01 January 2013 01:01 - As always at the beginning of the new year I look back at the previous year in numbers. So here is the 2012 year in numbers for me.

In 2012 I drove 42,104 kilometers by car. An increase of 0.87% compared to 2011.

The highest speed reached with my car was 196 km/h an increase of 15.29% compared to 2011.

I got a total of 2 speeding tickets, for a total amount of 85 euro (a 21% decrease compared to 2011). Each ticket was for breaking the speed limit by 4 km/h.

Speeding saved me around 71 hours, which makes the cost of speeding around 1.20 euro per hour saved (Which makes it economically feasible).

I cycled 417.49 kilometers a decrease of 61.66% compared to 2011.

The highest speed reached by bike was 43.20 km/h (11.66% decrease compared to 2011). The highest average speed was 25.20 km/h (12.5% decrease compared to 2011) over a 28.05 kilometer track.

The longest track cycled was 45.63 kilometer. A decrease of 26.94% compared to 2011.

In total I cycled 17 hours and 50 minutes with an average speed of 23.4 km/h. My average cadence during cycling was 91 rpm, which makes for a total of 93,275 rotations of my pedals in 2012 or 4.48 meter covered per rotation.

My average heartbeat when cycling was 146 bpm.

I was on my cellphone for 58 hours which is the same time as in 2011.

I typed more than 330,452 characters on IRC and twitter a decrease of 14.32% compared to 2011.

I traveled 53 kilometers by train.

I traveled 2,190 kilometers by plane.

While travelling I visited 2 foreign countries (Poland and Germany).

Overall I traveled 1,936 kilometers more in 2012 than in 2011.

I finished 99 online chess games. I won 56, lost 30 and drew 13.

My online chess rating increased from 1200 (default start) to 1849 now.

My success in the magazines continued with me starring in 2 magazines, the same as in 2011.

I went shopping 96 times an increase of 84,62% compared to 2011.

I wrote 5 blogposts in 2012, 4 more than in 2011.

I still got 2 cats. Which is the same as in 2011.

I helped organizing 1 conference.

I made 1,342 photos, which is 3.67 a day.

I completed 6,379 todo items, a decrease of 6.47% compared to 2011.

I visited 2 ERs, which are 239 kilometers apart, within 12 hours.

I read 42 books with a total of 17,398 pages. This is on average 1.98 pages per hour. The longest book I read had 672 pages.

I watched TV series for 301 hours, which is around 49 minutes per day and well below the dutch average of 191 minutes per day.

I used 2,474 Kwh of electricity. Which is a decrease of 27.17% compared to 2011.

I rebooted my home server 5 times.

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12 May 2012 11:03 - Aangezien het voor politici erg moeilijk blijkt te zijn om na te denken, hierbij een introductie in common sense.

• Bezuinigen betekent dat je minder uitgeeft, niet dat je meer geld gaat vragen.
• Als je lasten verhoogt voor mensen, dan gaan ze niet het zelfde blijven uitgeven.
• Als je rode diesel duurder maakt, worden producten van eigen land en tuinbouw duurder.
• Als je transport duurder maakt, dan worden alle artikelen duurder.
• Als je het duurder maakt om te gaan werken, wordt het minder snel interessant om te gaan werken.
• Tegen mensen na 40 jaar zeggen, je werkt maar 50 jaar om dan te zeggen,#44; je werkt maar 52 jaar heeft niets te maken met "het moet eerlijker".
• Geld dat je niet hebt, kan je ook niet uitgeven.
• Mensen gaan niet dichter bij hun werk wonen als ze eerst 10 duizenden euros voor dat privilege moeten betalen. De meeste mensen hebben dat geld ook helemaal niet.
• Als je maatregelen neemt die huizenprijzen snel doen dalen, kunnen mensen niet verhuizen. Ze moeten dan in 1 keer te veel geld op tafel leggen.
• Als je de BTW verhoogd, wordt het interessanter om dingen in Duitsland of Belgie te kopen.
• Zolang je fraude in de zorg niet aanpakt, zal de fraude blijven groeien en de kosten onbeheersbaar blijven.
• Als artikelen duurder worden, kunnen mensen minder uitgeven.

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20 February 2012 08:24 - Because I got some complaints about my response speed to email, I will try to give a small insight in the mysteries of how I handle my email. Especially how I handle my email during the holidays. It is a little technical, so if you do not know anything about Unix or mail, it is probably better to take a look at the pictures of my cats.

Anyway, the mail server which is the final destination for the jeroen.se email runs postfix. Which of course is configured using the main.cf file.

In my main.cf file there are 2 lines interesting for understanding how I handle my email during the holidays:

Which checks all the recipients of incoming email against the /usr/local/etc/postfix/holding file. Normally this file is empty, but during my holidays it contains:

Which puts all incoming mail for the jeroen.se domain into the hold queue, instead of delivering it.

When coming back from a holiday, I remove said line, run postmap on /usr/local/etc/postfix/holding and run postsuper -r ALL hold to reprocess all mail and mail will start coming into my mailbox again.

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01 January 2012 01:01 - As always at the beginning of the new year I look back at the previous year in numbers. This year 2011.

In 2011 I drove over 41,739 kilometers by car. An increase of 8.49% compared to 2010. Based on the average diesel oil usage of my car this amounts to over 2,343 liters of diesel oil used.

The highest speed reached with my car was around 170 km/h a decrease of 13.26% compared to 2010.

I got a total of 2 speeding tickets, for a total amount of 108 euro (a 107% increase compared to 2010).

Speeding saved me around 71 hours, which makes the cost of speeding around 1.52 euro per hour saved (Which still makes it economically feasible).

0 persons managed to damage my car, while it was parked. Which is 1 less than in 2010.

I cycled more than 1,089 kilometers an increase of 478.72% compared to 2010.

The highest speed reached by bike was 48.90 km/h (17.63% increase compared to 2010). The highest average speed was 28.80 km/h (14.65% increase compared to 2010) over a 28.80 kilometer track.

The longest track cycled was 62.46 kilometer. An increase of 97.03% compared to 2010.

I was on my cellphone for more then 58 hours a decrease of 6.45% compared to 2010.

I typed more than 385,672 characters on IRC and twitter a decrease of 66.71% compared to 2010.

I did not travel by train a drop of 100.00% compared to 2010.

Overall I traveled 1,171 kilometers less in 2011 than in 2010.

My average heartbeat in rest was 53.43 beats per minute. Which is an 10.22% decrease compared to 2010.

My average weight in 2011 was 54.99KG. Which is a gain of 0.81% compared to 2010.

My estimated Vmax in 2011 was on average 36.72. Which is an increase of 0.44% compared to 2010.

After my successful movie career of 2009 and 2010, 2011 was the year to make the move to the magazines with me starring in 2 magazines.

I went shopping 52 times a decrease of 15.07% compared to 2010.

I completed 30 private projects. 18 less than in 2010

I wrote 1 blogpost in 2011, 4 less than in 2010.

I still got 2 cats. Which is the same as in 2010.

I helped organizing 1 conference. 1 more than in 2010.

I threw away 52 garbage bags.

I made 609 photos.

I completed 6,820 todo items.

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01 January 2011 18:27 - As always at the beginning of the new year I look back at the previous year in numbers. This year 2010.

In 2010 I drove over 38,577 kilometers by car. An increase of 45.7% compared to 2009. Based on the average diesel oil usage of my car this amounts to over 2,044 liters of diesel oil used.

The highest speed reached with my car was around 196 km/h (on the A31 in Germany).

I got a total of 1 speeding tickets, for a total amount of 52 euro (a 24% decrease compared to 2009). (Note: I will object because I did nothing illegal at that moment. So this is 0 euro if the dutch police had followed the law.)

Speeding saved me around 77 hours, which makes the cost of speeding around 0.67 euro per hour saved (Which makes it economically feasible).

1 person managed to damage my car, while it was parked. Which is the same as in 2009. Could you be so kind to make an appointment this year?

I cycled more than 194 kilometers an increase of 1.04% compared to 2009.

The highest speed reached by bike was 41.57 km/h (19% decrease compared to 2009). The highest average speed was 25.12 km/h (0.83% decrease compared to 2009) over a 15.23 kilometer track.

The longest track cycled was 31.7 kilometer.

I was on my cellphone for more then 62 hours an increase of 85% compared to 2009.

I typed more than 1,157,672 characters on IRC and twitter a decrease of 39.6% compared to 2009.

I traveled over 5,340 kilometers by train a drop of 91.85% compared to 2009.

I visited 1 foreign country (Germany of course) a drop of 67% compared to 2009.

Overall I traveled 48,014 kilometers less in 2010 than in 2009. Which is the same as traveling 1.20 times around the earth.

My average heartbeat in rest was 59.51 beats per minute. Which is an 5.86% decrease compared to 2009. This of course means that my heart beat more than 31,278,452 times in 2010.

My average weight in 2010 was 54.55KG. Which is a drop of 1.89% compared to 2009. It is also a known issue which has been addressed.

My estimated Vmax in 2010 was on average 36.57. Which is an increase of 0.11% compared to 2009.

I did 676 commits to my private subversion repository a decrease of 4.51% compared to 2009.

I went shopping 73 times a decrease of 3.94% compared to 2009.

I completed 48 private projects.

I wrote 5 blogposts in 2010, 11 less than in 2009.

I moved 1 time.

I got 2 cats. 2 more than in in 2009.

2010 was the first year I drove more kilometers in The Netherlands than in Germany. And yes , it is true. Dutch people can not drive safely.

I got 1,522 replies on twitter.

The number of plants in my home increased to 25, which in theory provided more oxygen than an average person uses in 1 year.

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13 April 2010 20:16 - Finally I have some time again to write a blogpost. February and march were busy months in which I moved from Enschede to Delft. Main advantage of this is of course that I live closer to my work, which on average safes me around 12 hours a week of travel time. Another advantage is of course that the house is larger (around 30 m^2) and do not have to park my car 10 minutes away.

But that was not all that happened in the last 2 months. I also passed the PRINCE 2 Foundation exam on the 19th of february.

Beside the PRINCE 2 Foundation exam I also received some Novell certification. Due to my LPIC certifications I became a Novell Certified Linux Administrator and a Novell Data Center Technical Specialist.

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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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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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03 May 2009 16:57 - Sometimes you are just chatting on IRC and hear that some people still use passwords that appear in quotes on IRC and are mentioned in various IRC channels. If you are fully aware of that, you should of course not use that password for anything. Especially not for anything that can be considered confidential.

The above points seem obvious, but to illustrate the effect this can have I will give an example: Imagine you are the chairman of a well known hosting community providing virtual private servers. Lets call this community 'zoloos'. Further more, imagine that you use a password that has been mentioned in: #linux.nl, #alcohol, #cafe and many other IRC channels as your password. And to make things worse, even imagine that the password is mentioned in quotes.

What will happen then? Well the following information may get publicly known:

1. The personal information of all zoloos members.
2. The confidential minutes of zoloos meetings.
3. Passwords of various zoloos services. I.e. the zoloos cacti and zoloos zabbix.
4. The configuration of the zoloos switch.

So please choose good passwords and change them regularly.

Thanks to Hepp, BugBlue and of course Cinder, who quickly locked the account.

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09 February 2009 18:48 - Just thinking of it: The average dutch person commutes 2 x 39 minutes a day. Which totals to 78 minutes. The average dutch person watches 182 minutes of TV per day. Total amount of watching TV and commuting 260 minutes per day (aka 4 hours 20 minutes).

So lets take in account the time I commute (4 hours 45 minutes) and watch TV (none or I watch TV while commuting). Also part of my commute time is work time (1 hour 15 minutes).

The funny thing is the average person says I have a long commute time. So lets calculate the time left per day when removing commute time, TV time and work time (based on 8 hours a day).
Average dutch person: 24 * 60 - 78 - 182 - 480 = 700 minutes per work day
Me: 24 * 60 - 285 - 0 - 405 = 750 minutes per work day.

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04 February 2009 08:09 - Last week I thought a little about naming volumegroups on SANs, logical volumes, hosts and (micro)SD cards. They all have one thing in common, if you have a lot of them you hardly can avoid numbering them. The only problem with this is of course small typos that can lead to disasters. Fortunately there are of course solutions for this.

After some thinking I thought about using checksums in the numbering, which makes it harder to create a disaster with just one typo. The best scheme I could find to work for this was using the ISBN numbering scheme.

So i.e. I now number my (micro)SD cards as follows:

• jni-60001
• jni-10002
• ...
• jni-12761
• jni-72762
• jni-22763
• etc.

As you probably can see the first number is the checksum digit. A number is valid if and only if the checksum digit + 2 times the second number + 3 times the third number + 4 times the fourth number ... modulo 11 = 0. Note that the checksum digit can also be X to indicate a value of 10.

If you look at the jni-60001 number. The checksum is 6. And the 1 is multiplied by 5. Summarized this makes 11, which modulo 11 is of course 0. So this is a correct number. But what if we make a typo i.e.:

• jni-60010, this becomes (6+4) modulo 11 = 10, which is not valid.
• jni-60002, this becomes (6+10) modulo 11 = 5 , which is not valid.
• jni-60019, this becomes (6+4+45) modulo 11 = 0 , which is valid. But then you already have made 2 typos.

Of course I created a script for this that does all the hard work. It can be found here.

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02 January 2009 17:32 - As always at the beginning of the new year I look back at the previous year in numbers. This time 2008 in numbers.

In 2008 a drove over 27,000 kilometers by car. A drop of 10% compared to 2007. Based on the average diesel oil usage of my car this amounts to over 1,674 liters of diesel oil used.

The highest GPS speed reached with my car was 198 km/h.

I got a total of 3 speeding tickets (50% increase compared to 2007), for a total amount of 170 euro (a 227% increase compared to 2007).

Speeding saved me around 25 hours, which makes the cost of speeding around 6.80 euro per hour saved (Which makes it economically feasible).

2 persons managed to damage my car, while it was parked. One of these persons attempted to to steal my navigation system. The other one should practise parking a car.

I ran more than 4 kilometers a drop of 98% compared to 2007. Mainly because I focussed more on cycling.

I cycled more than 1,113 kilometers an increase of 271% compared to 2007. I fortunately had no flat tires.

The highest speed reached by bike was 67.56 km/h (39% increase compared to 2007). The highest average speed was 28.22 km/h (15.65% increase compared to 2007) over a 22 kilometer track.

The longest track cycled was 127.78 kilometer.

I was on my cellphone for more then 47.5 hours an increase of 48% compared to 2007.

I sent 1,206 sms messages.

I posted 0 messages to usenet a drop of 100%.

I typed more than 943,230 characters on IRC a decrease of 9.76% compared to 2007.

I traveled over 1,000 kilometers by plane a drop of 50% compared to 2007.

I traveled over 66,572 kilometers by train a drop of 5% compared to 2007.

I visited 2 foreign countries (Germany and France) a drop of 60% compared to 2007.

I slept approximately 2,690 hours.

My average heartbeat in rest was 59.8 beats per minute. Which is an 10% increase compared to 2007.

My average weight in 2008 was 55.76 KG. Which is a drop of 0.214% compared to 2007.

My Vmax in 2008 was on average 36.84. Which is an increase of 4.27% compared to 2007.

My ability to lift weights increased by 36% compared to 2007 (times * amount).

I did 784 commits to my private subversion repository a decrease of 26.73% compared to 2007.

I celebrated my birthday 1 times.

I went shopping more than 75 times an increase of almost 14% compared to 2007.

I do not know how many garbage bags I threw away because of the breakdown of 1 counter on the container.

I completed 33 private projects a drop of 72% compared to 2007.

I logged in to remote hosts using ssh more than 13,168 times.

I wrote 28 blogpost in 2008, 1 less than in 2007.

I got 1 nephew.

I read 28 books. Which amounts to around 8,400 pages.

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

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17 December 2008 08:53 - Since a few days I have a Sony HDR-TG3E from my employer. The target is to get an hour of movie material per consultant about the company. The material of all consultants will be gathered to make a professional promotion movie.

My idea for my material is to make a 24 like clone, which when put in a one hour movie will result in 2.5 minutes of material per real hour. There are how ever some challenges I have to face:

• How to keep it interesting. That is I have to come up with a good plot.
• Writing a sharp and humorous dialog, while in the mean time give a real impression of what my work is like.
• Security, privacy and NDA regulations. Which means that I can not shoot and/or publish all material I want or need.

Anyway, casting has started. So if you want to play the role of jnieuwen girl (in parody of the Bond movies :)) send an email to casting@jeroen.se

Stay tuned for the trailer. The movie should be ready near the end of 2009.

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26 November 2008 19:04 - Sometime you can easily get someone confused. I.e. a colleague who accidentally changed the owner ship of all the directories in the /home directory of a system (non recursive). His question: "How can I fix this?".

Our answer:
ls -ld * | xargs -n 1 -Iwithouta chown withouta:withouta withouta
or how we had to say it in words: l s space minus l d space star space pipe space xargs space minus n space 1 space minus capital i without a space chown space without a colon without a space without a enter.

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05 November 2008 18:22 - After a lot of complaints on IRC that I did not have an hyves account, I finally created one. It can be found at jnieuwen.hyves.nl. The posts from the jeroen.se blog are also available on hyves. For the rest I still have to send some hyves invites, and set more profile information.

So if you have a hyves account and want to be a friend on hyves, do not hesitate to send an invite.

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06 October 2008 18:35 - Today on IRC someone claimed that there is a mathematical proven algorithm to win money with poker in the long run. I can not believe this is true because of the following:

Assume we have the algorithm A that guarantees a certain win when playing poker. Now imaging 4 poker players. Each starting to play with an starting amount of X euro against each other in a room. Each player plays according to algorithm A, because that will guarantee him a certain win of money over time.

Given by the rules of poker: The amount that can be won in a round (W) by a player is equal to the amount lost in a round by the other players (L).

After 0 rounds the total amount of money in the room will still be 4X euro. Trivial. After n+1 rounds the amount of money in the room is the amount of money in the room after round n + W - L. Which gives Mn+1 = Mn + W - L. Given that W = L we have that Mn+1 = Mn.

So after n rounds with n a natural number >= 0 the total amount in the room is still 4X.

Assume that algorithm A works and g is the average amount gained by each player per round. If A is true than g > 0. Hence after n rounds (with n > 0 and sufficiently large), every player has on average X+gn. Which means the total amount in the room would be 4X+4gn with n > 0 and g > 0 after n rounds. Earlier we have proven that for every n the total amount in the room is 4X. Therefor we have that: 4X+4gn = 4X for every value of n. But 4X+4gn > 4X for every n > 0, hence the assumption that algorithm A works is false.

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01 October 2008 21:30 - Today I launced a new layout for jeroen.se. A few pages have disappeared in this process, but some of them will return when I have decided how to redesign them.

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23 September 2008 20:55 - Today it is 5 years ago that I registered the jeroen.se domain.

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09 July 2008 13:23 - Just a quick blog post about how to run a command like uptime in more than one screen window. Just do crtl-a then
:at "#" stuff "uptime\015"

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24 May 2008 13:57 - Today my blog is 1 year old.

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20 May 2008 07:58 - For reading and organising my email I use mutt. In the past I have used mail.app for a while, but it had to much problems for me. Using mutt however I had one little irritation. Saving email to my next and waiting for mailboxes was cumbersome. It takes to much keypresses or hard to remember key short cuts.

The simple solution I came up with was to make symbolic links in my Maildir. I.e. ln -s .next .n, which allows me to type the command s=n in mutt instead of s=next.

So what do I gain by that: With approximately 3 emails a day to file this way, I save 1095 keypresses per year. With an average life expectation of around 75 and an current age of 29 I save 50370 keypresses in my life. Being able to type with around 200 keypresses per minute I save 4 hour, 11 minutes and 51 seconds.

2 comments

24 April 2008 08:29 - Monday I passed the Introduction to Oracle SQL and PL/SQL exam. So time for a week of rest and then going to work on the exams to become an Oracle Certified Associate.

1 comments

01 January 2008 16:29 - The year 2007 in numbers

• I traveled over 30000 kilometers by car
• I traveled over 2000 kilometers by plane
• I traveled over 70000 kilometers by train
• I ran more than 200 kilometers
• I cycled more than 330 kilometers
• 245 km/h was the highest speed at which I drove a car (note: gps speed)
• I visited 5 foreign countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Denmark)
• I was on my cellphone for more then 32 hours
• I posted 57 messages to usenet
• I typed more than 1045236 characters on IRC
• I did 1070 commits to my private subversion repository
• I celebrated my birthday 1 times
• I went shopping more than 66 times
• I threw away 35 garbage bags
• I completed 118 private projects
• I got 2 speeding tickets for a total amount of 52 euro

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11 November 2007 20:24 - Today Tijmen Ruizendaal released the latest version op typingspeed.pl. It has 2 major improvements. First a fix for a memory leak. The second improvement based on my code is the logging of your typing speed to a file. This allows you to make nice graphs of your typing speed. Read all about these changes and more here.

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31 August 2007 17:58 - This week I switched back from the Apple mail client Mail.app to mutt. I have tried Mail.app for several months. And it does have its good points. However I want to keep and send my email in plaintext format. Unfortunately Mail.app seems to think it has to save my plaintext email in some kind of html format when I put it in the drafts box. So back to mutt.

The only problem this introduces however is that I currently do not have an option on my macbook to read mail in offline mode. So I am currently on a quest for a mailclient which does not have the Mail.app problems and that I can use in combination with mutt. I will probably give thunderbird a try.

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19 June 2007 17:29 - Today I played a little with vim syntax files. So I created a simple one to have some colors in my todo list. Here it is:

syntax clear
syntax case ignore
syntax match jnieuwenPerson / [^:]*: /
syntax match jnieuwenCategory /^[^:]*/
syntax match jnieuwenDate /[0-9]*-[0-9]*-[0-9]*/
hi jnieuwenPerson ctermfg=yellow
hi jnieuwenDate ctermfg=red
hi jnieuwenCategory ctermfg=green

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29 May 2007 17:24 - This weekend I had the problem that I had to check several hosts on a network behind NAT with nagios. One solution would be to add portforwardings on the NAT firewall for each host and use check_nrpe with different port settings from the nagios machine. This is of course a maintenance nightmare.

The solution that I choose was therefor a little different. I installed nrpe server and the nrpe plugins on all hosts. Then a portforwarding to port 5666 of one host (irobot) was added in the firewall. In the nrpe config of irobot I added the checks for irobot and checks for the other hosts by adding lines like these to the nrpe.cfg of irobot:
cammand[vacdepot_fs_root]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H vacdepot -c check_fs_root
In the nrpe.cfg of vacdepot check_fs_root is defined of course.

So I am using nested nrpe calls to get the data I want. The advantage being that I do not have to have a portforwaring for every host I want to monitor behind the NAT firewall.

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