01 January 2010 09:44 - As always at the beginning of the new year I look back at the previous year in numbers. This time 2009.

In 2009 a drove over 26,427 kilometers by car. A drop of 2.12% compared to 2008. Based on the average diesel oil usage of my car this amounts to over 1,638 liters of diesel oil used.

The highest GPS speed reached with my cars was 196 km/h.

I got a total of 1 speeding tickets (66% decrease compared to 2008), for a total amount of 68 euro (a 60% decrease compared to 2008).

Speeding saved me around 25 hours, which makes the cost of speeding around 2.72 euro per hour saved (Which makes it economically feasible).

1 person managed to damage my car, while it was parked. A decrease of 50% compared to 2008.

I ran more than 14 kilometers an increase of 350% compared to 2008.

I cycled more than 192 kilometers a decrease of 82.71% compared to 2008. I had 1 flat tire while cycling.

The highest speed reached by bike was 51.47 km/h (23% decrease compared to 2008). The highest average speed was 25.33 km/h (10.24% decrease compared to 2008) over a 20.37 kilometer track.

The longest track cycled was 52.2 kilometer.

I was on my cellphone for more then 33.5 hours a decrease of 29% compared to 2008.

I typed more than 1,917,907 characters on IRC and twitter an increase of 103% compared to 2008.

I traveled over 600 kilometers by plane a drop of 40% compared to 2008.

I traveled over 65,504 kilometers by train a drop of 1.60% compared to 2008.

I visited 3 foreign countries (Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom) an increase of 50% compared to 2008.

I slept approximately 2,752 hours. An increase of 2.32% compared to 2008.

My average heartbeat in rest was 63.22 beats per minute. Which is an 5.72% increase compared to 2008. This of course means that my heart beat more than 33,228,432 times in 2009.

My average weight in 2009 was 55.60 KG. Which is a drop of 0.215% compared to 2008.

My estimated Vmax in 2009 was on average 36.53. Which is a decrease of 0.84% compared to 2008.

My ability to lift weights increased by 17% compared to 2008 (times * amount).

I did 708 commits to my private subversion repository a decrease of 26.76% compared to 2008.

I went shopping more than 76 times an increase of 1.33% compared to 2008.

I completed 68 private projects an increase of 106% compared to 2008.

I logged in to remote hosts using ssh more than 7,308 times. A decrease of 44.5% compared to 2008.

I wrote 16 blogposts in 2009, 12 less than in 2008.

I read 24 books. Which amounts to over 10,000 pages.

The longest time of having no connection to the internet was 72 hours.

I watched 30 movies in 2009.

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08 December 2009 19:12 - Lately there has been some discussion in the Netherlands about the so called 'kilometerheffing'. 'Kilometerheffing' means in effect that you get a GPS enabled device in your car. This device tracks where you are driving and based on that info you will be billed. I.e. you will have to pay more for driving on busy roads. The average price will be around 3 eurocent per kilometer.

Of course this is an enormous invasion of privacy. Despite the claim that the GPS data will stay in the car and only will be used in criminal cases. And despite the fact that the only information the government, represented by a billing office, will get is how much kilometers you have driven for a given price. In this blog post I will show with a simple example that the price per kilometer can be used to track your movements.

People familiar with the road layout in the Netherlands will know that coming from Leiden I have a few options to get to the A1.

1. A44 - A4 - A10 - A1.
2. A44 - A4 - A9 - A1.
3. A4 - A10 - A1.
4. A4 - A9 - A1.

The difference between options 1 and 3 depending on my decision to Leiden on the east or the west side.

Lets now assume the following pricing scheme:
A44 1 eurocent per kilometer.
A1 2 eurocent per kilometer.
A4 4 eurocent per kilometer.
A9 3 eurocent per kilometer.
A10 5 eurocent per kilometer.

Lets also assume I get the following bill:
A kilometers of 1 eurocent
B kilometers of 4 eurocent
C kilometers of 3 eurocent
D kilometers of 2 eurocent

Is is fairly trivial to conclude I must have driven on the A44, A4, A9 and A1. So I probably have driven route 2.

Of course this tracking by using prices can be improved significantly. The major excuse being to regulate traffic. It is easy to argue that the traffic is more dense on Monday morning so the tariff on the A10 should be 5.005 eurocent per kilometer on Monday mornings. 5.004 eurocent on Tuesday, 5.003 euro cent on Wednesday etc. Then having a 5.004 kilometer price on your bill would put you on the A10 on Tuesdays.

To further facilitate this way of tracking the innocent I would like to propose the following scheme for the pricing:

B.WWWDDHHMMKKK eurocent per kilometer. With
B - Base tariff.
WWW - Number indicating the road.
DD - The day of the month.
HH - The current hour in 24 hour format.
MM - The current minute of the day.
KKK - The position on the road in kilometers from the start of the road.

i.e. Driving on the 1st of December 2009 at 19:54 CET on the A35 between kilometer 50 till 51 would then cost you 2.035011954050 euro cent per kilometer. This of course also allows for determining in which direction is travelled. Note that month and year is not needed, because of the monthly invoicing. Or just maybe we should put the GPS coordinates in the price.

But the moral of the story is, datamining on your 'kilometerheffing' bill can tell a lot about your movements by car.

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15 November 2009 10:38 - Last week I went on a driving training with the company I work for Snow. Part of this course was learning how to make a good emergency stop , how to make a lane change with 70km/h and how to correct front- and rear-wheel slips.

You can get an impression of the day by watching the movie below.

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03 November 2009 19:41 - Since I replaced my trusted Treo 650 with a HTC Hero, I decided it became time that I would have a possibility to sync my calendars between my phone and my laptop. My laptop being a Mac, this quickly boiled down to a sharing solution with iCal support. Unfortunately, the HTC Hero can only connect to Exchange, Outlook and Google Calendar.

Using Google Calendar was of course not an option. I do not want to store my private calendar data on the servers of a company like Google. From the HTC Hero perspective that only left we with the Outlook/Exchange choice. As mentioned before, I also want to sync my calendar with iCal on the Mac, hence the only possible solution seemed to be Zarafa.

Setting up Zarafa proved to be straight forward. I just followed the following steps:

• Install a Centos 5 host on a kvm machine using netboot
• Run yum update on this machine and reboot.
• Download the Zarafa Community edition (I do not need more than 3 users)
• Follow the Zarafa installation manual
• Enable zarafa-ical
• Made the machine reboot proof by enabling the zarafa services with chkconfig

During this I ran into 2 very very minor problems. First of all the manual did not state that you had to extract the .tar.gz file. This is of course logical step to take, but I am a little picky about the correctness of manuals. The second issue was that sysstat is not mentioned in the dependencies of Zarafa in the manual.

After the fixing of said problems, I had a working Zarafa server which could sync with iCal. For syncing with the HTC Hero I had to install Z-push on the server to be able to use active-sync. The installation of Z-push looked very easy, however after following the installation manual and configuring the HTC Hero I ran into the following error: Account could not be created, please try again later. After some searching I found the solution here. And now it works like a charm.

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