You know that you really left a company when you try to log in to the system and you get an “auth_fail_exception”. Buh-bye Transfer. Hello Merkator!

My new boss called me today, saying he has a job for me. Start: a.s.a.p., but only when I have my own hardware. So he “ordered” me to buy a laptop. One could get worse instructions from upperhand. So I bought a HP Pavilion dv7-3030ed. It’s not the Elitebook I got from my current employer, but the Pavilion is about 1000 euros cheaper.
It’s a great machine, with Win7 x64 on it, very nice wide 17″ LED-screen, 4 GByte of memory and a 640500GByte harddisk. Notefully, the keyboard is better than on the Elitebook, the mousepad is not. Definitely not. So I’ll buy a lasermouse to go with the laptop.

The new phone is not going to be the Nexus One, but the Motorola Milestone (Droid in other countries).

Open Source benefits the customers. Google recognizes this, as you can read in their press release of the new Google Android (2.1) phone. Let’s see when I can import one, or whether I’ll have to wait for the Dutch (read: expensive) release.

Update: no, it’s not gonna be cheap, $530 + $150 = $680 ~ €475.

In 2009 I wrote “As 2008 was a year of pain and suffering for me, I’m already beginning to suspect that 2009 will not be so great as I hoped it would be. For starters, I did not win the 25M euro in the lottery. I started 2009 with the flu. And I didn’t get as drunk as last year (there’s no hole in my memory). Fortunately I didn’t make any resolutions, so I can do whatever I want this year.”

Well, for starters the lottery didn’t win me the 27.5M euro nor the 10M Jackpot, and I didn’t even drink as much as last year (I even drove home by myself this time, no cab). But I didn’t start this year with the flu. That counts for something. I did some overdue backing up of my pictures to DVD, I backupped my MySQL databases, and I upgraded WordPress and Gallery to the latest (stable) versions.

I have no real new years resolutions, but my intention is to have a little more exercise again. Some running or some in-line skating, not sure yet.

A new year, a new WordPress version and a new theme. The upgrade to WordPress 2.9 went without a glitch, and I upgraded to a simpler theme as well. Please tell me if you like it. WPG2 is gone. It keeps nagging me about mod_rewrite, whereas mod_rewrite is active in Apache, but the stupid WPG2-plugin seems to think it’s not, so it disables the plugin in Gallery2 as well, leaving me with a less functional Gallery. That sucks, so WPG2 will not return.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is not supported in WP 2.3+, so tags are gone for old posts. Unfortunately! Sorry ’bout that.

I can’t seem to get the Gallery integration to work properly. Either I get lots of 404’s in my Apache’s logfile,or the popup image is bigger than the screen or something else is wrong. I’m not sure what to do, but this sucks. I know, I should upgrade to the latest Wordpress, perhaps that helps.

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you can be with your loved ones and have a great time. Again, I will be celebrating Christmas alone. But I won’t be celebrating by myself. No!!! I will be surrounded by my family, and by my friends. I just hope Santa fulfills my wish next year…

I’m not sure that I like Thunderbird 3.0. I was a big fan of TB up until 2.x, but with the 3.x version released, I’m not sure. Double click on a message, and look at the (default) buttonbar. Why is there a “write” button, and and “address book” button? Where are reply (all) and forward? Oh, they are in the message-header-block, but why can’t I remove them there? Why don’t the previous/next buttons work properly (not even with add-ons)? What’s the fuss about tabbed reading? Why would I want tabbed email-reading? There is a smart-folders reading mode, but where can I see/setup how smart I want TB to be? Why is the “new” button renamed to “write”? Write an event? And what’s with the hint texts: Write event hints “create a new message”, write task hints “create a new message”? Why can’t I see my calender AND my email in one view, why can’t I disable the tabs?

Adding features is never really a bad thing, but don’t touch thing that work. And have worked for decades. Don’t reinvent the wheel. A round one is just fine on our planet.

Did a custom build of Thunderbird yesterday, since openSUSE comes with version 3.0b4 and that’s not recognized by all plugins. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the annoying “Shredder” name, but at last I found it: it’s in some files in the branding directory. Once you change those, and do a rebuild, Thunderbird is called Thunderbird again.