De spoorwegen in Nederland blijven altijd een paar jaar achterlopen op die in Engeland, en nu is volgens reizigersvereniging Rover eindelijk het excuus van the wrong kind of snow gebruikt door Prorail.
Bronnen: Reizigersvereniging Rover: “Ontwrichting treinverkeer door sneeuw is blamage”, nu.nl: 'Ontwrichting treinverkeer regelrechte blamage'
2007-10-19 (#)
Een nieuw record in koeriers snappen niet dat mensen overdag werken. Ik had wat VoIP hardware besteld bij Voipsolutions. Vervolgens een paar keer gemailed waar een en ander nu bleef (ruim 2 weken lang) en toen kwam er uit dat de koerier mij overdag niet thuis aangetroffen had en daarvoor contact had opgenomen met de afzender. Dit ging langs allemaal vertragende paden want de koerier in Belgie (ABX logistics) had het pakketje doorgegeven aan GLS logistics in Nederland.. en met GLS had ik al eerder slechte ervaringen. Uiteindelijk maar als alternatief afleveradres mijn werk opgegeven. Daar keken ze nog raar op omdat mijn achternaam niet goed was overgenomen, maar uiteindelijk toch de doos in handen.
2007-10-12 (#)
The Register: Windows update brings down TV newscast. This reminds me of the local infochannel we saw on our 2007 wintersport holiday: every morning at 09:00 the infochannel changed to a screen of Windows 2000 rebooting and starting up and starting Scala Infochannel for images, short clips, commercials, snow heights and weather reports. Lots of possibilities for error-message like this screengrab from 2002 showing that the local cable channel in Utrecht did something likewise. From what I hear, it is possible to run software like Scala on a secondary video adapter that will just go black or freeze when the system fails, and not show the Windows error popups.
2007-10-09 (#)
Vanmorgen zag een vrouwelijke fietser totaal niet aankomen dat ik linksaf zou slaan nadat ik links richting aangegeven had. Ze moest een rare slinger maken om niet tegen me aan te rijden of om te vallen en daarna keek ze nogal schaapachtig naar me. Een nieuw record in rariteiten op de weg.
2007-10-03 (#)
It seems Eircom broadband missed the news about WEP being dead (pdf) and WEP being really dead. From The Register: Eircom wireless security flaw revealedEircom's director of communications Paul Bradley defended the protocol, however, saying "WEP is an industry standard protocol used by telecoms providers around the world."Well Paul, just because all the stubborn kids do it, does not mean it is the right choice.
2007-09-16 (#)
I kept seeing things in the logs like Sep 16 05:52:39 gosper named[779]: denied query from [143.215.129.200].22632 for "www.capitalone.com" A/IN, all from 143.215.129.200, 143.215.129.102, 143.215.129.43 without any explanation to be found on the web. The name guesses some sort of study of DNS answers, and all queries seem to be for phishing targets, but several thousand answers "your query was denied" doesn't make them stop asking. Solution: iptables -t filter -I INPUT 8 -j REJECT --source 143.215.129.0/24 --protocol udp --dport 53 --reject-with icmp-admin-prohibited. Mail to noc@ was never answered.
2007-08-06 (#)
Windows XP update sees Windows Explorer as a security risk with a screenshot of the actual error message. To help protect you computer, Windows has closed this program. Name: Windows Explorer Publisher: Microsoft Corporation.
2007-07-13 (#)
As part of their very tough job of collecting lots of money from Internet radio stations, SoundExchange seems to have quite a problem contacting several artists, therefore having to burden themselves with keeping the money. You can help SoundExchange! Look at the SoundExchange unpaid artists lists, find artists you know, google for the contact information for the artist (usually a representing agency) and tell them to collect their money by filling out the right forms.
2007-07-05 (#)
De Casema-adviseur is alweer langsgeweest en heeft een briefje achtergelaten of we contact willen opnemen als we meer willen weten van het aanbod. Twee of drie weken geleden lag er ook al zo'n briefje, en kort daarvoor hebben we een keer een iemand aan de deur gesproken van Casema die we snel konden vertellen geen interesse te hebben in andere diensten. Zouden ze zo slecht bijhouden dat hun klanten geen interesse hebben in andere diensten of zou Casema zo verlegen zitten om klanten voor Internettoegang / digitale TV / telefonie.
2007-05-12 (#)
Mirjam recently bought a laptop. It came with Microsoft Vista as operating system, XP was not an option anymore. The reason for any story of succesfull Vista sales is therefore clearly a result of Microsoft steering the market using their OEM contracts, and not due to Vista being spectacularly good. A lot of people are waiting for it to become useful, service pack 1 to be released or avoiding it alltogether. One of the features of Vista that is supposed to make us say 'Wow' was the eye-candy with stacked windows. Mirjam searched for this feature (her laptop has a fast graphics card, so that should be possible) and found out that you need a business version of Vista to get this part of the 'wow' of Vista. So I guess Vista is not that 'wow' after all, you just get it shoved down your throat.
2007-02-22 (#)
A great sample of the 'movie plot' way in which 'terrorism' is seen and handled: a Vancouver police computer crime investigator has warned about how the wifi network in the city can be abused by terrorists at the 2010 winter olympics. Yes, three years from now. Reading the original article in the Vancouver Sun makes it an almost funny story (from this distance) but the saddening part is that this detective is serious and the newspaper seems to take his story serious. Bruce Schneier has written a good response about it Movie Plot Threat in Vancouver. One good comment:I think the Vancouver Police crime investigator watches too much "24".
2007-02-20 (#)
Sometimes Debian makes me go "aaaargh" a bit. When I visited Paris and wanted Internet access, I found out the pairing between my phone and the laptop had gone bad (all errors). Trying to delete the pairing and setting it up again gave a problem: there is no working bluetooth-pin application at the moment. Due to the dbus package being in transition, an attempt to install bluez-pin results in bluez-utils being removed (which means there is no bluetooth stack left running to authenticate in the first place). Google-fu to the rescue: Impossible to do pairing in Kubuntu shows that ubuntu users have the same problem and Dan V posted a solution how to build the command-line passkey-agent from the bluez-utils sources and use that to get a pairing again. I'm not the only one frustrated, debian bug 382269 shows more frustrated users.
2007-01-14 (#)
Jason Scott pulled a nice stunt when he was confronted with loads and loads of links to an image on his site.. he Goatse'd them all.. and found out in the process that the real culprut was a stupid design site offering 'free myspace layouts'. I had the same happening with idefix.net in 2002 and wrote about deep linking and bandwidth theft. As Jason shows: you link to my urlspace, I control what comes back, and you may not like it.
2007-01-13 (#)
Telemarketeer calls are annoying, but from time to time we get one of the extra annoying kind: The does not want to talk to the answering machine kind, who hang up quite fast. Result: even when we're home to grab the phone, they still hang up. Irritating.
2007-01-03 (#)
Found this gem:"Media hysteria about e-mail stalking and the threat to children on the Internet"in The Best and Worst of 1994 and Predictions for '95. Some things haven't changed in 12 years, it's just called "MySpace" now. Source: Nothing To Say: The Internet Year In Review - 1994.
2007-01-02 (#)
A spammer has used a sender address in one of my domains as From: address, so I get to see all the bounces, and in some cases the original e-mail gets bounced along so I get to view the original. The spam itself uses an image that is supposed to defeat any OCR attempt by anti-spam software, but I have a hard time viewing the image myself... stock symbol and description gimped away because I don't want to become a stock criminal myself.
2006-12-23 (#)
Peter Gutmann has written a good article A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection where he analyzes the impact (in cost and negative consumer experience) that microsoft windows vista will have on the computer industry. A scary future for PC hardware?
2006-12-08 (#)
While checking the logs of The Virtual Bookcase to see if I made any errors in the pages, I noticed another webbot requesting loads of pages, the bot related to Webclipping.com. I looked at their site and noticed that they are no search engine, they just scour the web looking for people having opinions about their paying customers. Which means: those requests by their spider will never result in visitors to The Virtual Bookcase. I only want to allow webbots that result in visitors to the site. So, I wanted to know what to put in robots.txt to stop them.. couldn't find that on their website so I asked via e-mail. The answer is (paraphrased): "We decide on our own which sites to visit.". My answer is to block them.
2006-12-05 (#)
Een popup die zelfs door firefox weet heen te komen (Grrrr! geen nedstat meer gebruiken!) komt met een advertentie voor een sms ringtone dienst met de mooie tekst:De eerste ringtone is gratis. Dit is een abonnementsdienst. De kosten bedragen EUR 3,00 per ringtone (+ sms download kosten), 3 ringtones per week... enge bedragen en ik vraag me af of er nog een verificatieslag achter zit of de eigenaar van het telefoontoestel het er wel mee eens is. Zoiets als dit verstoort natuurlijk enorm het gebruik van de originele site.
2006-11-27 (#)
Ik zat vrijdag op de HCC dagen in de jaarbeurs. Jaarlijkse gewoonte.. hoewel ik dit jaar niet op zaterdag kon wegens andere afspraken. Maar zowiezo is 'de HCC' niet meer wat het geweest is. De games trekken een jong publiek, de hobbyhal trekt een deels jong en deels oud publiek (het middenstuk lijkt ernstig afwezig). Maar de indeling van de hobbyhal was nog meer 'consumentgericht'. Niet iets waar ik echt enthousiast van raak. Je gaat ook naar de HCC voor contact met de gebruikersgroepgenoten en die zijn nu verspreid over de hele hobbyhal zodat ze elk in hun eigen stukje consumentgerichte eiland staan. Als netwerkgroep hadden we ook niet echt een hot item dus hadden we ook niet veel ruimte geclaimed (uiteindelijk was er een tafel, een stoel, een stopcontact en een netwerktouwtje met gratis Windows-virussen).
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