The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Dealing With cPanel: Setting Up a 301 Redirect to Your Main Domain And Preventing .htaccess Hell

2010-07-28T12:34:37Z

cPanel is surprisingly ill-suited for managing domains. Rather than treating each domain as a separate entity, you get one main domain and various so-called add-on domains. The most annoying aspect of this is that it always creates a subdomain when you add a new add-on domain. There should be no such thing as an add-on domain, just a bunch of domains. cPanel has some features that help you work around these defects, but I wasn’t too thrilled with those. It now seems to automatically redirect the www-subdomain to your no-www domain and you can easily set up subdomains to redirect through the interface, but it doesn’t satisfy me.

Setting Up a 301 Redirect

Instead of having to bother with a plethora of settings in cPanel itself, I came up with the following to stick at the top of .htaccess. A quick look around on the Internet brought up Fayaz Miraz’s blog, but while the solution suggestion was close, it misses one crucial aspect: it only redirects from the main page as far as I can tell. This is fixed easily by the addition of $1 (i.e. everything that was added after the main page).

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^fransdejonge\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://fransdejonge.com/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Simply put, it matches all possible routes of approach (whether through www or through a subdomain of another domain) and if it’s not fransdejonge.com, it will 301 redirect to fransdejonge.com. The L means no further rewriting will occur after that rule. Mostly because it would just be inefficient, and partially because something else further down the line might mess things up.

Preventing .htaccess Hell

Another problem is that cPanel automatically creates a /public_html/addondomain directory. This is bad, because /public_html already contains a .htaccess file for the main domain. When accessing /public_html/addondomain, it would first parse the .htaccess file in /public_html before moving on and overriding it in /public_html/addondomain, and that’s assuming none of the rules in /public_html make anything go awry!

To prevent this kind of nightmare from occurring I took the simple precaution of creating a new directory /domains. This domain is contained in /domains/fransdejonge.com, for instance, and any other add-on or subdomains can reside in their own /domains/domain.com directory to prevent any added load from needlessly parsing .htaccess files.

New URI

2010-07-21T14:46:49Z

After nearly five years of being hosted at a subdomain of Lowter, this blog is now hosted on my own server. I would like to extend my gratitude to Ethan for hosting me all those years.

Feminism and Atheism

2010-07-04T14:54:59Z

It’s amazing how often I see the same information posted on both the feminist and atheist blogs I follow. Religion is not good to women.

On a very related note, I would highly recommend anyone to read Infidel, the autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. These issues all come down to treating people equally and fairly regardless of sexuality, gender, race, religion or any other reason, but religion is often in direct opposition with those values. For illustration I’ll quote the devil of whom I just spoke:

Feminists need to be wary of the celebration of “cultural diversity” unless they want to inadvertently celebrate polygamy, child-marriage, marital rape, honor killings, wife beating, selective abortion of female fetuses and other traditions that are now legitimized in the name of culture.

To end this quick post I’ll link to some of my favorite atheist blogs.

Pharyngula, no doubt well-known to many. The amount of time he spends debunking quacks is to be admired – or to be pitied. Regardless, his blog is intelligent and provocative and an excellent source of rationality.
Friendly Atheist isn’t as entertaining as Pharyngula, but heck, not everything can be.
Heaving Dead Cats also hails from the US and telltales of living in a society that sounds like the 1950s to my Dutch ears.

I’ll end this post with Bill & Ted’s idiom, aka the Golden Rule: be excellent to each other.

Pancake Visions

2010-06-08T08:08:53Z

Some of you may be aware that I often imagine things in random shapes that other people have trouble envisioning, sometimes even after I draw them out. On June 3rd my wife and I baked tiny pancakes, and here’s what I saw in two of them.

The first pancake that managed to attract my attention was an evil cat.

This pancake also happened to be on the plate while taking a picture of the evil cat one, so I figured I’d demonstrate that I do indeed see something in just about anything.

Note, these are animated SVG images. At the time of writing they only render correctly in Opera and Webkit browsers, whereas Gecko displays a static image. Internet Explorer is served with fallback PNGs.

What Do Dinosaurs Eat for Breakfast?

2010-06-01T19:50:41Z

It was a nice day in spring, almost 20 years ago. There was a dinosaur exhibition traveling around the world and for a couple of months it was closer to home, somewhere in the Netherlands. I don’t remember the name, the location or all that much about the exhibition at all. I do have some distinct memories of the fossilized bones of an apatosaurus (which my spell checker wishes to “correct” to brontosaurus), but I’m not quite sure if that was at the same exhibition. To cut the reminiscing about which bones belong to which exhibition short, however, let me continue with the story.

We got out of the car and walked to the entrance of the location hosting the dinosaur exhibition. The large banners showing pictures of artist’s impressions of dinosaurs and pictures of dinosaur skeletons already excited me, so I probably jumped around and said something like “Mom! Dad! Look, pictures of dinosaurs!” The ticket office was as boring as ticket offices patently are, but this didn’t dim my enthusiasm. As I struggled not to embarrass my parents by screaming loudly and enthusiastically about the dinosaur treasures awaiting us, my father finished buying our tickets. I probably still gained free entrance to most museums, exhibitions and the like in those days.

As we entered the exhibition, we didn’t immediately hit on all the bony goodness of fossils. It was merely a fairly boring main hall from which you could go in several directions to actually enjoy skeletal delight. However, there was a fake life-like tyrannosaurus rex at the other end of the hall. Although we’d come there to enjoy vertebrate fossils, I was quite willing to give reconstructions a chance, and besides it was the most real thing we’d seen so far. I asked my mother if I could enjoy the anonymous’ artist’s work, got permission, and sprinted toward the t-rex to gaze at the marvels of reconstruction in what was supposed to be some kind of natural (plastic) environment.

The first thing I noticed, while still running toward it, was that the skin looked surprisingly much like real lizards. I had expected it to look more plasticly, perhaps more similar to my own toy dinosaurs. I slowed down somewhat because the t-rex was starting to tower over me. I doubt it was any more than 1/5th the size of a real t-rex, but I was quite small myself. But before I had slowed down enough to stop the t-rex turned its head toward me. I froze. I thought a thousand things at once in the following less than half a second. Weren’t dinosaurs extinct? But this one looked awful realistic; that would explain a lot. The WNF was always talking about animals that could go extinct, is this – as it lowered its upper body toward me my mind entered a blank. Fight or flight kicked in. You want to fight? I’m here to save your ass from extinction, pal, so you better beha- the t-rex opened its mouth and roared. I doubt I ever ran as fast as I did right then and there. As I sought cover behind my parents the t-rex stopped roaring. “Mommy, daddy, that t-rex-” I said while I pointed at it with a shaking finger. My parents laughed, and both took one of my hands. My mother pointed out that the t-rex hadn’t come after me, and it had stopped moving or making any noise.

I wasn’t as eager to visit the exhibition anymore. That creepy dinosaur was guarding the entrance hall. However, my curiosity got the best of me, so it didn’t take my parents long to convince me to look at the mechanical dinosaur some more. After I carefully positioned myself behind my parents, we walked toward the theropod. When we were close enough, the t-rex repeated his earlier shenanigans in the exact same manner, a clear sign of a machine; unless by some fluke this were an autistic carnivore. After realizing that it was motion-triggered and only had a limited range of motion, I silently gawked at the awesomeness of the creators of the realistic t-rex.

What Is a Malamanteau?

2010-05-29T12:22:35Z

The following article appeared on Wikipedia for a very short time due to a recent xkcd comic. It’s a reference back to Language Log, which references xkcd sometimes, but the reverse seldom happens.

A malamanteau (plural malamanteaux) is a neologism for a portmanteau created by incorrectly combining a malapropism with a neologism. It is itself a portmanteau of malapropism and portmanteau. In a less strict definition, a portmanteau of a malapropism with another word can also be considered a malamanteau. The contained malapropism must be typically a very common one, probably most people are not aware of, in order to be able to regain the meaning of a malamanteau.

A malamanteau often is created when somebody tries to use a neologism (alternatively, an idiom) but mistakenly confuses a word with another one. However, unlike a malapropism or an eggcorn, the fumbled word is not completely replaced, but merely transfixed to the new one. A famous example is: “misunderestimate” which was popularized by the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. Probably it was intended to be “underestimate” but mistakenly jumbled with “misunderstand.”

Examples

Somebody describes his misunderstanding of what someone was saying by stating, “I misconscrewed it up.”

Somenone explains his inability to talk while being upset by saying he was “flustrated.”

A meaningful malamanteau is “ambiviolent,” as in: “Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill was ambiviolent. She didn’t know who to kill first.”

I was going to write more about it when I made this draft, but by now it’s two weeks later and I’ve lost interest. Booyah.

Intelligent Alien Life Does Exist, Otherwise They Would Have Contacted Us

2010-05-18T19:30:03Z

This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Saturday 2005-02-26 at 18:08:45. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

This is the only signature I had which really liked. [I guess I must really, really like it, for I still use it.] It looks like a quote from someone famous at first sight [(of course famous by no means implies not stupid)], or just a good old expression (you know, like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”), but it is entirely a product of my brain. [Whoopee.] I don’t find that so very surprising all by itself; in what may be a form of narcissism, I say things I consider quotable quite often. [Saying quotable things sure is narcissistic. What's that? You meant I consider things I say quotable quite often, did you? Very well then, carry on. On a very related matter, I'm not so sure if stupid jokes like You've got the first pickle (when offering a few pickles) as a play on first pick is all that quotable, though.] But still, this particular “quote of my mind” has a sort of uniqueness over it. [Oh boy. If that means it's the magnum opus of my brain, I'm fucked.]

You should also know something about my browsing behavior to understand a bit about what happened when the quote came to me. I seldom browse with less than four pages open. [Even at the time that was a lie and you know it. I bet you rarely managed to browse with less than 10.] I basically just open what I find interesting and then read what I have opened one by one, or close it quickly if I see it is not what I expected it to be. [Most people, on the other hand, close pages they don't want to see as slowly as possible.] I also start writing a reply to something, to interrupt it by going to some other page, after which I will continue writing the reply. [You were also doing that while writing this post, weren't you?]

The situation where the general idea came into my mind was like this. I was filling in profile information on some site (I don’t remember which one, but it doesn’t matter) and I came to the signature part. I could use the quote which I made up with my Chicken avatar (“The chicken and the egg came at the same time”), but I wanted something new. [I'm sure that everybody knows what your Chicken avatar looks like.] Something catchy. So I decided to go to another site. Meanwhile, I could think about my signature.

It was quite a strange site I visited. A UFO related site, where they argued that UFOs actually were some kind of new technology from the Third Reich, whose descendants still resided on Antarctica. Utter nonsense and therefore enjoyable. [The perfect way to judge whether something is enjoyable.] But then suddenly this thought came into my mind, because of the combination between World War II and UFOs. [Suddenly, I wanted to kill myself.] Why haven’t aliens contacted us? If they’ve observed us they must have noticed the bloodbaths of Alexander, the expansion and fall of the Roman empire, the Conquistadors, Napoleon, and most important, World War II. So yes, obviously alien life is intelligent; if they weren’t, they would have contacted us. Intelligent alien life does exist, otherwise they would have contacted us. [Amazing!]

And there it was. The perfect signature. I had exactly the kind of bad quote I wanted my signature to be. I still like it. [I guess I can live with it for a while longer. Perhaps I should update it. Space dinosaurs do exist, otherwise they would not be extinct on earth.]

Opera and Link Targets

2010-05-09T12:20:49Z

If you’re like me and you aren’t particularly fond of sites opening in new tabs without your explicit command, you might be interested in activating Opera’s Ignore Target setting. This setting “Unfortunately … also disables the window.open() method, breaking the functionality of many sites,” so you might prefer to utilize JKing’s UserJS which stops most links from opening in new windows.

On the other hand, you might prefer all links to external sites to open in a new tab. I recently wrote a script that does just that for someone on the MyOpera forum.

Hewlett Packard Breaks Wheaton's Law

2010-05-03T16:49:46Z

The title of this post probably isn’t a shocker, assuming you know that Wheaton’s Law is “don’t be a dick.” Wil Wheaton is a pretty awesome ~~guy~~geek. His blog and his podcasts are well worth listening to. What is shocking to me, however, is the fact that HP region encodes their printers and ink cartridges. That’s right, just like the annoying mechanisms that apply to DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, video games and whatever else might be region-encoded, ink cartridges are region encoded as well.

We discovered this issue a couple of weeks ago when my wife’s printer ran out of ink. She’s got an HP PSC 2355 All-in-One Printer, which, while not super expensive, she certainly wasn’t going to leave in the US. At Saturn (where ink is slightly cheaper than at Mediamarkt even though they’re owned by the same corporation) she selected some ink cartridges and we thought that would be the end of the ink shortage. The ink cartridges had the exact printer model in the list of compatible printers on the package, but after inserting the cartridges in the printer it displayed the joyful message that an “Incorrect Print Cartridge” had been inserted.

It’s especially lovely how all of the official HP support pages claim that something has probably inexplicably gone awry with the cartridge itself and, summarized, that it really couldn’t have anything to do with the printer. While keeping the possibility in mind, we didn’t consider this scenario very likely, however.

Alternative search results seemed to point to some obscure error and upon running the patch for this error, the patching software said there was nothing to patch. That was a waste of time and effort.

Somehow that wasted effort did make me realize that perhaps I should try a broader Internet search while including things like “US to Europe” in the search string. This quickly yielded plenty of results. One commenter said that “after 3 phone calls and 4 emails” he “learned that all HP printers sold after 2004 are regionalised.”

So my wife went on the HP support chat and after 45 minutes to 1 hour of exchanging all kinds of codes and diving into hidden configuration screens (something rather silly that reminds more of an easter egg than of a serious feature) the region of the printer was changed. It’s now working properly in Europe. Beware, however, if you’re a business person staying in various continents who wants to take their printer along. Aside from the considerable effort involved, there are only 2 region changes left now.

Whenever my current Epson printer or my wife’s HP printer is ready for replacement I will most certainly try to buy one that doesn’t have such ridiculous anti-features. Therefore I was trying to find out if other printer manufacturers also region-encode their ink cartridges; I couldn’t find anything (though I didn’t search for very long), but I did run into this gem, as a reply to someone asking whether their American Epson printer would work in Japan.

I’ve never heard of region coding for ink cartridges.

Such sweet, blissful innocence.

While HP was already on my avoid list due to their abhorrent tech support regarding the lousy computer they sold to my parents. It turned out that the SATA controller to which the HDD was connected had somehow become defective. Figuring this out took me about 5 minutes; they took several weeks and they still couldn’t find anything wrong with it. But the story behind that is worthy of a separate blog post. Suffice it to say that I will not be buying any computers, printers, scanners or anything else from HP anymore. Lousy support is one thing, but if I wanted to have acts of coitus performed on me if I happen to move outside of some so-called region I’d rather pay money to a hooker.

P.S. By the way, Microsoft, this is why I use Ubuntu now instead of software that does all kinds of ridiculous things that I don’t want it to do. This has already been extensively covered by other people, so I certainly won’t waste my time doing any such thing.

Fun With American Airlines and British Airways

2010-04-28T19:15:40Z

Unlike my last post about airlines, this one’s about luggage.

I was going back from the US to Amsterdam, transferring at Heathrow. Customs & security in England took so long that by the time I got anywhere near the A-gates they’d already started boarding, so I hurried to the gate and got on board of the plane as one of the last people. Only later did I discover that Heathrow is the absolute craziest airport in the world that should take a very, very good look at how they do things in a proper airport like O’Hare or Schiphol. They don’t even seem to know anything about their gates until 30 minutes or so before it’s scheduled to leave! Anyway, pretty much as soon as I was in the plane the pilot said something like “it looks like everyone’s on board already, so we’re taking off 30 minutes early, woo!” I remember thinking something like “good thing my luggage didn’t have to go through 1 hour customs & security.”

We landed in Amsterdam, I got off the plane and I waited at the luggage belt, but my baggage never showed up. As I was looking around to figure out where to go to fix this problem, this guy working there came up to me in his cart and was like “can I help you?” So I said, “I just got here with British Airways flight BA217 [or something along those lines anyway]” and he said “that’s the one from London?” and I said “yeah, does it make a difference?” He said “no, actually it doesn’t. Anyway, you have to go to that office right there” while pointing at this place with a huge line in front of it.

I went to that office and waited for 30 freaking minutes until it was finally my turn. Then it turned out that this was the KLM & partners lost luggage claim thing, and the BA lost luggage office was on the other side! I wasn’t the only one misled by the bloke driving around on his cart and like 5 people who had been waiting behind me followed me to the other office where of course all the time no one had been to at all. Turned out my suitcase was still in London and it was scheduled to come toward Amsterdam in about 30 minutes on the next flight. Gee, thanks.

I scheduled a delivery for the next day between 9 and 12. That was all very decent, except for the fact that they actually came at 14. When I called them at 12:30 they said “oh, it’s normal that they might run a little late.” Sigh.

Fries Red White

2010-04-21T14:02:47Z

I’ve been reading a lot of notalwaysright.com over the past few days. It reminded me of the following experience I had while working at a fast food restaurant when I was 17 years old. The conversation took place in German.

Me: How can I serve you?
Customer: I’ll have fries red white.
Me: Do you mean mayonnaise and ketchup, madam?
Customer: No, I mean those red and white condiments that people always have with fries. This looks sarcastic on paper, but trust me: it wasn’t.
Me: I’m sorry, we don’t have any white condiments other than mayonnaise. Could I get you mayonnaise and curry sauce, perhaps?
Customer: No, not mayonnaise and whatever else you said! Fries red white!

I figured I’d just take a gamble and I gave her fries with mayonnaise and ketchup.

Customer: There, was that so hard?

For the record, no other German customer has ever ordered their fries red, white or in any other color; all other Germans ordered fries with a condiment, such as mayonnaise or ketchup.

Fun With American Customs & Airlines: Special Thanks to KLM.com

2010-04-12T10:01:34Z

A few years ago I booked a flight to America and I got a confirmation e-mail listing the details of the flight. Because it was my first time with an e-ticket, I assumed that was all that I needed. I don’t mean the type of e-ticket you print yourself but the airlines call it e-tickets anyway. Turns out I was supposed to have received another e-mail and that the reservation number I got wasn’t an actual e-ticket number. It was apparently a problem with KLM’s system. Even though I paid with iDeal, it hadn’t properly registered it. The woman working for KLM at the check-in desk quickly made a few calls, found out the problem was known, and within 5 minutes she’d gotten me a boarding pass to Detroit. She told me that they were working on getting my connecting flight in order.

At the other side of the ocean, about 8 to 10 hours later, things were less nice. Customs was making a fuss about my lack of a connecting flight ticket. Gee, if you want people to have all their tickets fixed up at customs, how about you stick those airline desks before you have to pass through customs, or otherwise shut your stupid pie-hole about it. I was in luck: I could see the airline desks from customs, so I could point at the NWA desk and be like “well, if you want all ticket issues to be resolved you should put those desks before this checkpoint. I need to go to the NWA one over there.” He grudgingly admitted that my logic was flawless, added a stamp to my passport and stapled this green immigration paper in a way that made it stick out annoyingly. That crooked stapling became a recurring theme during all of my subsequent visits to the US except one.

So then I went to the NWA desk. I told the woman that KLM had messed something up with my reservation and that they should’ve fixed it by now. KLM told me they’d probably fix it in about 1-2 hours, so that presumably would’ve been before the plane even left Amsterdam. She then asked if she could see the boarding pass I’d gotten in Amsterdam and said “you were late, weren’t you?” I said something like “um no, I just told you, KLM messed something up with my reservation because something went wrong with this payment system where my money was transferred but the system didn’t register this correctly.” She replied, “so you were late.” I tried one or two times to explain the situation again, but I met a blank stare and a repetition of the notion that I must’ve been late. I ended up saying something like “sure… could you get me my ticket for the connecting flight please?”

Her NWA computer didn’t have me in it with my KLM e-ticket number (that the KLM woman gave me), so she had to phone a colleague who did have access to KLM’s booking system. Consequently she could type in some code on the NWA computer which finally resulted in my ticket. I still don’t know why she couldn’t have just typed my name, but oh well.

Perhaps to compensate for all of the trouble, the connecting flight to Chicago was executed in the most comfortable plane I’ve ever been in. The seats were wide, there was plenty of leg space. I can tell you that I would’ve preferred the preceding 8 hour flight in that plane.

Acceptable Advertisements

2010-03-31T12:52:06Z

I agree with everything that Faruk Ateş wrote about ad blockers and flash blockers, but I would like to add one more point, with which I presume he will agree; I think it’s implied by his writing by referring to certain advertisements as being beautiful and fitting with the content, but never explicified. My point is simple: the advertisements have to be compatible with the type of media I’m viewing.

I don’t block Flash as it typically crashes separately from Opera on Linux, nor does it seem to slow things down for me. I don’t typically block ads, either — though it is really annoying if one ad is making the entire page load slowly. However, I will generally close a page while it’s loading if I am annoyed by the ads. When do ads annoy me? Simple: when they do not fit the type of content I’m looking at. If I want to read some text, I’m fine with static textual or image-based ads. I don’t want animation, although I suppose it’s possible to change ads now and then without it being too obtrusive. Anything that utilizes Flash typically breaks these rules and comes with distracting animation. Worse, it often even comes with sound. It doesn’t really matter what I’m doing; as long as I’ve got my sound system turned on I don’t want any sound to come from my speakers that I did not explicitly ask for.

Now if I’m going to watch a video, like on Uitzendinggemist, then I’m perfectly fine with a video-based advertisement with audio. Uitzendinggemist literally means “missed broadcast.” It’s an online archive of most of Dutch public television broadcasts. After all, I’m requesting video with sound. A 10-15 second advertisement prior to actually viewing the particular video I requested is perfectly acceptable. Similarly, I welcome short audio clips or endorsements in podcasts if they help pay for the podcast. But don’t start playing such messages at random. Although I don’t frequently use Firefox for regular browsing, my favorite extension is StopAutoPlay. This isn’t just about ads of course and applies just as much to people who decide to stick background music on their site, or to start playing videos automatically (I’m looking at you, YouTube), though if I opened a video somewhere it’s usually not too hard to figure out where the noise is coming from.

What could be an acceptable form of a video-based advertisement on a non-moving Internet page would be something akin to YouTube embedded videos. These don’t autoplay, but you have to click the play button first.

Everything I said applies just as much to things that aren’t advertisements, but too many advertisements seem to be made as annoyingly as possible on purpose. I hope that nobody has ever gained any business from such advertisements. They sure haven’t from me.

Tubes Beats Yahoo Pipes: Feed Fixup

2010-03-21T13:01:51Z

Although it has only been a couple of weeks since I started work on Tubes, the mechanism I put in place to output feeds is already serving me very well. So well that it’s approaching all of my personal needs. This may potentially be bad for other people, but it’s great for me. Besides, I put the code out there; it should be easy enough to fork it if you wish it to do more! Bitbucket is also said to make it easy to merge such changes in later. I should also point out that the large majority of the work was of course done by the people who made SimplePie.

Anyway, I wanted to subscribe to the UN News podcast. To my surprise, gPodder was incapable of handling it. No surprise, as it turns out, because it’s not even proper according to the iTunes enclosure specification (although I imagine it works in iTunes). SimplePie had a nice get_enclosure() function already, so the first step, adding a proper enclosure to my Tube’s output feed, was a matter of minutes. The UN also fails to specify any size information, however, which I can’t say I was too enthused about in my trusty gPodder interface. Another 10 minutes or so later, I finished adding some cURL magic to my application. I should probably stash it away into a class later and see if I can somehow make it utilize SimplePie’s cache system to minimize useless traffic, but for now I just stuck it straight in the feed generation code. Now the UN feed is transformed from something gPodder couldn’t handle into something that essentially fixes all the UN did wrong. Thank you SimplePie for providing this great foundation!

Before (RSS):

<item>
  <title>UN Daily News 12 March 2010</title>
  <itunes:author>United Nations Radio</itunes:author>
  <itunes:subtitle>News and features from United Nations Radio.</itunes:subtitle>
  <itunes:summary></itunes:summary>
  <enclosure url="http://downloads.unmultimedia.org/radio/en/ltd/mp3/2010/10031200.mp3" length="" type="audio/mpeg" />
  <guid>http://downloads.unmultimedia.org/radio/en/ltd/mp3/2010/10031200.mp3</guid>
  <pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:42:32 EST</pubDate>
  <itunes:duration>0:00</itunes:duration>
</item>

After (Atom):

<entry>
  <author>
   <name>United Nations Radio</name>
  </author>
  <title>UN Daily News 12 March 2010</title>
  <summary> </summary>
  <published>2010-03-12T11:42:32-05:00</published>
  <updated>2010-03-12T11:42:32-05:00</updated>
  <id>http://downloads.unmultimedia.org/radio/en/ltd/mp3/2010/10031200.mp3</id>
  <link rel="enclosure" type="audio/mpeg" href="http://downloads.unmultimedia.org/radio/en/ltd/mp3/2010/10031200.mp3" length="6720384" />
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://downloads.unmultimedia.org/radio/en/ltd/mp3/2010/10031200.mp3"/>
</entry>

I realize the alternate link currently has the wrong type attribute, which I’ll look into fixing, but at least my gPodder can handle the feed now.

I also set up a little demo so you can check the difference with the original feed for yourselves. I’d be curious to hear how different podcatchers handle both feeds.

A Morass of Rules and Regulations: Dutch Immigration Policy

2010-03-17T12:42:22Z

Nearly a month ago, the Dutch cabinet fell. Because of this, national elections will be held on June 9, 2010. Dutch immigration policy plays an important role in these elections, though there is no real debate on the matter. The immigration debate (or lack thereof) is controlled almost exclusively by Geert Wilders and his PVV.

A couple of days ago, ppk published his party profile of the PVV. One commenter remarked, “On immigration, the CDA/ VVD ideas a couple of Cabinets ago were novel and more creative compared to the rest of Western Europe.” If you’re interested in Dutch politics or simply wish to learn more about it, I can strongly recommend ppk’s political site. This pushed my buttons and I replied that I prefer to call it “illegal fascist xenophobic nonsense.” I don’t think fascist was the right adjective, but other than that I stand by my statement. However, especially the xenophobic part of my opinion regarding Dutch immigration policies embodies much more than merely language and cultural tests, and the income requirement. This post will list what I consider most important regarding Dutch immigration policy, how I think the implementation is horrible even if you do agree with the basic principle behind all of the rules, and to a lesser extent how I also think the principle behind some of the rules is improper.

How Hard Is It to Live With a Foreign Partner in the Netherlands?

The following list has examples ranging from easiest to hardest.

EU citizens with a foreign spouse (nationality spouse is irrelevant). Example: a Romanian with a Mexican spouse.
Highly-educated workers with a foreign spouse (nationality spouse is irrelevant). Example: an Indian ICT specialist with a Nigerian spouse.
Turks with a foreign spouse (nationality spouse is irrelevant). Example: a Turkish citizen with a Turkish spouse.
Non-EU citizens with a permit to live in the Netherlands with their foreign spouse. Example: a Moroccan living in the Netherlands with their Moroccan spouse.
Dutch people with a foreign Western spouse. Example: a Dutch citizen with an American spouse.
Dutch people with a foreign non-Western spouse. Example: a Dutch citizen with a Mexican spouse.

This list and the examples were taken almost directly from the Stichting Buitenlandse Partner (Foreign Partner Foundation) forums, but I didn’t feel right about the gender bias in the original (each example was a man wishing to live together with a woman), so I reworded it a little in my translation.

Conclusions Based On This List

Dutch people have less rights in their own country than EU citizens from any other country. I see no reason why things should be any different for Dutch citizens than for EU citizens.

Hurdles

Income

If you want to live together with a foreign partner you will have to make approximately €1,700 a month through a permanent employment contract (which I believe has to be for at least a year but don’t take my word for it). There are several issues with this:

This income requirement is rather high to say the least. Assuming that this is meant to cover monthly expenses, let me run down our monthly expenses on a monthly basis:
- Rent (including water): €550/month
- Gas (as in heating and cooking, not gasoline), electricity, Internet & public transport: €100/month
- Food: €250/month
- Insurance: roughly €1,800/year altogether, so €150/month
- Money required for potential unexpected things, such as the washing machine breaking down: €100 (perhaps a little higher than necessary, but I would definitely not like to be short on money if something comes up)
- Total: €1,150/month

This is a little lower than minimum wage, but not too much. Also note that we have a relatively low rent (at least for the amount of space we have available), and that this is for two people, so per person we have to come up with €600/month to be able to get around. For some foreigners (especially non-Western) this might not be very easy, placing the burden of coming up with sufficient money solely on the Dutch citizen. Roughly speaking the equivalent of minimum wage should be sufficient for this, however.

I emphasized equivalent because all of this only applies with a steady employment contract and lowering the income requirement would not fix this. A freelancer making equivalent or more money will not qualify. Someone with a fair amount of money in a savings account will not qualify regardless of whether they have the equivalent of the income requirement/month for a year or more on their savings account. To me it seems a safer bet to allow someone with €30,000 savings to live together with a foreign partner than someone who’s making €1,700/month but barely has any savings.

The main problem with this situation, regardless of whether you think €1,700/month is a fair minimum income requirement or not, is that it is only possible to qualify if you’re employed in a certain way. Your savings don’t count, your freelance income doesn’t count, nor can anybody vouch responsibility for your expenses if you’re not able to make ends meet. Especially the fact that savings hold no value whatsoever seems wrong to me on so many levels. Additionally, I think the partner’s savings should also be taken into account. If the Dutch citizen’s savings were taken into account without doing the same for the foreign partner’s savings, I imagine a workaround would be for the foreign partner to transfer the money to the Dutch partner’s account, but exchange courses and the like might make that a very costly endeavor if that were a necessity.

Cultural test

Potentially an interesting idea. As I said on ppk’s blog, “The message that we think gays and nudity are awesome and that you should perhaps reconsider [whether you want to live in the Netherlands] if you don’t like such things is perhaps a good one, but as far as I understand it, [the cultural test is] mostly a waste of time and money.” To expand on that, there are many questions in there that would be, broadly speaking, answered differently by people from different parts of the country and among different age groups. There is such a thing as Dutch culture, but it’s certainly not uniform enough to say that in situation X, you should always do Y. Worse, the “correct” answers to questions regarding the House of Orange-Nassau and Dutch colonialism have to be answered positively. Why are these in there at all? I couldn’t find the example test at the moment, but I looked at it a few years ago in NRC Handelsblad and on a site they linked to and I thought they were old-fashioned to say the least. Eric Krebbers describes my thoughts on the matter quite well. If you throw it in Google Translate you’ll get a reasonable idea of the kind of questions asked. Apparently one of the questions even assumes that immigrants will be appalled if they see gays kissing openly. I don’t recall seeing that question, but it’s certainly in line with what I do remember. One last thing: taking this test costs €350.

Residency Permit Request

If the foreigner passes the test, the residency permit can be requested. This costs €800. For this money, they’ll easily take much longer than half a year and then they might still reject you. This isn’t necessarily a hurdle, but it seems almost a complete waste of money on the part of the requester. How can they do this in other European countries for not even a tenth of this amount?

Driver’s License

Virtually no non-EU driver’s licenses are accepted in the Netherlands. An international driver’s license is accepted, of course, but after a year or so you’ll have to get a Dutch driver’s license. Now I can imagine that a non-Western license could be rejected on the basis that it’s not worth much, but I’d like to hear the reasoning regarding Western nations for sure. Anyway, rather than just getting a license (which is €50) you’ll thus have to take the required tests. That’s €25 for theory and €250 for the exam. Since you’ll have to know just what they’re looking for during the exam I imagine you’d have to take at least a few lessons, at about €40/hour. €400-500 would thus be my lowest estimate for this.

Total Costs

A simple addition of €350 and €800 totals at €1,150. Adding the costs of a driver’s license ups that to €1,500. In most or all other EU countries the same can be achieved for €100 or less. This is more than 10 times as costly and the IND (immigration and naturalization service) is also slower than most of its counterparts across the EU.

Legality

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Article 16 of the UDHR reads:

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family (emphasis mine). They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State (emphasis mine).

Probably more important to us EU citizens, the text of the UDHR is also implemented in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Specifically, article 9.

Article 9. Right to marry and right to found a family

The right to marry and the right to found a family shall be guaranteed in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of these rights.

I am not a lawyer, but while Dutch immigration policy might potentially not be inconsistent with the letter of the law (one might argue that these rights are not obstructed because we can live together in any other EU country and America – I don’t know how valid such reasoning would be legally), it most certainly is not in accordance with the spirit of the law.

Conclusion

The current Dutch immigration policy is not implemented in a way that suits a modern, free-thinking democracy. Dutch citizens’ human rights are infringed and the financial burden related to merely requesting a residence permit for those wishing to live together in the Netherlands is over 10 times more than in other European country. Changes are necessary indeed, but not in the direction Wilders suggests.

Microsoft and Video on The Web

2010-03-16T20:47:29Z

Opera employee Haavard posted an open letter to Microsoft regarding video on the web. I’m just going to quote the last and best part.

I know you are a patent licensor in the MPEG LA, and this would actually make your actions even more powerful and meaningful. You could show just how serious you are about interoperability on the Web by supporting the free and open codec rather than the one that would best suit your short-term interests.

This is a unique opportunity for you to win back the hearts and minds of people who might have otherwise dismissed you as carrying on with “business as usual”.

Are you up for it?

Lighttpd and PHP on Ubuntu

2010-03-12T11:51:11Z

I prefer Lighttpd over Apache on my personal computers because of its phenomenal speed and reduced memory usage. It’s surprisingly easy to get Lighttpd and PHP running on Ubuntu. For an extensive guide, including how to enable MySQL, Ubuntu Geek is the place to be.

This entry only deals with the basics of getting Lighttpd up and running with PHP. To get started, use:

sudo apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi

Then run lighty-enable-mod and enter fastcgi.

Then you can edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. Stick the following at the end:

fastcgi.server = ( “.php” => ((
“bin-path” => “/usr/bin/php5-cgi”,
“socket” => “/tmp/php.socket”
)))

Recommended: sudo apt-get install php5-curl php5-tidy to be able to run Tubes with all functionality, and of course any other modules you might like. There’s nothing to it; you don’t even have to edit php.ini.

When you’re done customizing things to your liking, use sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart to see the changes.

The Way Alternative Text Should Be Rendered

2010-03-05T09:12:40Z

Vlad Alexander describes how browsers mess up horribly on alternative text. I noticed the deficiencies in Opera and Firefox before, but what Webkit does is simply ridiculous. I don’t entirely agree with him since I don’t think that the alternative content should display without any indication that it’s alternative text whatsoever. I consider Opera’s behavior best in this regard (as opposed to the obtrusive icons most other browsers throw in there), except for the part where it applies width and height meant for images to the text thus cutting them off.

Opera 10.50

2010-03-03T12:30:01Z

For those of you who read my blog, use Opera and don’t follow the latest releases, Opera 10.50 for Windows was released yesterday. Download it now!

What Is Philosophy?

2010-03-01T10:29:17Z

I wrote this summary for a university course, but I never finished it.

The History of Philosophy

The history of Western philosophy starts in Greece—Miletus, more precisely, situated in modern-day western Turkey—, around the beginning of the sixth century BCE. According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletos was the first to develop a way of thinking that deserves the name philosophy, around 585 BCE.
The first philosophers were possibly aware of the novelty of their enterprise; at any rate, they made up a new term for it, historia, which means as much as “research.”
The verb philosophein is not found until the second half of the fifth century BCE. This verb and the substantive philosophia do not become commonplace until the first half of the fourth century BCE. Literally, it means “love/desire to/strive to” (phileô) “knowledge” (sophia).
Philosophia did originally not only specify a specific way thinking: originally philosophizing as an intellectual activity was intrinsically connected to a certain way of life. Something of this ancient concept is still present in our modern language: someone who sees things “philosophically” might possess the spiritual calmness the philosophers of Antiquity had in mind.

This intrinsic connection no longer exists, but some particular terms have maintained this connotation to the present day. Kantian, Heideggerian, phenomenologist or structuralist, on the other hand, only refer to certain points of view. The only qualities the philosopher needs to have are the same that every other scientist should have. Consequently, practicing philosophy does not mean that someone is or tries to be a better human being. It should be noted that this isn’t a modern development. During the Middle Ages, philosophy was little but a tool to support theology, and that is where the modern meaning of philosophy as academic and purely theoretical originated.

The Four Philosophical Questions According To Kant

What can I know?
What should I do?
What may I hope?
=> What is a human being?

To know what philosophy is, it does not suffice to know the history. You need to know which questions philosophy wants to answer. According to Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) philosophy tries to answer three main questions, which come together in one big question.