Bloggers@large

Jewel of the Seas Popquiz: from what movie is the quote: “When life is over, all you can hope is, that you’re sitting on a boat with all the pleasant people from your life, having boat drinks.” Well, you will have to look for the answer at the rest of this blog; otherwise it would be too easy. The reason I brought it up though, is because in December I will be having “boat drinks”: my girlfriend and me booked a carribean cruise. That’s right folks. Most people take a cruise after they retire and are in their sixties, but […]

Karr’s mugshot As it now turns out, John Mark Karr is not the killer of JonBenet Ramsey. There was no match between the DNA found on JonBenet’s body and Karr’s DNA. As I wrote in my Blog about this case: I guess all that is left now, is to match his DNA to the DNA extracted from the crime scene, because personally, I do not rule out that Karr is confessing to something he did not do. So sadly my gut feeling (to me he just looked like an obsessive freak) now turns out to be right. His motive for […]

Haven’t decided yet if this would be a nightmare, or a wet dream? The Lynx Effect Ps: in Holland and Europe it’s called “The AXE effect”.

Build 5536 Yesterday I downloaded and installed the latest version of Windows Vista, Build 5536. This is the Pre-RC1 build, so after this we should see what probably is the closest build to the final release next year. My conclusion so far: Vista is shaping up to what Microsoft wants it to be. Some improvements are small and hardly noticeable, but others are definitely visible – or should I say: noticeable. Performance has gone up on my PC. Vista feels more responsive and quicker on it’s feet. Yes, this release is miles away from the crappy beta2 community release (the […]

Horror cellar Bizarre news of the day: Austrian girl ‘found’ after 8 years. As incredible as it may be: a 10 year old girl that disappeared on her way to school in Vienna on March 2, 1998 was found again after she was able to escape her captor. Police were called when she was found staggering in a garden. The kidnapper, named in Austrian media as 44-year old Wolfgang Priklopil, had been chased by police earlier on Wednesday evening and his red BMW car was later found abandoned. The suspected kidnapper died after throwing himself in front of a train. […]

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 […]