Today, I found this in my mail:

The “success kit” included a lifetime membership card for

(…) an elite group of Oracle Certified Professionals (…)

And I had hoped for a coffee pack

But still. Excellent.

I got a new phone. It’s my first real smart phone, it has Android and two CPU cores. I like it. It’s an LG Optimus 2x and it looks like this:

LG Optimus 2x

I like it for having a Linux kernel, a big screen, a 3.5 mm earphone jack, convenient volume buttons, a slick design and because I can greatly expand its usefulness by installing apps. It’s not become a lifestyle though. The first Saturday after I got it, while waiting outside of a dressing room for someone to try on some new piece of clothing, I did not check my messages or Facebook wall. That’s not product dissatisfaction, I’m just really in control.

So I wanted to make a list of all the different cell phones I’ve owned. ‘Owned’ being off course a relative term (albeit decreasingly so in each case), since I got each one for free (also relative, increasingly, also inversely correlated with ‘owned’) with a subscription that would last for two years, after which the phone was more than fully paid.

KPN Pocketline Swing

My very first cell phone was the KPN Pocketline Swing (links to page in Dutch).

KPN Pocketline Swing

The `Swing’ was a very popular phone in the Netherlands at the time. It is the only one I used with a pre-paid subscription. My service provider was KPN-owned Hi, which was targeted at young people. I got the phone in January 2000, while away from home for the entire month. I remember the first thing I tried to find out about it was how to turn off the high-pitched beep at every key press. Apart from the extensible antenna for noticeably better reception I don’t remember much else. Its functionality was limited to making and receiving calls, text messaging, name/number storage and an alarm clock. But it was as cool a gadget as I’ve ever had.

Nokia 6210

When I got a new phone, I sold the Pocketline Swing, including its phone number. And for good reason. The law that enables you to take your phone number with you when switching service providers didn’t exist yet, and if I stayed with Hi I didn’t have a lot of options choosing my next phone. So I switched to Ben, which gave me a Nokia 6210.

Noka 6210

Also targeted at young people, Ben was the übercool brand of the time. I believe the first name of the guy who founded it was Ben, and in Dutch, “ben” also translates to “I am”, which provided for lots of subtle advertising possibilities.  They were growing, but their coverage wasn’t very good when I first got this phone. I lived in Groningen then, and I remember only having reception in the down-town area. As soon as I crossed a bridge over the enclosing canal,  the connection was lost. Ben was bought by T-Mobile in 2002 as their way to get access to the Dutch market. They closed down the brand, but reinstated it in 2008.

A Nokia 6210 from Ben was what everybody in my demographic had. Apart from calling and text messaging, the user could compose his very own ring tones. I remember using the opening theme of Shostakovich’s Sixth string quartet as my ring tone, because we were rehearsing that at the time. And off course there was the very addictive game of Snake. I got pretty good at it. Obviously, because everyone was.

A couple of years ago, when someone in my neighbourhood’s Windows XP laptop became frustratingly slow and unstable, I convinced her to install Ubuntu. Using Ubuntu she could again perform all of her computing needs comfortably. Her laptop was fast and stable again and easy to maintain.

Since then, two times a year, we go through the same predictable and frustrating motions:

1. The distribution upgrade button appears in Ubuntu’s update manager.
2. Usually a few weeks later, when her dependency on her computer is temporarily somewhat lower, we do a backup of her home directory and click the upgrade button. After all, new and better versions of all installed software packages are waiting for her.
3. After the upgrade has finished, she tries to restore her previous set-up and colour scheme in the new Ubuntu, insofar as it will let her.
4. The next weekend we decide to do a fresh installation of the new Ubuntu, because it is less hassle than trying to fix all the odd quirks that have surfaced since the upgrade.
5. She now has to fully recreate her previous set-up and colour scheme.
6. She decides to learn to live with what seems to be the new set of bugs for the coming six months.

This morning I read The Register’s review of the latest Ubuntu beta. Apparently Ubuntu is no longer fast or stable. If it is any indication, Ubuntu won’t be very fast or stable. I think I should try to convince her to install Arch. It’s either that, or buy her a Mac.

Since the start of this month I have been looking for a new job, because my current position at the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice will end January 31st next year. Barely a day after leaving my resume at nationalevacaturebank.nl, I got a few dozen calls from recuiting agencies and other companies, interested in getting to know me. One of those companies was Sogyo, a smallish company in De Bilt, specialised in software architecture,  development and integration.

(Promotional video in Dutch)

When I arrived at Sogyo for my first interview, I was a little early, so I was offered a cup of coffee and  asked to wait a few moments. While enjoying the coffee, I looked at the books in a book case, and was pleasantly surprised to find Noami Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. It appears I’ll be feeling quite at home there.

I’ll start working there February first.

I have some kind of a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I like being up to speed on what people I know or once knew are up to and the network site allows to me to conveniently stay in contact with people without any effort on my part. That said, Facebook has a questionable reputation where it comes to privacy and for Facebook to be useful to you, you have to post private stuff, like your birthday, relationship status, holiday pictures, who your friends are or what’s on your mind. Some people go even further, by posting more explicit pictures or revealing their moment-to-moment location, but I don’t do that. Sure, you can lock your account to people not in your network, but Facebook has an interest in me sharing as much as I can, so how can I trust them?

Enter Diaspora. From Wikipedia:

Diaspora (also Diaspora*) is an open-source personal web server software intended to provide a distributed social networking service, a decentralized alternative to Facebook. The initial developer release was on the 15th September 2010 and a consumer alpha is planned for October 2010.

The project’s intent is to provide the ability to have “the little games, the little walls, the little chat” that a Facebook user’s experience currently provides, but instead hosted on users’ personal web servers (called “seeds”) so that users can “fully control the information they share.”

September 15th was yesterday, so I decided to try it out. The website tells you how to build it on Ubuntu, Fedora or MacOS, so I adapted the instructions for my favorite OS, Arch:

These steps expect two things:

• AUR to be setup. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository on how to do that.
• You don’t have ruby 1.9 installed. Diaspora has ruby gems working only in ruby 1.8

Install dependencies using pacman:

# sudo pacman -S openssl imagemagick git libffi libxslt

There could be dependencies that I didn’t notice because I had them already installed, but these are noted on the website. Then, install ruby 1.8, ruby-gems and bundler:

# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ruby1.8/ruby1.8.tar.gz
# tar xzvf ruby1.8.tar.gz
# cd ruby1.8
# makepkg -s (installed tk, tcl)
# sudo pacman -U ruby1.8-1.8.7_p302-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz



# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rubygems1.8/rubygems1.8.tar.gz
# tar xzvf rubygems1.8.tar.gz
# cd rubygems1.8
# makepkg -s
# sudo pacman -U rubygems1.8-1.3.7-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz



# sudo gem-1.8 install bundler
# PATH=$PATH:/opt/ruby1.8/bin/


Install mongodb:

# wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mongodb/mongodb.tar.gz
# tar xzvf mongodb.tar.gz
# cd mongodb
# makepkg -s (also installed spidermonkey, scons, boost, sconsboost-lib, nspr; took a long time).
# sudo pacman -U mongodb-1.6.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz


Clone and build Diaspora:

# git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
# cd diaspora
# bundle install (will fetch source index and ask for your password)


And finally, run Diaspora:

# sudo /etc/rc.d/mongodb start
# rake db:seed:tom
# bundle exec thin start


Now direct your browser to http://localhost:3000/, then login with user tom and password evankorth. More information can be found here.

Here’s a thought:

As I understand it, lots of Greeks, who have been reaping EU benefits for years without paying any taxes whatsoever, seem to be under the impression that they are not to blame for their country’s current problems, and are now protesting that they are being sent the bill.
This reminds me of the world-wide “It’s not my fault” protests against drastic measures that we will see within a few decades, when global environmental crises present itself, compared to which the current financial crisis will look like a minor nuisance.

I think I started drinking coffee when I was fourteen or so. It being an acquired taste, the first few years I drank it with milk and sugar, but when I moved out of my parent’s home into my student room some five years later, I quit on the milk and sugar since I found those unworthy of spending money on. I have been drinking my coffee black since then.

At the advise of my mother, and her mother, who actually worked at the old Douwe Egberts plant in Joure, I started cutting out and collecting the point certificates that can be found in the wrappings of any DE coffee pack. They assured me that  with enough points there were nice gifts available.

So now that I had been buying my own coffee for some fourteen years, I turned upside-down the little can in which I had been storing them all these years, and started counting them. I counted some two thousand points, which I was sure was quite a lot. After all, they had taken me almost one and a half decade. I wondered what kind of nice things I could get in return for them. A cappuccino maker perhaps? Excited with anticipation I typed www.de.nl in the location bar of my web browser.

Utter and complete disappointment befell me. My two thousand painstakingly gathered points amounted to ten Euros. Ten. And in return for ten points, DE will give you nothing but a few ugly coffee cups.

This pure materialistic set back is not the reason for the dissatisfaction I wish to convey here. It is the mere fact that for the first decade of this century and the better part of the last, once or twice a week, three generations of my family have been going through an utterly pointless (pun intended) ritual. DE made me feel genetically challenged today.

This morning I threw coffee wrappings away without cutting out the point certificate. Life will be different from now on.

Yesterday, many Dutch news sources reported that a group of fifty physicians recommended further study into the harmful effects of radiation from cell phones and other wireless devices and a moderation in the usage of such devices. They observe a raise in unexplainable complaints and a raise in the use of such wireless devices, and somehow infer a causal relationship. You can ask yourself what kind of doctors these fifty people are.

Today, the Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij reports that, first of all, the list only contains 49 people, some of which are no doctor at all, and most of which are known pseudo scientists, like homeopaths, astrologers and the like.

The Vereniging explains that the only known effect of these types of radiation is a very slight raise in body temperature, much less in fact than for instance the natural daily variation in body temperature. It is not the radiation itself, but the supposed effect that causes the complaints. As they put it, “there is no reason to take these people seriously.”

Excellent.