Dreams Unlimited - Christian Peper's blog

So cool! I found a Lorem Ipsum generator! "A WhAT?!", you may ask. Well, it's a simple generator of text that is often used in typsetting business to check how a font looks on screen or in print. To test web designs and check how text flows, header sizes, etc.

My old gymnastics club at the University is celebrating their 25th anniversary this April!
Calling all old gymnasts... Calling all gymnasts... :)

Yesterday, our former Queen Juliana (she retired in 1980 or so) was burried after she died on March 20th 2004. Over the last week, she was set in the Paleis Noordeinde, here in The Hague, where the public could say goodbye to her. Then, yesterday, she was placed in the same church where all her ancestors have been burried over centuries: the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft. All through the country, especially in The Hague, you could see flags hanging half way. I never saw so many. I took a few pictures of it, but only 2 came out good enough.

The MSN shop has a couple of *realllly* sexy hot pants and bikini tops... Jeez! And with these gorgeous 60F/15C temperatures we are having here, it's not helping. I know... it's Spring, go figure! pfff

Google Personalized Search
Totally cool news search service from Google! Must see this! Fill in your profile, do a search and get rid of useless results because they don't fit your interests... Duuh! Why didn't they do that in the first place? Of course, sometimes you'll want to ignore your profile because you might miss otherwise interesting things that you don't know about yet! That's how you develope *new* interests! LOL :D

mini-itx.com has a reports of the coolest of all cool mini PC projects: windows xp in a windows xp box: "I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my 'Windows XP Box' in a Windows XP box."
:respect:

ClickZ News says: "Microsoft's MSN plans to launch a handful of new search features in the next year, including engines that will search news sites and blogs, and another that offers natural language Web search results."

I live in a street named after a famous Dutch guerrilla warrior from way-back-when: Geuzenleider Diederick van Sonoy, redder van Alkmaar. LOL :D
Born in 1529 as a protestant, he refused to budge in front of the King of Spain in 1567 (400 years before I was born!) and became an outlaw. The site is wonderful, with plenty of old plaques, pictures and so on. But unfortunately, it is in Dutch and I'm too lazy to translate it. ;)

Le Mans 2004 lineup announced! I'm soooo gonna watch that this year... B)

Today, through LinkedIn, I found out that Mojo, a good friend of mine from Quakeing, KPN Research and Groningen, is active in a reeeally cool New Media company called GRRR: Goed Gedrag. (y) B)
very cool indeed! :respect:

Petra is working on a site of her own... :)

Digital Grin is a forum by the guys that gave us smugmug.com, the award-winning photo gallery site. The forum is about the thousands words, smugmug is about the pictures. :) Check it out!

GIMP has just released v2.0 and now supports not only options for geeks and nerds, but also for beginners and photo professionals. So if Adobe it just too large, or just too expensive or you're fed with trying to find a crack for the lastest version, consider this alternative instead (6.5 MB plus 3.5 MB library). It may not be as slick (yet), but it doesn't cost anything and... if you're really seriously pissed off at it, dust off the good old code editor, download the code and improve the sucker! :D LOL GIMP is open-source and runs on anything, so you'll become famous too!

Remember the 70s and 80s? Remember sitting by the radio with your hands on the record button and all your senses tuned in to the DJs voice, intensely awaiting that final cue that your favorite single was gonna get played, so you could tape it and put in your walkman on repeat?! But that resulted in tens or hundreds of songs you only have on cassette because you didn't have or couldn't afford CDs... No fear! The PlusDeck is here! Brilliant! Convert all your old cassettes into mp3 or store your favorite songs on cassette, in case you drive a classic car or oldtimer!

Damn! Yahoo just bought European comparison shopping site Kelkoo for 475 million euro to get a bigger marketshare and more control...

ClickZ has a great article on RSS news feeds, who uses them and what they're for. Did you know the BBC has 46 different RSS news feeds with one just for Harry Potter news? :shock: I didn't! RSS feeds also greatly help search engines index your site properly (I *did* know that!)

On the DJMixed.com newsletter, I learned that Tiësto will launch a new album on June 1st. :bounce: Can't wait! The newsletter also reviews the album a bit and is very praising. :) So I thought I'd check his own site, w w w . t i ë s t o . c o m, for news from first hand...
The single "Love Comes Again" will be released mid April and his new album "Just Be" on June 1st.

Intel Corp.-backed startup, SolarFlare Communications Inc., said on Monday that it has developed a working prototype of a chip that will permit 10Gbps communications over standard CAT5e copper wiring. "It's an achievement that some people said was impossible," Cates said, who added that he expects other manufacturers to follow suit with similar components.
That's a 1,000 times faster than the first commonly used version of Ethernet, operating at 10 Mbps!

Petra posted the pictures of our little beach picnic in Scheveningen, last Monday. The sun was out and about ;) but out of the wind it was really Springtime. :) We bought fresh bread, some cheese and meat and fresh juice and just found a bench. Afterwards, we strolled along the beach, I played with dogs, Petra took pictures, got caught by a wave with revenge on its mind and witnessed the beach clubs being built.

If you're a hardcore gamer and take gaming seriously, like I do, you've probably switched from nVidia to ATI... because it'll get you some more fps. If you did, then you should also switch to the Omega drivers (w00t). These are tweaked ATI Radeon drivers to squeeze the most of your ATI card.
Goto DriverHeaven for the lastest release...

Calgary Herald - canada.com network: "Five new variants of a malicious e-mail virus released overnight Thursday on the Internet break new ground in that recipients are no longer required to open attachments to infect their computers.
The new variants of the Bagle virus -- which was first discovered in January -- exploit known flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Outlook and Media Player programs to run a small hyper text language message that downloads the virus directly into the target computer." Fortunately, patches from MS have been posted last October...
What should you do?
* Patch your Windows PC using WindowsUpdate asap!
* Update your virus scanner software to include the latest definition files
* Try using an intermediate mail server like SpamAssassin or SpamCop or read your mail using your provider's web interface instead.
More detailed info is here and here.

"Royal appears ready at last to ship its Linux-based PDA, the Linea LX. The Linux LX is now expected to arrive this quarter, priced at $399. The device will be based on a 200MHz Motorola i.MX1 MDragonBall processor equipped with 64MB of SDRAM and 32MB of Flash memory, and will include Trolltech's Qtopia graphical framework and PIM suite."
It also boosts a 65K color, 240x320 (QVGA) LCD screen, IrDA, USB and SD memory slots.

Fourth Annual Weblog Awards lists this years winners of most original weblogs, as well as links to last years'...
Great ideas for blogs, themes, content and other tools! Recommended!

A friend of mine, also former CS major from UT Twente and a former gymnastics buddy from Linea Recta, sent me a video link of this team of demo break dancers slash gymnasts slash stunt men slash marshal arts dudes... It's called Friday Night Madness part 3. All I can say is: D A M N! :respect: Seeing is believing!

Heise Online, the German version of good ol' BYTE (remember that?) reports in its CeBIT Special that Panasonic plans to introduce a Blu-ray Disc Recorder with a 50 GByte capacity somewhere around August 2004!
This successor to the DVD, built around a blue laser instead of a red laser, promisses much higher capacities than those possible by using a red laser. Another new upcoming standard is the Mt Rainier specification, but that is meant to allow a CD-RW or DVD+RW to be used much like a floppy drive: with fast, real-time, random access read and write as opposed to making an image and burning that in a batch-like that fashion.

Pff, weird weekend... totally different than expected but still good. First, Juli and Harald came by to visit Saskia and me. We hadn't spoken to them in ages and they had just come back from their Nicaragua vacation. So we ate, talked and drank over dinner and wine. Sadly, I became ill during the evening and felt worse and worse. Tired, headache and muscle aches. Dunno why, dunno what for, I just did. So we left for Crazyland at 11pm... but... in Leiden we decided to go to Petra's instead and: go to sleep... Boohoo! :( Bye Crazyland! Hello Bed! :)
After 13-14 hours of sleep I woke up and felt better. Go enough to go to Wonderlust instead. I had gotten free tickets for being on some mailing list and since I missed Crazyland I thought I had deserved at least one party this weekend! :) That was a great idea! Wonderlust was a lounge party set in a show greenhouse in Aalsmeer, flower capital of the world (no kidding)! Gorgeous plants, flowers, small tress, verns and a pond with hug…

Dunno what's wrong... KPN (my network provider) had an outage this morning in the The Hague area but it is fixed now. Nonetheless, my connection seems to have switched to some kind of manual protocol or so. S L O W! Domain names resolve in slow motion and my bandwidth seems to behave erratically. :( :S Boohoo
I'm giving up for today, I have to catch a train at 4pm anyway. So I'll TTYL! Mzzl!

"Mark Webbink, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Red Hat, Inc., wrote this article for corporate attorneys, explaining free and open source software and comparing various open source licenses, detailing how the GPL really works, explaining US copyright law, and listing some corporate law office best practices for software, from the standpoint of what policies are prudent for the corporate environment.
He also explains how derivative works are defined, touches on the indemnification issue and the difference between open source and "shared source", and highlights some of the main myths and misconceptions about the GPL and open source."
Recommended!

The CEO of palmOne said they'll unveil New Palm PDA models in April, I heard on tweakers.net. Even though palmOne wants to push the Treo phone/PDA combi more persistently, they won't neglect the regular PDA market. That means good deals on the old ones...! :)

Nokia showed the new 7610 mobile phone with 1 Mpx digicam on the CEBIT 2004 in Hannover. Cool, except the phone is unbelievably *ugly*! Holy moly! :p Yuck, what the f*ck happened to Nokia's style dept? Are they replaced by 6 year old morons...? Duuuh!

Slashdot warns against the spreading of a new virus/trojan threat: Phatbot. It will use your PC for a DDoS and to send large amounts of SPAM. "Phatbot snoops for passwords on infected computers and tries to disable firewall and antivirus software, albeit it is detectable by antivirus packages."
Gibson Research has a reasonably OK test called ShieldUP! to check if your particular PC is vulnarable for trojans and hacks in general... Check it! And make sure you have all the latest security patches from WindowsUpdate!!!

Busy weekend ahead... Saturday is Crazyland and we're going there. Somehow I wasn't quite paying attention because I accidentally order VIP tickets instead of regular. Duuh, weird! But perhaps the regular ones were sold out and VIP were the only option left. Either way, I didn't look carefully enough. :)
Then on Sunday, I got two free tickets to the Wonderlust party I reported about earlier. It's a promo party in Aalsmeer (city of Dutch flowers) for Lipton Ice's new flavor: Green Tea. The party is appropriately relaxed and much too my surprise I learned today that Rose is performing on Sunday as well! Woohoo! So Sunday afternoon will be a blissfully relaxt afternoon and early evening.

Observations on the Adobe Photoshop RAW Plug-in is a page with an analysis and comparison of two RAW filters for digital camera images. The original picture came from a Minolta DiMAGE 7i (I believe 6Mpx) and shows that although RAW is a more true and lossless format than JPG, one RAW is not the same as another RAW. Cameras use different algorithms to process the information coming from the CCD and the way they organize this information, makes a big difference! Check the two images on the webpage to see for yourself...
So the next time you think your RAW image is the closest digital approximation of the real world, think again!

dBpowerAMP is the only, really, tool you'll ever need on your PC to rip CDs or convert from one format to another! Have .wav files, but need to convert them to .mp3? No problem! Have .mp3 and need Ogg Vorbis? Have .wma *yuck* and want simple .mp3? Have Real Audio files and would like mp3? No problem! dBpowerAMP can do it all and there is a plugin and codec for almost anything!!! And best of all... IT's FREE! Woohoo! :respect:

MS has made a Release Candidate available for SP2 for Windows XP. It's not official yet and not recommended for mission critical machines! Don't get it if you can't fix or reinstall your own PC installations!
But you can always read about the upcoming fixes and additions, such as a default Pop-Up blocker, the new Windows Security Center (finally, duuh!), better firewall and logging options, safer E-mail and Instant Messaging (MSN Messanger) as well as Bluetooth support, DirectX v9.0b and WMP security improvements.
More information is available from Microsoft or you can read the release notes. And Heise Online and PCWorld.com also have reviews.

In preparation for my soon to be founded company, I've started a blog "Internet voor MKB" to help me organise ideas, tools and services that I encouter in my daily Internet reconnaissance. :) Sorry, the site is in Dutch only. I can only focus on one thing at this moment and the Dutch market is where I'll operate. So... made sense.

Lastnight, I attented a seminar at the Chamber of Commerce (KvK) on how to set-up a business administration. Debit, credit, general ledger ("grootboek" in Dutch), sending invoices and all the legal and tax aspects of the above. It was much more fun than I thought it would be. The group was pretty diverse as well, and very assertive. We gave the speakers a hard time (an AA from Boutkan and RA from BDO).
Tomorrow evening, I'm off to Apeldoorn for another seminar on the commercial plan. It's one of the weaknesses in my idea. I know what I can do, I know whom to target, but how much do I or can I charge for it? What should I charge? Afterall, I have to make a living out of it... So I'm also looking into who my competitors are...

If you want a firewall or you maintain one, you might learn something from PhoneBoy. This is a Wiki site full of info about this tricky subject and it has good mailing lists to help you in times of need. :) (Source: Slashdot)

Movie buff? Film Fanatic? Know Ain't It Cool News by hard? Then this page is for you too!
Dave's Trailer Page is a guy that makes a page with all new film teasers and trailers listed in chronoligcal order for your convenience. No more searching for new ones, no more deeplinking... they're all right there. Recommended! B)

This week, I'm going to visit a few seminars by the Chamber of Commernce, called Kamer van Koophandel. They have a pretty good website with a special section for Starters, people about to create their own company. On Monday, there's one about setting up your business administration and on Wednesday, there is one to help you create your Commercial Plan. What do you offer? What can you charge? How does it finance your company and create revenue, and so on? That's my weak spot at the moment, coz I can do many things and have difficulties choosing which ones to use? What kind of mix will I use?

The Google 2004 Anita Borg Scholarships... you're too late for now, but perhaps next year you can apply. If you're a woman, study Computer Science and have an exceptional record... You should. There are waaay too few women in CompSci, so any increase is good! ;)

How does the Internet work? What are packets? What's a ping? What does a router do? How about a switch, what is the difference? These questions are answered in an award-winning movie called Warriors of the Net, made by Ericsson. It's a streaming movie, so you need a DSL or cable connection to view this properly. (The Dutch MPG is 121 MB and is used as a test for proper functioning broadband connections...)

Cubbies Homepage is the home of the Microscopic skin for Trillian. Trillian is an Instant Messaging application like ICQ, MSN Messenger, Y! or AIM. But unlike these, it connects you to *all* 4 of those at the same time, if you want to. Of course, you need login accounts for each of the four services, but instead of running 4 IM on your PC and getting confused about who's where, you just have to worry about one tiny little window with all (in my case 70+) contacts there, when you need them. You can use Trillian for ICQ and MSN, or MSN and Y! or any other combination. No need to run all 4 services, just whatever you like. And it can import your contact lists, so everyone is still there after you've switched! It's free and with the skin I mentioned above, it takes upvery little space on your desktop.

Both Petra and Sjoerd have had terrible troubles from spyware after they used MS Internet Explorer to visit DesktopGirls.com. Appearently, it installed without warning or by deceiving you and tricking you to click on the wrong thing. I'm sorry... Please use AdwareCops (shareware) or Ad-aware (free) to test your system for spyware and remove it.
And next time, just install Mozilla or FireFox to prevent these things from happening! ;)

MacNN News reports: "Pixar is switching to Mac OS X and will be using Power Mac G5s for its work, according to a MacNN reader who attended an Apple seminar in New York."
Pixar and Apple even collaborated on a custom compression technology called "Pixlet", to allow the review of high-definition video on the desktop without needing huge files.

Pop-ups? I *hate* them with a passion. Mozilla has been blocking mine forever, don't even know since when. I installed the Google toolbar in IE to do the same. So I dont' get them anymore and it's a nice peaceful browser to live with. However, are there Pop-Up Alternatives? Because according to ClickZ.com: "Pop-ups outperform every other online ad format. They realize associating their clients with pop-ups could damage the brands. But when a format works, you'd be surprised how many marketers and advertisers are willing to take that risk."
Another irritating format is the skyscraper, the long ad at one side of your screen that runs all the way across one screen. It's sooo intrusive, especially in Flash. |( Aaargh! @%$*&%$@

On my favorite streaming music site, di.fm, the Vocal Trance channel often streams music from DJ GT of Generation Trance. He's great and the site features a whole serie of cool trance tracks to download. Excellent and hours of great music!

Mozilla Europe is a non-profit organization seeking to promote, develop and help deploy Mozilla products in Europe. To achieve this, we provide services and support to enterprises and administrations as well as help foster local communities."

And if you really like her, really really... check out Desktop Girls for a drop dead, stop what you're doing and just sit, stare and drool wallpaper of Catherine Bell

Catherine Bell... WHO? You know...!? Catherine Bell!!! *insert blank stare* The gorgeous brunette from J.A.G.! Ah, see! I knew you'd know whom I was talking about... the site is worth a visit, if alone for the gallery. Wow, she's stunning!

Last week, Petra and I went to visit the Botanical Garden "Hortus Botanicus" in Leiden. It was a chilly and gray Spring afternoon, but the garden was coming to life all around us. We'll go again in a month or so and see a much more colorful display, I'm sure, but I love "catching Mother Nature by surprise", like this.

DPReview reports: "Philips Research is demonstrating at the CeBIT a unique variable-focus lens system that has no mechanical moving parts. Suited to a wide range of optical imaging applications, including digital cameras. Philips’ FluidFocus system mimics the action of the human eye using a fluid lens that alters its focal length by changing its shape. The new lens, which lends itself to high volume manufacturing, overcomes the fixed-focus disadvantages of many of today’s low-cost imaging systems."

In preparing my business plan, I found this piece of information about small businesses: Small Biz Worried About Success. Interesting, isn't it?

WONDERLUST is a Spring party, to celebrate the arrival of Spring... and Lipton Ice's new Green Tea flavor... ;) hehe I got an Email for this party, but it's right after Crazyland and I think I won't be able to get up in time for this one. Much rather go to the sauna the day after and recouperate there... Too bad, sound like fun. So if you have time, check out Wonderlust (€37.50) on the 20th or 21st or March in the Showkas in Aalsmeerderbrug, from 16:00-23:00 hrs.

Martin let me know that di.fm, the greatest dance station on the Internet, has produced a great overview of dance music: Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. It lists the basic types (Trance, Techno, House, etc.) and when you click on them, you see which sub versions exist too. Clicking on them yields a little description such as origin, followers etc but also loads a little sample so you can listen to something... B) Excellent!

Hundreds of people have wasted eons of time when I was young (1992) playing Sierra's The Incredible Machine. Seemingly simple puzzles that you just couldn't put down. Well, Petra played this forever too and last weekend it came up in conversation and 'lo and behold, it is still out there on the Internet (Duuh!). 87 levels, simple but functional VGA graphics and hours of fun from 500KB of tight machine code! Coool! B)
BTW, Sierra, who created it has remade it in 1997 and at least 3 more titles in this serie exist. (Search at gamespot.com for "incredible machine".) There is also a demo of TIM 3 (3 MB) on gamespot.com

My grandmother oma Peper turns 88 years old today! Happy birthday Oma! :hug: At the end of the year, my grandfather will turn 90... Pfff, shjeez. I'll have 54 more years to live if I want to get that old... *sigh*

I'm still not much better than before; hope it is not again one of those slow moving viruses that just fucks up 3 weeks instead of raving like hell for 3 days. :( Luckily, almost everyone I know seems to be or have been ill in the last couple of days... Isa, Rob, Elise, Marleen, Michel, Saskia, lots of people at the EPO and so on and so forth. I guess that means Spring is finally here!!! That's the good news!

Say your server park is co-located at some ISP 75 km from where you live. Your web server crashes, the mail server gets hogged down by some virus, the databases is full or simply the hard disk is full... What do you do? Jump in the car and kick the damn thing? Why I think not!
Get of the SMS servers from D D S and hook up upto 16 inputs signals. Then connect upto 6 control signals and simply reboot machines or servers over SMS by sending a reboot command to the server. Coooool B) Why? Just because you can! LOL :D

Grrrr, I have an attack of the the Influenza (Flu) virus... cotton ball head, itchy, sniffy and runny nose all day long and a sore throat that feels like it was made of old dry tree bark instead of flesh and bones. :(

Sooo cool! As a subscriber to the mailing list of Norah Jones, I got an Email saying they have saved some tickets in each European city especially for list subscribers! Woohoo! :) So at 5pm today, CET, I could enter the online shop and get 2 tickets for an otherwise sold out show! B) I hope I got through and I'll get the tickets...
(BTW, the new website looks cool and sunny but it's a *pain* to work with and perfectly shows what NOT to do in Flash in your site... Grrr!)

Today tickets go on sale for Dance Valley Festival a decade of dance...! However, plans were to create a festivals that spans more than one day, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Dance Valley. But I just learnt on the UDC site that the local police is stubborn and doesn't want to cooperate... :( Time will tell.

Netcraft informed me that "TUCOWS is preparing to roll out a private-label service providing weblog hosting for its network of more than 5,000 resellers. As part of its expansion, TUCOWS said that it had acquired BlogRolling, a service that manages 'blogrolls' (link lists) for 32,000 weblog users."
You may know TUCOWS (the Ultimate Collection of Windows Software/Shareware) from downloading your favorite software, but they are mainly an ISP with domain registration, hosting, managed DNS and so on. A blog service is just something they want to add to their portfolio...

Alright, so I'm still a sucker for some good ol' Chemistry and will always love those scientific organic chem lab set-ups... But I also love the WebElements Periodic Table, dunno why. I even have a coffee mug with the thing on it... ;) Wonder which element Coffee is? What would the symbol be? Co? Cf? Or better: (c) as in many IM software. LOL