over van de RDW maar die was met alle verbouwingsdrukte blijven liggen. Vorige week ontdekte ik dat 2010-01-10 geweest was en ik dus geen geldig 'roze papiertje' meer had. Snel voor pasfoto's naar foto boekhorst die prima pasfoto's volgens de huidige regels en toen naar de gemeente Utrecht voor de aanvraag. Ondertussen rond, dus nu is het 'roze papiertje' vervangen door een 'roze creditcard'.

De schilder had de cat6 connectoren meegenomen (zonder afplaktape erover) dus ik heb de nodige verf er uitgepeutert en daarna connectors aan de kabels geknepen om ze te testen en gelijk te labelen. Gelukkig werkte alles op gigabit snelheid zonder fouten, maar ik denk niet dat er in de Category 6 specificaties ruimte is voor verf in de connector.

A while ago Twitter was so broken for me it showed a plain error message, not even a fail whale:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Double fail!

I noticed a few malformed characters in the RSS feed of my homepage that weren't there in the original database entries and showed ok in the web version. Again, utf-8 problems showing, although all data (postgres - script - xml - browser) should be utf-8. Lots of testing and searching, finally I found The Perl UTF-8 and utf8 Encoding Mess by Jeremy Zawodny. He is right: it is a mess. And the post itself demonstrates it by being filled with � characters.
So to make sure everything in the RSS generating process understand that what comes out of PostgreSQL is valid utf-8 and should be imported in the XML::RSS module as the same valid utf-8, I need to recode it to utf-8. Uh.. ok. The bit of code:

        my $body = Encode::decode('UTF-8', $row[1]);

And now I can use ÜTF-8 çħáräćtërs!

I updated my homepage so it automatically incorporates my tweets. I notice I use different styles on twitter and here, probably having a lot to do with the 140 character limit at Twitter, but in the end it can be mixed anyway.

I have a twitter. Somebody invited me for reasons I don't know but I thought "why not". It is so inviting to hook this up to some scripts so I can auto-process homepage updates or other automated scripts. Or hook it up to some sort of ticket system at work (probably on a separate account) so our users can follow our network changes.

It seems my homepage has turned into a livejournal. It seems someone prefers following my homepage via the livejournal interface. And this page just copies information from my rss feed.
Update 2008-09-28: reader found (hi rone!).

A new version of my homepage, rewritten in perl because PHP was starting to irritate me. More database-driven in the background which allows me to add things like the tags. And a minor change in the colour scheme because someone remarked that the black-on-cyan was hard to read for people above a certain age.

Slowly I'm no longer denying the blogness of this page ;). View myTechnorati Profile. I got the idea from Kirrily Robert's article Technorati and Perl.

I'm a married man! I married Mirjam yesterday (13 June 2006).

Ik heb voor de hcc!pc netwerkgroep een blog opgezet met serendipity, eens kijken of dat gaat werken. Ook heb ik beschreven waarom ik serendipity gekozen heb.

idefix.net now lives on a new server, somewhat faster and more reliable. Time to update the picture on that page! I also moved stuff like The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless. Only thing that gave me troubles right before moving was GNU mailman.

I will marry Mirjam on 13 June 2006!

I added an RSS 2.0 feed for my homepage (link in the obligatory style ofcourse).

Page restyling has hit my homepage as you see. It may look mostly the same, but the change in source is big. I moved stuff around too, and added the google searchbox to help you find stuff I (re)moved the links for. The interesting part was to build the stylesheet parts to create the page columns without resorting to using tables. Next big restyling project is The Virtual Bookcase where almost all pages are still bad html 3.2.