URL Shortening done wrong

Posted on Thursday, 1st of April, 2010 | 1 Comment

Today, on Twitter, I saw a tweet by one of my colleagues at my internship at e-sites. It was about an April fools day joke by Heikenen®. (If you don’t get it, don’t worry – its a bad joke anyway.)

In the tweet, my colleague linked to the website. And as all links on Twitter, it got shortened. (I beleave Twitter does this automatically these days – I’m not sure as I don’t use Twitter myself.) Now, in the (rather crazy) world where messages can only be 140 characters long, I understand the need to shorten URL’s – if you can only use 140 characters,  you don’t want to waste 64 on a URL like the URL of this post. 20 characters seems much better right.

But if you’re living in that crasy world, the 17 of http://bierpad.nl is better then to 20 of http://bit.ly/do4hsF right?

Now, I’m not saying everybody should be counting how long a URL is before they shorten it. But it wouldn’t be that hard to make those shortening services do that same counting for you, right?

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Posted in The Internet

Fedora it is

Posted on Tuesday, 19th of January, 2010 | 6 Comments

As I mentioned in my “Dear Microsoft” rant-thing, I was planning on moving away from Windows.

The first thing I wanted to look into, was FreeBSD, and I did. After installing it and getting a wonderfull commandline, I started poking around. That was somewhat of a fail; I could get neither Wifi nor KDE to work properly. So maybe FreeBSD wasn’t just there yet, or maybe I just suck – either way I didn’t really have any preferences, so I decided to move on.

A while ago I read that OpenSuse is great. So I gave that a try. The installation went pretty smooth and most things worked. Except for one thing, the Wifi again. While it did technically work, there was some bug that led to there only being a default route going to the wifi card, if my wired-network was also connected. Obviously this could be fixed, and I found a bunch of work arounds. But since I still didn’t care much for what OS I was going to use, and I didn’t want an OS where I had to use work arounds to do basic things like connect to my wireless network, I ditched OpenSuse as well.

Next up was Fedora. The installation went very smooth and everything worked out of the box, except for things like Flash. (But thats the same for anything other then Windows and maybe OS X, so Fedora didn’t lose points for that.) I managed to install some of the basic stuff I wanted without issues and am now in the process of transfering everything from my Windows Vista disk to the brand new Fedora installation.

I still have a few things I need to install (IDE’s, a good torrent client (I love µTorrent), that sort of stuff) but it seems like with Fedora I have (finally) found a keeper.

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Posted in Computing

Dear Microsoft

Posted on Sunday, 20th of December, 2009 | 1 Comment

Dear Microsoft,

for a while now, you have been promoting your new Windows 7 as the operating system everybody should use. Understandable, because Windows XP really does need to be replaced, and Windows Vista just isn’t what it should be.

As a Windows Vista user, I’ve been wanting to upgrade. Not just to Windows 7, but also to more RAM and a bigger harddrive. The logical thing to do, would be to combine these three upgrades. (Doing the HD upgrade and the OS upgrade at the same time also allows me to not destroy my Windows Vista installation – a big plus, because I don’t have to worry about forgetting to back something up.)

So, after buying two Corsair DDR2 2GB modules and a 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4, I downloaded Windows 7 Professional EN 64bit (from MSDNAA), burned the image, swapped harddrives and began the installation. Well, I got my laptop to boot from the DVD anyway. After the installer loaded the files and I picked my locale settings, it told me it was missing a “CD/DVD drive device driver”.  Obviously that message makes little to no sence, since the installer is on a DVD in said device, it there must be a driver available for it somewhere.

After searching the web a bit, it seems more people have this issue. Other people who also have a Dell Vostro 1500 seem to be able to solve the issue by installing completely unrelated drivers, reformatting the harddrive, or using an older image of the same installation DVD. I tried the first, can’t do the third and am to lazy for the second. Instead, I think I’ll just give something else a try. (I’m thinking of FreeBSD – I really like the idea behind that project and it seems to be making progress in the desktop area.)

With kind regard,

Jory Geerts

ps. I know you don’t care – its not like I’m even a paying customer. I just needed a reason to blog,

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Posted in Computing

Life Changes

Posted on Sunday, 11th of October, 2009 | 4 Comments

A bunch of things changed in my life recently. Some big changes, other small. The first of these, is the half year internship at GeoTax I started on september first. At GeoTax, they develop software to help municipalities execute a bunch of Dutch laws. My job there is that of software developer. They use a pretty cool enviroment with a lot of new toys for me to play with. (Or one, Oracle. Another is JBoss Application Server.) I’m really enjoying it there – lots of nice and really smart people, a great project to work on. The money is nice too, and I really don’t mind working from 8.30 to 5. What does suck, is that in order to be there at 8.30 I have to leave my house at 7.15, and I’m normally home around 6.10.

Another thing that changed, is that for a few months now, I’v been doing squash. Its a pretty fun game and I’m really feeling better, healthier then I did back when I didn’t do any sports. (Even though since I started at GeoTax I’ve been less active when you look at the total picture – I go there by train, while I used to go to school on my bike, which is a 45 minute drive.) Its strange how two 45 minute sessions a week (which is my goal) can make you feel like you have way more energy.

Between the internship and squashing, I have way less time then I used to. As a result of that, I’m making much less hours at work these days (not that big an issue, as the internship also pays pretty good), I’ve had to cut back on the TV shows I follow (all good shows got cancelled anyway) and I’m reading far less (as in, from a few chapters a day, to one or two a week). I’m also spending much less time online. I don’t read half the articles I would have read if I had the time, and my activity at Zetaboards Support has dropped to an all time low.

Oh, and I have a girlfriend these days. I try to spend what little free time I have with her.

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Posted in Computing, My life, Programming