Category: Blog News

News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.

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Blog News

48 hours of interruption

Should you’ve passed by the last 48 hours or so, you might have noticed that my domain boschmans.net had been parked, and that you arrived on a meaningless advert page. My apologies for that, this was none of my doing.

So far I have not received an explanation from my website provider (I have been with Priorweb since 2002 or so). I can only guess that the problem was with them thinking I hadn’t payed my bills, as my renewal was up for begin April.

Apparently there is something like paying too early, as I had already paid somewhere in February !

Anyway, the technical reason is fairly simple. If the domain name is not renewed, the name goes up for grabs again. This is why my domain name suddenly pointed to an advert page. There’s a grace period of several days before someone else can claim the name, so I got it back after complaining furiously. The DNS name change needs to be propagated across all the DNS servers, and is normally set to update once a day. So that means that it took at the very least or so one day when the domain registry lapsed, and one more to reset the DNS correctly.

I’ll wait for a better explanation from Priorweb.

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Blog News

Playing Mass Effect now

Woooo. It’ certainly captivating, making me loose a lot of sleeping hours.

A nice engaging storyline. Lots and lots of side quests, which let you beef up your armour, weapons and technique so the main quest runs easier.  No rush except if you want to. Save when you want, almost, except for in combat (logical).

I do have a blue light effect which bothers me from time to time, but that’s the only big complaint I have.

That and the time spent of course. I feel guilty spending all those hours enjoying myself with this game 🙂

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Blog News

installer.app 'main script execution failure' & moving your Applications

Firmware 1.1.4

If you have moved your Applications to your mobile directory (/private/var/mobile/) you might have problems with your installer.app permissions.

Howto move your applications from your small root partition :

  • cp -r /Applications /private/var/mobile
  • mv /Applications /Applications.old
  • ln -s /private/var/mobile/Applications /Applications

CD into your now-moved Applications folder and do the following :

  • chmod +s Installer.app/Installer
  • chown -R root:wheel Installer.app

This worked for me. YMMV, of course.

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Blog News

Messing about with the options theme

Oooooh. This looks so cool, with so many bells and whistles, I just have to play around with this.

Please close your eyes, we’ll be back to normal soon enough. Perhaps.

Update : back to my old theme, for now. I just love 3-columns themes.

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Blog News

Upgrading WordPress to 2.3.3

We live in a fast-changing world. For the past few weeks, I had neglected to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and this suddenly came back to bite me in the behind.

I was wondering why suddenly, after all these years when I no longer require commenters to sign up first as a user, I suddenly had 3 new users. What tipped me off was the third one, who named himself ‘Free P…rn’. Finally, I did what I should have done in the first place : I really read why the upgrade to 2.3.3 was necessary. In short, “a user can change blog posts of other users via an xml-rpc attack”. Ouch. So that was why I had 3 new users so suddenly.

So I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, deleted those 3 users, and am going to do some spot checks on my posts and comments to see if any have changed.

That’ll teach me to be complacent in this always-online, web-based world. Nowadays every spam-wannabe-king has a script that scours the internet for potential vulnerabilities and you just can’t upgrade whenever you feel like it.

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Blog News

What punctuation mark are you ?

Hmmm. Not really what I expected ! I am intrigued as to the qualities of the “dash” so if anybody can tell me what the qualities are I’d thank you kindly for it.


You Are An Exclamation Point


You are a bundle of… well, something.
You’re often a bundle of joy, passion, or drama.You’re loud, brash, and outgoing. If you think it, you say it.
Definitely not the quiet type, you really don’t keep a lot to yourself.

You’re lively and inspiring. People love to be around your energy.
(But they do secretly worry that you’ll spill their secrets without even realizing it.)

You excel in: Public speaking

You get along best with: the Dash

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

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Blog News

A great idea ?

Just got a great idea, or well, perhaps just an idea.

My son Sam, who is almost 2.5 years old, always wants to see animation movies (especially Wall-E) on my iMac. I can start them up for him, but sometimes he wanders into my computer den on his own and starts banging on keys to see if he can do it (he has a VERY strong will of his own and doesn’t always ask what he wants).

One time I actually needed to reboot my iMac, and I still don’t know how he activated one function that involved screen scrolling – I can’t even find it back in the settings !

Wouldn’t it be great to have a screensaver running that could identify Sam (some toys nowadays already can do that, so what not an iMac) and propose him to run animation. Or perhaps you could configure it to automatically start playing content (animation, movies) from a specified folder when somebody walks by that it recognises ?

That way my computer could be locked and he could still come and check his animation out…

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Blog News

Running again

Yesterday my wife started running again, the first time after the festivities. Inspired by her and my once-again bulging belly, I resolved to go running as well, so after the children were off to bed, I went out in the dark, windy and cold evening for a small 3 kilometer circuit. The last time I had gone for a run previously was the 24th of december, and before that only twice in November (for which I don’t have data as this was in France on weekend vacation).

For the first and a half kilometer I was cold, with cold sweat on my brow. Even though my head was covered, the cold wind managed to chill me. Breathing was very hard, probably also because my seasonal asthma is kicking in. It couldn’t be because of my speed, as 7.25 minutes per km or worse is not exactly fast !

But after my half-way point it seemed that my body suddenly remembered what it was supposed to do, and suddenly I was no longer cold, my breathing became easier and my feet found their rhythm again.

And wonder of wonders, my right knee/upper leg decided to play along and didn’t give me any trouble at all. Perhaps because I stretched my leg muscles before starting to run ? I’m still apprehensive that this pain in my upper leg will return, so we’ll have to wait and see.

It was a good run. I didn’t really like the darkness, I prefer seeing where I run, I like running with the setting sun, but all in all I was very glad that I had done this.

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Blog News Websites Caught !

www.international-orders.com customer service is no good. In fact, it's bad.

When I ordered my iphone I ordered it from the USA via the site www.international-orders.com.While the actual delivery was speedy, the follow-up was not. When I ordered it I didn’t want to take any chances with customs and taxes, so I payed to have it shipped out to me including prepaid taxes and customs duties for the additional amount of 157,49 dollars extra.

However, 2 weeks after receiving my iphone, I received an additional invoice from fedex, asking me to pay another 27,99 euros. This turned out to be the invoice that was supposed to have been prepaid by International Orders. However, it was not prepaid. The Fedexbill clearly showed the tick marks that the recipient was to pay for the customs fee.

So I asked them to refund me the 157,49 dollars I had already payed. That’s 109 euros I paid them to pay a bill of 27,99 euros. Clearly they have a serious profit margin on pre-paid customs and duties…

At first they apologized, then they hemmed and hawed, and then only wanted to pay the additional bill and no refund IF I could show them proof of payment ! I wonder how I, a Belgian, can convince an American that yes, this piece of paper in Flemish that I sent to you is indeed proof of payment…

Really ! First you get a customer who pays you to send it prepaid, then by making a mistake you make him pay more and potentially a fine ( the iphone was undervalued on the form), and then you want to reimburse him only for the additional cost and then only if he has shown you proof of payment !

My advise : be careful when dealing with internet shops, and be especially careful with International Orders !

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Blog News

Traffic jam without accidents

I always wondered about those traffic jams that have no accident to show for it – you just seem to suddenly slow down, stop, sit in a traffic jam and suddenly it dissolves without anything really to show for it.

Seems that the cause is a driver that brakes too suddenly, and this shockwave travels backwards, causing other drivers to brake, which eventually brings those behind you to a stop.