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This is my journal (RSS feed). Find here: personal entries but also rock music, politics, urbanity, starcrushes, sports and technology.

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Your own London phone number on your mobile

Anglosphere

Modern technology has brought me a step closer to the Anglosphere. UK friends and readers can now call me at a London number (see contact details on this site) at landline rates. US friends and readers can call me at a San Francisco number. I'll get the call right on my mobile. I can call UK landlines and any US/Canada number for less than a pence a minute (peak-rate) and UK mobiles for less than 10 pence a minute (peak-rate). But.. I live in the Netherlands, so how do I do it?

It's simple, really. My new Nokia N82 phone, for free with contract renewal, has built-in WLAN. This means it can connect to wireless networks. It also has built-in SIP/VOIP support, which means it can make and receive Internet calls.

VoIPtalk is the VOIP service I'm using. If you have a modern WLAN and VOIP compatible phone such as the Nokia N82 (or N95) S60 models or some Sony Ericsson UIQ models, you can enjoy all this:

Sure, it's not entirely free. But for the price of one international text message it is now possible to have two up to fifteen minutes of international airtime! If this is what Anglosphere globalism brought us, I love it!

Nuclear site in Syria, says US

Anglosphere

What could it be, a nuclear site or military facility? The US says one thing, Syria another.

"Is it logical for a nuclear site to be left without protection and not guarded by anti-aircraft guns?" Assad told the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan.

...

He reiterated that the site destroyed by the Israelis was "a Syrian military position under construction and not a nuclear reactor."

No, it is not very logical for a nuclear site to be left without protection and not guarded by anti-aircraft guns. It is however still a lot more logical than a military facility to be left without protection and not guarded by anti-aircraft guns.

Use Amazon S3 storage or not?

Software

Capsi is not in jeopardy of requiring more bandwidth and storage than planend for with its current hosting solution. It is however the goal that one day it will require more resources - and I'd like to plan ahead.

Capsi's current host, EngineHosting, is probably the best entry-level hosting provider when it comes to knowledge, support and reliability. They on quality of service, where budget hosts tend to oversell resulting in questionable availability and horribly incompetent support. Not EngineHosting - they know what they're doing.

The downside? EngineHosting offers limited disk space and data traffic. So I have the feeling that splitting dynamic content from static content would be a good decision in the long run. So let's do some math, assuming bandwidth is a greater resource risk than storage. What would the next 5GB of traffic (average filesize 50k, so that's 100,000 requests) cost? And what's the next upgrade step?

Let's take a look at the options:

Don't be surprised if Capsi's static content will soon be hosted on S3..

Additional benefits:

Yup, I'm going to give it a go with a couple of static images. And if I'm happy with the performance, reliability, ease-of-use and costs.. I will definitely port the user content uploads towards S3. Another added benefit, albeit specific to Capsi: this would be a great opportunity to obfuscate content names more, providing better privacy for users using Capsi's access levels.

Last but not least: Neil will probably complain how Amazon is naughty for its one-click shopping patent, but to be honest I don't think life will be much fun if you're going to avoid every single bit of evil..

UTF-8 in LAMP

Software

Here's a handy function returning an array of UTF-8 characters associated to a simple ASCII character. Can be useful when offering users an interface to browse by first character (0-9, A-Z) while actual data retrieval should obviously also include entries starting with a special character.

For example, browsableUtf8Characters("e") returns an array containing e. è, é, ê and ë which can easily be joined and then used in SQL like-queries.

Download browsableUtf8Characters.php or view the source first. (License: none really, enjoy!)

Open your eyes, fools

European Union

How bad is it?

European Union foreign ministers condemned on Saturday a Dutch film that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, but said its author had a right to make it under the bloc's free speech principles.

(Reuters)

So people still have the right to disagree with Islamic extremists, but our governments no longer do disagree.

Great.

Wilders' anti-Islam movie Fitna released

Anglosphere

Hurray for freedom of speech: Fitna has been released! And is it the hate-spreading, insulting, inappropriate movie people expected it to be?

No, not really. It simply joins loads of existing footage of NYC's 9/11, Madrid's March 11, London's 7/7 together with Koran texts and speeches. The ultimate message? The Islam seeks to conquer/control Europe. We stopped Nazi oppression in 1945, communist oppression in 1989.. now it's time to stop the Islamisation of Europe.

Well done, Geert Wilders. This movie is simply a strong and clear message and not at all insulting, unless you seriously believe not a single nation state or organised system is using the Islam to dominate others, or that such oppression is actually a good thing.

PSV draw Fiorentina

Sports

Intro: I'm alive. Wasn't capable of watching the penalty shootout on Wednesday, nor to even look up the result until late afternoon on Thursday. But apparently we won the shootout so it was use in the draw today and not Spurs. And the results of the draw are now known so it's time to reflect.

PSV will play Fiorentina in the UEFA Cup quarter finals. Not the best draw possible but to be honest we could have had a far worse draw as well. Especially considering we first play the away match before returning to Eindhoven. Where we usually tend to play better even though it didn't show on Wednesday.

Prior to the draw, I made a list ordering the teams by most-desirable-to-draw:

  1. Getafe. By far the weakest team of the final eight. UEFA ranking: #58.
  2. Zenith St. Petersburg. Unlikely to be in great form because the Russian league has ended. And it would be fun to meet former PSV-coach Advocaat. (#44)
  3. [b]Rangers/b]. Probably the most fun to watch. Tough but managable. (#29)
  4. Fiorentina. Usually I wouldn't like to draw an Italian team but they actually have the lowest UEFA ranking of all seven: #73.
  5. Bayer Leverkussen. German teams are no fun to play. (#33)
  6. Sporting CP. Don't know them very well and that scares me, especially considering their #23 ranking.
  7. Bayern Munich. Definitely most likely to win the Cup. (#13)

Mind you, PSV has an excellent ranking of #11 itself, having reached two Champions League QFs and four UEFA Cup QFs in nine years. Unfortunately only once the team achieved more when in 2005 it reached the CL semi finals.

So it was indeed a decent draw: not the best but definitely not the worst. I'm not unhappy about Fiorentina and even happier we can't meet Bayern Munich until the final, which definitely improves our odds to reach Manchester. And there's a chance we'll play Rangers in the semis, which would be fun!

The full draw: (April 3, returns April 10)

Expected semis: (April 24, returns May 1)

Air Miles is a scam

Personal

Back in the mid nineties when the Air Miles customer loyalty programme was introduced, the idea behind it was that after shopping for a certain while, you would be able to fly for free. So I checked some prices for GIAN weekend on-line.

Fly for free? It's not even the cheapest option! What a scam.

"Landslide victory"

Anglosphere

Hurray! Medvedev grabbed a landslide victory in Russia!

Mr Medvedev was Mr Putin's endorsed choice as successor and that made his election over weak challengers a foregone conclusion.

Oh, please. What went wrong with the Western press? Lesser evils have been criticised and ridiculed with the greatest of ease. Now, there actually is a fascist superstate (Russia) with a dangerous single-party, lead by nutty dictator-wannabe's (Putin and his proxies).. and we conclude the election results are because of "weak challengers"? Would it have been too hard to mention the challengers were so weak because Putin's party has a media monopoly and political opposition more often than not results in arrests and torture?

Analysts will be looking for signals of changes in Kremlin policy under Mr Medvedev, whose rhetoric has presented a more democratic, Western-leaning face to the world than Mr Putin.

We'll see about that. For the time being, I trust North Korea and Iran more than I do Russia.

Grow up and ignore Nader

Anglosphere

"Grow up and ignore Nader" is my advice to the Democrats. It's really childish to whine about the "fact" his candidature "gave" Bush the 2000 elections and that he might help McCain in a similar way later this year.

Sure, Nader's 2.7% in 2000 could indeed have given Gore the electoral and not just the popular vote. But let's not forget that in 1996 Ross Perot took a far larger share of the popular vote: 8.4%. That's a rather significant number of voters: 1 in 12. Who knows how close a call the electoral vote between Clinton and Dole could've been..

Or let's go back to 1992, when Perot took a massive 18.9% of the popular vote. Had those people voted Republican, George Bush Sr. would probably have buried Clinton under a landslide so impressive that even Ronald Reagan would have been full of envy.

And people talk about Ralph Nader? Sigh.

I'm ready for McCain vs. Obama

Anglosphere

It's not nice to be mean. And still, I can't help it and am absolutely loving every single defeat of Hillary Clinton. US libertarians and conservatives might actually be worse off with Obama, but I simply cannot stand that woman. The thought of a female president does turn me on, but like Chris Rock already said: "Does it have to be her?".

London/Camden trip

Personal

Most concert related entries will no longer be posted here but on Capsi, so if you want to read about my weekend trip to London to see Exit Avenue, hit the link and be happy.

China is a sick country

Anglosphere

Sure, I eat meat and support fox hunts etcetera.. but this is even to sick for me: lions on horseback. Offered by your friends in China. Of course it's no surprise, people who don't respect human rights also have trouble respecting animals.

Network oddness

Software

Most of my friends and probably most people I have worked with would call me an Internet expert. That doesn't necessarily mean I know everything about it, but usually I do have a clue what's going on.

Well, not this week. I'm currently in Austria for a skiing trip. The wireless network in the hotel works fine (hence this post), however there are some hosts I cannot access. There seems to be some correlation with the network location: US hosted sites have most problems, including.. Capsi. Argh! (I could easily forego checking my own site and e-mail for a week if I didn't have the opportunity, but when I do have a network connection and I still can't, that's just annoying.)

So far so good, though. I don't like it much but there are some reasonable explanations for the situation, such as a broken proxy server at the hotel or its provider. But I just set up dad's wireless connection - and he has no problems whatsoever connecting to the sites I have problems with. This I do not get.

Network oddness

Software

Most of my friends and probably most people I have worked with would call me an Internet expert. That doesn't necessarily mean I know everything about it, but usually I do have a clue what's going on.

Well, not this week. I'm currently in Austria for a skiing trip. The wireless network in the hotel works fine (hence this post), however there are some hosts I cannot access. There seems to be some correlation with the network location: US hosted sites have most problems, including.. Capsi. Argh! (I could easily forego checking my own site and e-mail for a week if I didn't have the opportunity, but when I do have a network connection and I still can't, that's just annoying.)

So far so good, though. I don't like it much but there are some reasonable explanations for the situation, such as a broken proxy server at the hotel or its provider. But I just set up dad's wireless connection - and he has no problems whatsoever connecting to the sites I have problems with. This I do not get.

Spurs 5, Arsenal 1

Sports

It's only the Carling Cup. Still, I'm extremely happy Tottenham beat Arsenal 5-1 in the second leg of the semi finals! And not because of Laura (she's with another bloke anyway), but because I actually like them whites.

Sometimes the small things in life DO matter.

New haircut.. have patience!

Personal

In case you're wondering why I still haven't uploaded a picture of my new haircut: my home Internet won't be restored until after my upcoming skiing trip.

I do of course have Internet access on my mobile, however Opera Mini doesn't allow me to upload files from my memorycard. And although it can take pictures, I don't like the dimension mos orientation of the ones it takes.

I suppose I'll have to upload it in the morning when at work!

Update: gone with the emo, back with the punk. Check the pictures here, here and here!

Chat chat chat!

Capsi

Capsi has come full circle: when it was still my personal web site back in 1996 one of the features was a chat room. As of today, Capsi (now a community and profile site) has a chat again! The Capsi Chat is back!

Sunday is holy, leave it alone

European Union

The Dutch government considers barring Dutch shops from being open Sundays if they are outside of tourist areas. I disagree and not just because I like to do groceries on Sunday just around the corner.

It is insane that the government wants to queer the free market like that. Religious arguments in favour are nonsensical because, well, plenty of shoppers feel differently. Besides, if priests are allowed to work why should clerks not be? Economical arguments don't hold ground either. We demand this kind of service as society. Broad opening times increase the efficiency of the retailer chain, especially by not being idle at hours consumers actually have the time to shop. Even if total spending doesn't increase and prices go up, we are talking about an increase of service. People are smart enough to choose when they want to spend their money. We don't need politics to decide that for us.

Revisiting Deep Space Nine

Reviews

Last Christmas, I spoiled myself with a gift I should have gotten myself long ago: all seven seasons of Deep Space Nine on DVD. DS9 has always been my favourite Star Trek and as I am watching the entire show again I know more and more why so.

Unlike the past, I even like the earlier seasons. Partially because I had never seen a few of those episodes, but also because there is some sort of satisfaction in seeing the characters grow into what I ultimately remembered. Especially the third season was far better than I recalled, while I was actually a bit disappointed by the lack of development in the fourth which I used to love. Somehow once the Dominion was introduced, I wanted nothing but the war epic. The Klingon and Maquis interludes just seem like a waste of time. Fortunately I just started with season 5 now, so all is great again.

Watching an all-time favourite definitely beats watching new TV!

New Hampshire chooses weakness

Anglosphere

Hillary Clinton credited her emotional outburst on Monday for her victory in the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire.

Am I the only one who is alarmed by that? Does part of the USA seriously consider a president who, in response to a terrorist threat or Iranian provocation, would burst out in tears? That ought not be the kind of leadership to look forward to.

That said, I wonder how much the Obama-Clinton race is going to hurt the Democrats in the long run. The media coverage for this race is so high that by the end of the year people might very well be entirely fed up with either candidate. This could possibly play in the hands of either McCain or Huckabee.

Electoral Compass USA 2008

Anglosphere

Too lazy to actually listen to the candidates? Want to know whom to vote for in just a few minutes? Take the electoral compass! I myself ended up closest to Ron Paul, however we don't seem to agree about Iraq very much. When leaving out the issues "Iraq", "national security" and "terrorism", I'm closest to Rudy Giuliani.

Hillary Kerry?

Anglosphere

Looks like Hillary Clinton is pulling a John Kerry by stating that she would not have let the US go to war in Iraq, despite voting in favour of "A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq.". Unfortunate for the Republicans: Barack Obama's team is already pointing this out.

I remember when..

Personal

I remember...

I feel old.

Bada-bada-Obama

Anglosphere

Even though I probably would be happiest with Ron Paul for president (based on a test I'll link later), I'm also happy Obama beat Clinton yesterday. Not because I am a huge fan of his, but rather because I can't stand Hillary. Besides, I reckon America is not ready for a black president even more so than it is for a female one. A shame in itself but as it helps the Republicans at the end of the year you won't see me grieve over it.

© Copyright 1995-2008 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)