Dead ex-spy “It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong”. A famous quote by French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist Voltaire (1694 – 1778). And still true as Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB agent and FSB lieutenant-colonel found out the hard way. Before his death on November 23rd nobody had probably ever heard of something called “polonium-210”. In fact it sounds like something from a bad spy movie. However, the truth seems more bizarre than any scenario from a cheap cloak and dagger novel. Litvinenko left Russia for the UK in 2000 after severly criticising his superiors on crime […]
Et tu, Brute?
Backstabber On March 15, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was stabbed by an angry group of senators, including Marcus Junius Brutus, Caesar’s great friend and senator. Caesar initially resisted his attackers, but when he saw Brutus, he supposedly spoke the words “Et tu, Brute?” (“You too, Brutus?” or: “Even you, Brutus?”) and resigned himself to his fate. People often cite this quotation when they feel they have been betrayed. It is also the quote that comes to my mind when I see what is happening in the Dutch political party called VVD. The VVD (the “Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and […]
Portable Apps
U3 clone I wrote several times about nice solutions for portable applications in my blog including the solution that U3 offers. The problem – if you see it as a problem – with U3 is, is that it is a proprietary solution that only comes pre-installed with certain USB sticks. Well, John T. Haller, the developer behind numerous portable applications (like Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.org), has come up with his own portable U3-clone that is actually open source! It’s briljant! PortableApps Suite is a collection of portable apps including a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging […]
Election day
Conservative? Today is Election day in Holland. We, “the people” get a chance to decide (more or less) who will run our country for the next four years. Off course it’s not an easy job to vote. Ever since the assasination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 our country has been in an identity crisis. All the things we liked about Holland (tolerance, business sense, laid back way of doing things) seemed to have backfired and all the negative feelings are taking over. Racism (mostly against the Islam), distrust of politicians etc.. All things that obviously have been brewing underneath our […]
Almost back in business
It sucks! Damn, restoring and installing my Website is quit a lot of work! I decided to put my stuff back up as much as I could, but some things might not work untill I have time to fix it. Right now for whatever reason the mod_rewrite module of my server doesn’t seem to work, and that sucks. On top off things I am so swamped and busy because of work, that I had not enough time to try and configure everything in the right way. Darn it! And there are so many interesting things to blog about at the […]
Why don’t they get some decent design people?
It’s Clunky Jim! This I had to throw in just for kicks: my friend Vincent mailed me this videoclip from CNN with New York Times Andrew Ross Sorkin’s ‘Minding Your Business.’ It’s about the new Microsoft Zune player that offcially launched today. They discuss if the Zune will become the iPod killer or not. Don’t expect big revelations or something, but what is hilarious is how in the end of the segment they compare the Zune to the new iPod shuffle. One of the hosts shows off her new iPod Shuffle and immediatly all three start to drool over the […]
Crash and Burn!
So you might be wondering: why am I looking at the old website and old blogs? Well, I had a HD crash. My spanking “new” server (an old P3!) running Ubuntu has problems and so I have defaulted back this old server that still has a mirror on it. But hey: I hope to be back soon! I learned a lot from installing Ubuntu and I have just bought a new 320gb HD and will soon be back in business!