Next week we'll be off to southern France for a couple of weeks of camping. I had a few loose strings/projects to tie up this week, but all in all it looks like I'll be able to enjoy a nice quiet holiday without any emergency calls *knocks on wood*.

We had a wii-partii yesterday evening with friends (aquatix too! Pity he pwn3d me in mario kart :) and although it was a bit busy in our small apartment it was fun enough to do more often imho. This time it was more-or-less to celebrate that I got that second MSc, but it was also nice to get together before everyone goes to the far corners of the world for their vacation.

Earlier this month I updated the Aperte website to suck a bit less, using lessons from "Don't make me think" and "CSS Zen garden". Although I try to keep my projects on the 'web development' side of the design-border, a bit of usability and CSS tricks-of-the-trade go a long way.

On the political side of life, I'm getting more and more annoyed at the state that is the EU. Ignoring the Irish referendum, after denying the French and our second referendums, we're getting a new Constitution shoved down our throats if we like it or not. If you couple that with an EU parliament that openly commits fraud, I see a strong argument for getting out of the EU asap. The right to bear arms is one that (in this case unfortunately) doesn't exist in the Dutch constitution...

I've been seriously neglecting my blog these last few weeks, so while the rest of the Netherlands is gearing up to see 22 over-paid sporters playing rugby with a round ball and without a glimmer of violence, I can give a small update.

Last week I got my second MSc, this time in Computer Science. The ceremony went a lot better than the first time (got a great speech from my supervisor at IBM, thanks Nicky!). I've been learning Blender, and inbetween work for clients I've been working on a few prototypes for my own.

Oh, and I hate the "Awesome" bar in FF 3.0. I finally updated FF2 on my laptop, and the first thing I did was hunt around for a way to disable it. The oldbar firefox plugin/extension/add-on makes it bearable, but only just. How dare Mozilla change something that worked perfectly to begin with.

Today I played around with getting Google's Android to work on my n810 internet tablet. On the android-on-n8xx wiki there is quite an extensive tutorial. Unfortunately, certain parts of it are incorrect and will lead to a non-booting n810. Below you can find the fixed tutorial and links to binary packages with instructions on how to more easily try out android on your nokia tablet. The result: android-on-n810 photo (0.5MB)

Forgot all about posting last tuesday that I'm really getting old (26). Had a nice relaxed day with lots of presents and a dinner at a nice Thai restaurant thanks to the misses. This weekend I'll have a dinner with the family, and we'll have a bbq/party next weekend.
These last few weeks have been rather quiet, compared to other years where you have the end-of-the-year course deadlines. I've been spreading my wings a bit into other areas: doing research into Google/Yahoo APIs, playing around with Arduino (example, 6MB uncompressed mpeg2 warning), working on learning python-ogre (and writing/converting tutorials) and fooling around with the gc-linux wii proof-of-concept (but I'm not much of a kernel hacker). Aperte does R&D too, you know! :)
I also got a load of books via Amazon. "Don't make me think" was on the top of my list thanks to Jure, and I must admit being rather ashamed of my website "designs" even after only reading the first few chapters. Definitely on the required reading list for anyone calling themselves a web developer...
Oh, and yes: I'm getting gray already.

Since I got my Nokia 95 some months ago I had been frustrated at not being able to directly upload my photos to Gallery2 from my phone. So I dove into the LifeBlog / Atom Post protocol to see how it works.

I hacked together a quick example available here, that allows you to post photos directly from your Nokia 95 to your webserver (using the LifeBlog protocol). I probably will only use it in the case of a single photo, as the Nokia photo-browser isn't really handy for uploading multiple photos at once, but someone else might have a use for it or want to integrate it in his/her blog.

I wrote it in PHP5, as one day I might modify the old Gallery2 nokiauploader plugin to be compatible with LifeBlog using this hack, but at the moment I can't be bothered anymore. It works, next!

We were for a few days in Gent (Belgium). Had a nice stay, great weather too.
Right now every self-respecting Debian administrator is busy fixing the FUBAR with OpenSSL. There isn't much official help out yet, but the Debian SSLkeys wiki-page should be enough for most.
I did have one problem however: on one of my servers my ssh host-keys were vulnerable, even after regenerating the keys and purging/reinstalling ssh/openssh-server/openssl. In the end it was due to libssl0.9.8 being a later version than the update in etch (probably from testing), thus it wasn't updated properly even though openssl was. Goes to show that it is worthwhile to stick to stable proper, especially for a production server...