A while ago Frank asked us (Aldo & me) to create a cover for his thesis. Since Aldo is always swinging any number from 2 to 8 jobs at a time and I was having a bit of spare time between jobs I decided to take on the challenge.

Ola everybody, and the moderators in special,

 I see that Aldo is online, hi Aldo!! Why can't we chat here?! That's about it for now... Sorry, new entries in the near future...

Tessa and I will be attending both Portsmouth and Bristol kite festivals, and Tessa didn't think one new kite would be impressive enough. So she set to work, doing a remake of our Tyvek Edo. The paint was blistering off, because the acrylic she used was too expensive (too much pigment vs not enough glue). But this time, instead of using Tyvek and paint, Tessa is using spinaker nylon and applique techniques.

You might have noticed that Hoeben.net now feels downright zippy. And you're about right too. After reading this article and this comment, pages served from hoeben.net are now zipped before they are sent over, and your browser unzips them automatically.

Now, apparently, not every browser supports gzipped pages. So anyone who can't read this post, just leave a comment ;-)

So as it's turning out, after some initial getting used to, it seems that Hoeben.net moving to a new server may not have been such a bad thing afterall (though I still have to find me a new way to upload and include images etc)...

Last week, Thomas Higgins posted a note about Quicktime 7 preview for Windows breaking support for Quicktime video in Shockwave. The artcle reads:

At this time we believe that we've identified the underlying cause of this issue as a bug in the QuickTime Player code itself but are working with Apple in order to confirm that fact and to see what type of fix will be required (...)

More than a year ago I outlined some grand plans for the Hoeben.net theme. One of the ideas was that I wanted to be able to give each family member/blog and each topic a sub-theme. IE: mostly the same theme as the rest, but subtle (or not so subtle) changes to reflect the content of that section of the site.

This is now finally somewhat possible, and I have subthemed the kites topic as a showcase. If you're reading this message on its own page, you should already see the subtheme. If not, head on over! Do scroll down for an additional nice touch...

As of this morning, there's an actual bit of code in the CVS version of the core of Drupal. 4 lines of code in 4 different files. Woohoo! I have submitted a patch here and there before, but this is the first time a patch of mine is accepted into the core of Drupal.

So what's this patch about you might wonder? In the admin area of drupal - which most of you will never see - you can now see the referrer of a page that caused an error (such as a 'file not found' error). Exciting stuff.

It looks like they picked my version of the patch too...

Hoeben.net was migrated to a new server by our ISP. Apparently, it is all for the best, but I am not 100% impressed with the process; I had to get a bit too nitty gritty with .htaccess to my liking to get things to work, and they 'forgot' to migrate our images (sorry Tessa). I hope I can get them back... 

Perhaps I am spoiled by speedy response of the new Drupal server park, but I think hoeben.net currently feels quite sluggish (and I am getting intermittent DNS hickups it seems). Anyhow, we'll see how this progresses.

PS: Drupal.org itself had a nervous breakdown, but I made it to the thank-you poster. Woot!

Yes, it's really true, it has finally happened. I'm switching office desks. I think Aldo is even more excited than I am. Finally, a new topic of conversation :-)

I'm switching to tremani, a little (but somewhat bigger) design agency. My new job starts in mid August.

You know, once you know what it feels like to be a yellow tulip, being packed in a crows of 700.000 people watching the Red Bull Airrace doesn't feel all that different ;-)

Here's a panorama I took this afternoon near the Erasmusbrug.

An 8mm fisheye lens isn't the most ideal lens to capture tiny aircraft whizzing by at 300+ kph, but the panorama illustrates the huge number of people present.