Bloggers@large

Thirteen days after the big alert in the UK about a terrorist plot that hurdled all European airports into a huge chaos, it is now Holland’s turn: Dutch police have arrested 12 passengers after a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Mumbai (Bombay), India, returned to Schiphol airport, because several people on board aroused “suspicion”. Unlike the incident on August the 10th, this one did not lead to chaos; no extra security measures are in place and the threat level at Schiphol had returned to normal – whatever that may be. Also there was no reason to upgrade our country’s terror […]

It must have been late 1995 (I don’t recall exactly) when Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, visited The Netherlands. I think it was right after the introduction of Windows 95. Back then I was still working as an online journalist for RIV.NET1, the online channel at Riverland Networks (this later turned into Netcast and after that into Lost Boys business solutions, part of Lost Boys/Icon Medialab). He was promoting something called the “NC” or simply “Network Computer“. According to Ellison, the network computer would soon take over from desktop PCs, and many users would use applications loaded via a network […]

The biggest story this week I consider to be a victory for democracy in the US. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor struck down the NSA wiretap program ordered by G.W. Bush, which she said violates the rights to free speech and privacy. A blow for Bush who always maintained his program was lawful and necessary to ‘protect US citizens’ from terrorists. The judge also declared that the program “violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III.” Her ruling went on to say […]

Wow, this is a shocker: over 10 years the Jonbenet Ramsey case was never solved and turned into a ‘cold case’. Until yesterday, when a 41-year old suspect was arrested in Bangkok, Thailand. The man, John Mark Karr, who is reported to have admitted being present when JonBenét died, but claiming “it was an accident”. He is to be extradited to the US and charged with 1st degree murder. Karr was reportedly obsessed with JonBenét and had contacted Michael Tracey, producer of the 2004 documentary Who Killed JonBenét? as well as other researchers in Boulder. Jonbenét Ramsey was a six-year-old […]

Hurray! Ladies and gentlemen: mission (almost) accomplished. I have migrated my webserver for 98% percent to Linux. I hope you notice the improvement in speed when pages are served to you. Also this setup is a lot more robust and safer then the old WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySql, PHP) setup I had. Especially lately I had a lot of times where I logged on to my server and found that my Apache had crashed and automatically restarted. Usually a sign of problems or – worse – hackers trying to crash or hack my server. The migration also allowed me to […]

This Tuesday and Wednesday I went on a business trip to the United Kingdom. My collegue and I flew to London Luton, with Easyjet (mind you: why do they call the aiport “London” Luton is beyond me: London is actually not close at all: it’s over an hours drive!). There we took a rental car and drove to our hotel in Peterborough, about one hour north on the M1. Now, on June 15th I also went to the UK to and I flew with a tiny turbo-prop plane with an airline I had never heard of (Scott Airways). We flew […]

I had such busy week that I didn’t even had time to update my blog. At work my collegue is on vacation (he will return this Tuesday) so I have to take care of lots of things at the same time. One of them is our visit to London, England on Tuesday and Wednesday. Getting all arrangements done in time is a big hassle. I have many things on my head and I’m sure I am forgetting a few important… Oh well. I guess I have this week to clean up my mess. If only I know where to begin […]

Bugs’R’us As promised I was going to do a re-install of Vista Build 5472. Whatever the reason it crashed last time straight after I installed it: this time I have to report a flawless install. Not only that: it was – hands down – the fastest install I ever had done of a new OS. I booted from the DVD and decided to clock it with my stopwatch. Not only did I get to the install screen in less than 60(!!) seconds, the install it self was also blazing fast! Check this out: after less than 15 minutes I already […]

Here is a good thing to know; next time you get on a plane and notice that the person sitting next to you is using a laptop you *might* want to ask for a new seat, preferably next to the emergency exit. Because you *might* need to exit the plane prematurely. Why? Well, as it turns out the latop *might* spontaneously combust and catch on fire. In fact as you can see from the picture on the left (click it to enlarge) the flames are pretty damn scary. “Ah, humbug” you might think. Well, think again: the US National Transportation […]