Wens' blog

Just a shed

Wenslauw — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:23:08 +0000

Bit overprocessed, but then I’m still learning this stuff. A shed on Texel.

Do try the sheep if you ever go there.

Ehm, taste them I mean…

Now it’ll take even longer…

Wenslauw — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:24:14 +0000

This week I got a letter stating that my new car won’t be delivered before week 42. Today I read this… Big chance it’ll delay my car even more.

Goodbye to privacy

Wenslauw — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:27:10 +0000

I already had big issues with the US and its disregard for privacy and human rights, but now it seems Europe has sold its soul too. Of course we only got to know this through a leaked internal document… How is democracy working out for you?

Cassette tape light

Wenslauw — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:29:57 +0000

These cassette tape lights look quite cool.

Nagios

Wenslauw — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:44:41 +0000

I’m on call this week and next week (a screw up somewhere) for keeping the web sites of the electricity company I work for running. It means I take my laptop everywhere and they gave me a UMTS card, so I can get online everywhere. I also got another cell phone. On this one I get smses if there’s a system down somewhere.

Nothing happened all week…

I mentioned this at work and people responded that I shouldn’t say it, because the systems were bound to crash now. And they did, or so it seemed. At 23:10 yesterday night a lot of servers couldn’t connect to databases and hosts seemed to be unreachable.

I was on the phone until 3am before I gave up and went to bed. I slept for 7 hours and at 10 in the morning I continued the search. Now at 1:30pm everything is finally back up again. Turns out some guys turned off two databases they shouldn’t have turned off. They were doing maintenance on their systems this weekend. We connect through those databases to them. So if they’re down we still get data. Well, at least everything is back up again.

Nagios is the open source tool that sent me the messages that there’s something wrong. Nagios does periodical checks to see if servers and services are still running. I’ve never played around with such software before, so it was very interesting to see how it works.

Desertlike forest

Wenslauw — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:44:26 +0000

Last night I went out to take some pictures. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t completely suited for landscape pictures. The sky was quite white, which most of the times results in shitty pictures. I haven’t processed all of them yet, but this one seemed ok.

I didn’t expect this desertlike area by the way. I know there are these sandy planes/dunes farther to the east, but I didn’t know they exist so close to my home. Well, nice discovery. Should be nice to see the sun set over there on a warm evening with a cold bottle of Prosecco.

This is where I went, btw.

View Larger Map

The Editors

Wenslauw — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:13:42 +0000

Found this this morning in a newsgroup. Quite nice.

Unsharp mask

Wenslauw — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:14:13 +0000

Sean T. McHugh has an interesting site called Cambridge in Colour. On his site I found an interesting page about unsharpen masks. So much left to learn about photography.

I’m going for a walk in the forest tonight and I’ll bring my camera. If I manage to shoot nice pictures I’ll post some here.

iPhone 3G

Wenslauw — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:03:53 +0000

Damn, that iPhone 3G looks mighty fine. It’s faster, it’s got A-GPS and it’s 3G. The battery life is pretty good also. Also it’ll be available all over the place from July 11th. Pretty good. Price will once again be an issue of course. It’s Apple after all.

Here in the Netherlands the phone will only be available in combination with a T-Mobile subscription. Which totally sucks as T-Mobile’s coverage blows. Anyway, it’ll be hacked soon anyway, so we’ll be able to use it on decent networks.

Arrival of the car

Wenslauw — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:51:25 +0000

I just got an answer to the question to when my new car will arrive… MID NOVEMBER!!!! It’s June now… I have to wait more than 5 months. Ugh… Didn’t it expect it to be this long…