"Ik doe niets illegaals dus heb niets te verbergen". Duizenden mensen zeggen dat. Het mantra van Google's Eric Smidt die stelt dat "... If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." En Eric heeft ongetwijfeld geen geheimen. Doet geen dingen die ik niet mag weten.

Duizenden mensen denken dat dit de waarheid is. Dat als je een Opel hebt, belasting betaald en de hond uit laat dat je niets te vrezen hebt qua privacy van de overheid. Ik kom ze elke week tegen. Maar als ik vraag of ik hun PC even mag lenen om naar plaatjes te zoeken, hun browsergeschiedenis even mag copieren of hun mailarchief even mag doornemen denken ze dat ik gek ben.

Misschien hebben ze gelijk. Over mijn geestelijke gesteldheid. Maar niet over hun "ik doe geen kwaad dus mag de overheid alles met mijn data doen en inzien". Vrijheid is een hoog goed. Digitale vrijheid is op het zelfde niveau als fysieke/mentale vrijheid. Maar digitale vrijheid is veel eenvoudiger te beperken. Zonder dat mensen het weten, techniek is nu eenmaal niet transparant.

Net neutralitiet is nog een non issue in nederland maar dat kan niet meer lang duren. Er zijn in Nederland meer tabs in totaal absoluut aantal dan in geheel Amrika (USA). Er komt een 3 strikes you are out. Waarbij je zonder proces slechts drie keer een verwijt hoeft te hebben gekregen van Brein/Hollywood dat je illegale content download en je levenslang geen internet meer krijgt.

Komt dat er echt? Nee, soep wordt niet zo heet gegeten. Maar als we geen soep willen van de overheid, als we zelf willen weten wat we eten, wie ziet wat we eten en of we het gebruiken voor een foodfight of foodsex, dan doe je er goed aan nu recht op te staan.

(source)
Sta recht op en vraag je politieke partij ook je digitale vrijheid te beschermen. En de mijne. Hoe? Lees Bits of Freedom! Neem contact op met je politieke partij! En steun de campagne!

A DrupalJam is a place where anyone interested in Drupal can get together to discuss about one of the best Open Source CMS-es out there. A friendly palce where users, coders, business people as well as people interested in web technologies. This time the Jam will be helded at the StayOkay hotel in Amsterdam, Timorplein 21. More information about the StayOkay location can be found on Maps as well. We expect over 200 people (up to 300!) visiting the DrupalJam and we will have attendees form over four countries.

It only seemed like yesterday.. The first DrupalJam I co-organised was in a basement with 50 or so people (top left). Not unlike the second DrupalCon, held in Amsterdam (right).

And now, 6 editions later we have reached the scale of the third DrupalCon in Brussels as can be seen on Dries' site. And this is a global trends. While DrupalCons get bigger and bigger, there is also a trend to localise DrupalCon's that are reaching the same scale as DrupalCon's were only a a few editions ago. And with that the global DrupalCon problems get local as wel, continuity, professionalism en sponsors.

I am proud to say -not meant to toot my own horn- that the organisers of the DrupalJam so far did an excellent job. The very healthy ecoshere around Drupal in the Netherlands made that we have the following premium sponsors; Microsoft, Radio Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Dutch Open Projects, Internet Unlimited, KPN, NCRV, OneShoe and Sogeti. Other sponsors include VLC (gold), Lucius, Acquia, Synetic, Wizzlern (silver) and Merge (bronze). Looking at this list there are at least two key things to note. The first one is a classic one, the distribution is skewed to the left meaning we made the premium sponsorship to cheap.

The second one is more important. The ecoshere around Drupal grew and outgrew the standard Drupal implementers. KPN (fortune 500, telephone, mobile, ADSL, high end webhosting), NCRV (public broadcaster using Drupal a lot), Radio Netherlands Worldwide (public broadcaster using Drupal, see Dries' site) and Microsoft are not the "standard" sponsors of an Open Source project. It shows that the market around Drupal is maturing and that parties that have an indirect stake are willing to invest and give back. And we do thank them for that, as well as thank our other sponsors!

Dries once told me he wanted to have local DrupalCamps in every city around the world. We are not there yet. But I do think there is a (bi-)yearly DrupalCamp in every free country around the world right now. And when these will become too big, there will be a DrupaCamp in every major city around the world by 2015 for sure.

Drupal is coming home in 2015, your home! But if you can not wait that long, sign up for the DrupalJam in Amsterdam, look the sessions and propose a session (login required). Please do contact me or Bart Feenstra if you have any questions. DrupalJam will rock!

Ik ben geen UX expert. Maar ik ben wel een gebruiker. Dus ik weet wat een slechte manier van werken is als de omgeving mij een slechte interface geeft. Neem nu bovenstaande. Drie witte borden waar je op kan schrijven. Maar schijnbaar niet allemaal een whiteboard waarop je mag schrijven. Maar welke? De linker en rechter? Of de middelste van rand tot rand?

Dit soort kleine zaken maken we dagelijks mee; deuren die verkeerd open gaan, verpakkingen die niet open gaan zoals je denkt, afstandsbedieningen die onlogisch werken. Het geeft enkel aan dat slechte user interfaces niet beperkt zijn tot computers en computersoftware. En dat de veelgemaakte "oplossing" door software makers en UX experts om terug te vallen op een metafoor uit de echte wereld lang niet altijd goed hoeft te zijn.

In a recent post I joked about willy (this site) former hardware being the oldest server on the net. Well, it turned out that it might have been one of the slowest, but not the oldest. At least, there is actually a C=64 serving webpages with this ethernet board and it can be found on http://www.c64web.com/.

And yes, it seems it is actually running on a C=64:

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ telnet www.c64web.com 80
Trying 58.6.118.18...
Connected to c64web.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: Contiki/2.2.2 http://www.sics.se/contiki/
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html

So do not be surprised when I move this webserver over to my old C=64 running Contiki. :-)

As you might know, I am a big fan of using EyeTV as well as Plex on my mac mini hooked to my telly. Plex is the best mediacentre for the mac, EyeTV a way to view live TV on your Mac with EPG and much more.

Sometime ago I posted about integrating them, watching live or timeshifted TV on your mac within Plex on this post. Though the code is very rough and far from finished and seems to be orphaned already, I would like to suggest a cool feature.

Wath EyeTV in Plex and have Plex look in to the EGP and searches for tweets about the program you are watching, live or timeshifted. I do not watch much TV let alone live TV, but part of the joy of watching TV is seeing what others have to say about this via twitter. And watching this on a TV with live tweets updates about the program you are watching sure sounds something that TV's will have in half a decade.

BTW: follow me on twitter on @bertboerland.

APOSTLES

What's the buzz?
Tell me what's a-happening. (Repeat 8 times)

JESUS

Why should you want to know?
Don't you mind about the future?
Don't you try to think ahead?
Save tomorrow for tomorrow;
Think about today instead.

Google cant make waves anymore like they used to when people were bidding for free gmail accounts. To buzz has not been orkut for a long time.

Will it be a "silo integration", a flop like wave, a Spanish orkut or indeed a hit like gmail? Time will tell.

24, lost, house. Sure good tv. But nothing compared to Dexter. Dexter, By far the best American serie I have ever seen. Consider me a fan.

So when I saw that Dexter (wiki) had a mac with a bloody screensaver and found out it was available for the Mac, I had to get this as well.

On http://www.sho.com/site/dexter/downloads.do you can download the Mac and Windows version. The mac verson is zip with and .app in it. Howerver, double clicking the application does not give you anything.

So if you want to install this screensaver (not that good by the way) on your mac, here is the workaround:

Download,
unzip,
right click on the file (control-click),
go to "show package contents,
go contents>resources>dexter screen saver.saver

This will open system preferences with a dialog box prompting an install. Say yes and the screen saver will show up in the left hand navigation menu in screen savers. Select it and you are good to go.

And in case you want to become the "dark Defender" yourself, learn from this video series.

This leads to an optimized situation, one can swipe through images in Google images and has the least HTML overhead when visiting Google.com. There is however one thing google can do better. Spelling. Okay, there is also one thing I could do better, but that is not my point :-)

If google reads a search string and a user-agent, they could guess if the user/iPhone made a small error on the keyboard and hint to that word, just like the iPhone itself most of the times does.

So when I would search for "Ftupal" Google should see this and even though the word Drupal has only a few characters the same, changes are that I wanted to press the D next to the F and the R next to the T.

Doing this makes Google smarter then the iPhones' OS. And better at spelling and syntax as me are. For sure.

In 2008 top 20 gebruiker in Nederland op Twitter, in 2007, in de top 30. En ook in 2009 was ik in de top25, volgens deze lijst van Jeroen althans. again: kiss my ego, stelletje youpen!

Next weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the devroom was published a week ago on http://groups.drupal.org/fosdem. It features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van
Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

On Friday the giantesque beer event kicks off the conference. For Drupalistas there is a sprint on Saturday in Zaventem.

Please join, I have been to a couple of FOSDEM's and if you ever attended an Oreilly or Gartner con, you are in for a surprise :-)

FOSDEM takes place at ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Jammer dat er niet meer ansichtkaarten vanuit verschillende hoeken zijn. Zouden we streetview van historie kunnen voorzien. Ik zou best eens door het Rotterdam van 1939 willen "lopen". Welicht maakt Google deze optie ooit nog eens in combinatie met sketchup.

I finnaly moved this website from my 15 year old pentium 166 with a load over 20 to some better iron, some decent 3 year old hardware. The new machine had a newer PHP version and my /ancient/ Drupal install was fine with that. However, I was unable to log in. Took me some time to see if this was caching or Cookie related but found it, adding
register_shutdown_function('session_write_close');
to the sessions.inc did the trick

So this website should be more stable now, and faster. I will get a new ADSL line in a couple of week upgrading to 20Mb so should be even faster in some time. With some downtime however, I will get a new IP address as well and need to change my zones when I know what this address will be.

Thank you bas for giving me "havenmeester" (aka tug) 5 years ago. Even at that time dated hardware but served me well. It is just that the fan of the CPU makes an enormous amount of noise now.

shutdown -h now.

We salute you Tug, the oldest webserver on the net :-)

Push never made it. Push is "one point ooooh". Push is radio. Push is TV. Push is not the internet. The Wired article was wrong:

As everything gets wired, media of all kinds are moving to the decentralized matrix known as the Net. While the traditional forms - broadcast, print - show few signs of vanishing, the Net is being invaded by new media species. The Web is one. Yet with each additional node, each new T1 line, the media the Internet can support become richer, more complex, more nuanced. The Net has begun offering things you simply can't browse.

Very wrong. The old media are dieing. The web is not one, but a diversity of nodes, people and information. And even if you do not browse the net anymore (plexapp is a very cool way to see that non browsable traffic is still browsable and without being pushed) the net never became a push medium.

People want to be in control. And control is more then flipping a page, using a "remote control" or changing a radio channel. People want hulu, plex, a real browser, be interactive on facebook, twitter or any other social medium. And this can not be pushed away.

So my law is:
Push companies will never get it.

Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

Sir Berners-Lee -together with Al Gore- the inventor of the web (not Internet)- knows Drupal, his personal website runs Drupal. And he seems to know a bit about the "Semantic Web" as well ...

It is very good to see that the UK government is opening up its' data sources to the public. And for the Drupal community it is a big win to see that they have chosen the same Content Management System / Framework as Obama and many others did.

I really wished all governments would open up their back-end data like this and hope that the Dutch government will focus on Drupal as well. Note that there is a strong movement under the Dutch for this, combined under the "Hack the Government" mantra. See this older nice presentation / screencast I made about this in Dutch.

So great news for the British and great news as well for Drupal!