Blogs

On SlashDot I read an article on a 70 megapixel panoramic camera. Interesting technology...

Recently, #1 of the twin hamsters died... Sad, but such is life.

In the meantime, #2 (which has now become #1) is alive and kicking. He even found the courage to escape and take on Hobbes the cat. After chasing Hobbes and #1 through the kitchen, I managed to convince Hobbes that it wasn't a toy but actually a brother and that he should be nice, so Hobbes dropped him on the floor. In true fighting spirit, #1 bit me like hell, so I dropped him to the floor (it wasn't really a drop; more a flight - I tried to run it to its cage). #1 looked as if he finally gave up (all dizzy on the floor, ready to join #2 - used to be #1), and I was ready to give Hobbes another go at it. Then he stoodup and started approaching Hobbes with renewed vigour. This time I caught #1 and managed to bring him to his cage. I thought he would die now for sure, sustaining heart failure or something, but #1 thought otherwise; a good breakfest would do him good so he seemed to think. 2 weeks on, #1 is still as active as before...

Ola Hoebers and specially Hoebje (if she'll ever read here...)

Well, I guess that I'm online at the Hoeben Weblog. Well, nice things to do around here... Hmmm, I'm only not that superfammiliair with html encoding, so there'll be a lot of handtyped stuff from my side.

What's going on lately. I'm busy (o yeah? YEAH!) with the completion of my study International Economics and Economic Geography at the University of Utrecht, NL. It;s about time to start working on my final thesis.

Furthermore am I trying to enjoy my last half year of the good ol' college life. Because after december this year I'll be pounding in the big pond of workers, working hard every day until our pension do us part (the work and me, of course...)

Today I got the Big Healey from its storage place in anticipation of the Goodwood event. It is always good to drive the car for some time in advance to find out about any new quircks or old ones you forgot about. It proved good practice; it reminded me that the overdrive needs to be looked at! Ever since I bought the Big Healey, the overdrive has been reluctant to switch on - especially with the lights on. Coming winter I plan an overhaul of the overdrive (amongst others), but it would be good if for the Goodwood trip it is somewhat more reliable. Since I'll be traveling or busy coming weekends, and with Goodwood less than a month away, I made an appointment with my favorite classical garageshop, JagPoint. Let's hope they find the problem and that I won't have to switch off all electrical driven features (such as headlights and wipers) before trying the overdrive.

My tablet arrived. Now I'll be the first to admit the lyrics to the N.E.R.D. song I quoted for the title of this post are a bit odd outside the context of the song, but she is sexy! She will be known as "Tabitha".

First impressions:

In little more than a month I'll be enjoying the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Together with Remi, Frank and friends, I'll visit the ultimate race- and classic car venue. Remi plans to take the Lotus Elise, while Frank and I will take the Big Healey to its roots.

This will be my first time at the Festival of Speed. Next year we'll visit the Revival meeting, which promisses to be an event better venue when it comes to pure classical gadgets.

Hi,

As part of the Hoeben family, and Internet savvy person, it is an honour - no, a duty - to be active with a blog on hoeben.net. Favorite subjects of my blog will probably include gadgets, cars (a special kind of gadgets really; Volvo's, Healey's and other classic english vehicles I'll be adding to my collection), music (Bach) and my favorite pet, Hobbes. So let's get going...

Yesterday I bought a Roomba. Remi (friend and colleague at the Digital Home team of Conexant) was raving about the Roomba, and I overheared Ronald (dito relation) ask Remi where to buy one. I chimed in that I would like to have one too, so off Ronald went to buy 2 Roomba's at the MediaMarkt. After a long night charging, I finally got the Roomba to do some vacuuming. First impression is that it is really good at it; it collected lots of Hobbes' hair and seemed to be pretty intelligent about obstacles. At the moment I write this post it is doing the most complicated room in my house; the kitchen. I just saw it rotate around one of the table legs, quite neat! The only downside would be that it sometimes gets stuck on doorsteps; I probably need to improve the 'Roomba friendlyness' of my house. A more fundamental issue could be that the Roomba I have is really designed for spaces up to 5 by 6 meters; observation learned that the algorithm uses the size of the room (small, medium, large) to determine how long it should travel along the walls with its patented side-brush, or how long it should traverse a room before doing circles again (I'll explain more about the algorithm in a later post).

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3482504745

[image:12,left]Oh, the suspense... Will it make it over the ocean?
Will it make it through customs?
Will it arrive before the weekend?
Will it arrive undamaged?

Experimenting with drupal, I have now added a set of topics for blog entries, or a 'taxonomy' in Drupal. One of the neat things things about topics/catagories/taxonomy terms is that you can use them as a filter for the website, showing only content of a specific (set of) topics/catagories/taxonomy terms

It would be nice if all family members had their own set of topics that they could edit and moderate themself, but drupal doesn't readily allow that. On the other hand, 'sharing' topics is very interesting too, as for example my brother and I both like (buying) gadgets, and now we can create a single hoeben.net gadgets blog.

When I first started tinkering with hosting blogs on hoeben.net, I thought it would be a nifty idea to base it on phpBB. One of the sites I visit regularly is myHTPC.com, and I liked their idea of the whole phpBB based 'portal'; everything that happens on the front page comes from somewhere in the bulletin board. Different authors have different (moderation) rights, and the whole thing looked pretty spiffy to me.

Toying around with phpBB I found out that it just wasn't ready to do what I wanted: have a number of differently styled weblogs, and have them aggregated on a main page. Sure, with some hacking and slashing, it could be made to publish rss streams, and have different parts of the system display different themes. However, I found that creating themes was far too complicated, and tweaking the system to my liking was looking hard.