B10[m|g]

The 4day march is an annual four day event (the name kind of gives that away) in the Netherlands. This joyful happening attracts visitors from all over the globe. People from many countries come to the city of Nijmegen to walk ... and walk ... and walk.

For years, soldiers from many countries walk this route too. Recently, however, the Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported about armed CIA and DIA presence. These secret service officials were walking along to protect the 65 participating US soldiers. The 936 British and 1713 Dutch troops do leave security to the Dutch authorities.

The Netherlands, a sovereign state, clearly does not allow foreign armed forces within its' borders, yet for the US officials, an exception seems to be in place, according to the news paper's internal sources in the Ministry of Justice.

Not long after the article was posted, an online news website (nu.nl) posted an article with the response of the Ministry of Justice. The spokesman claims to have no knowledge of the presence of CIA/DIA officials, nor does he deny it. He tells us the US indeed has to ask permission first, which clearly never arrived at the ministry. The request for an investigation was dismissed by a simple "we've already investigated it".

Investigations, especially from government bodies, take a long time, yet in this case, the Ministry of Justice was able to investigate this delicate matter within hours. Leaving me with the thought that at most the ambassador was questioned briefly. Unfortunately, the results and facts of this investigation are nowhere to be found.

I might be biased, but the investigative qualities of this body aren't the greatest. The invasion of airplanes by CIA planes to Balkan CIA prisons was never really caught and I can probably list numerous accounts of such incompetence.

After these news paper entries, the media has completely moved along. Either no one cares about this grave invasion by US officials, or there is really nothing more to report. I however do not like the deafening silence and called upon my political party to get more information. Hopefully they will succeed, but seeing the recent trend of unsolved mysteries (like blocked investigations to the real reason why the Dutch participated in the war on Iraq), I doubt they will be able to do much.

Let's see if I myself, as a concerned citizen, can pry some information out of the Ministry of Justice or the US embassy.

Hopefully to be continued!

Update: I just emailed the Ministry of Justice, asking for the findings and conclusions of the investigation. The part that is still unclear to me is that they cannot deny CIA presence, nor confirm it. What did they investigate then?

CIA, DIA, nijmegen, vierdaagse

Ok, I've completely had it with Paris Hilton, the stupid iPhone and even more with Second Life! (... and I know I'm not the only one ;-)

Luckily there's a Greasemonkey script to filter your bloglines entries, called Mental health through ignorance. This nice hack hides the entries based on regexps you predefine. Just what I need! No more Paris Hilton, iPhone nor Second Life for me!

bloglines, userscripts, greasemonkey, filter

I can't believe how I was able to keep track of the news and sites in the pre-RSS era. I truly am addicted to RSS feeds and find myself quite lost if a site doesn't offer a feed.

A site I want to track, but rarely do is The Jakarta Post. They don't have a RSS feed (or at least I couldn't find it), so I thought of scraping it myself and building a feed, like I did with Fokke & Sukke.

Then I remembered there were services out there that did this for you and one of them is Feed43. Within a minute or so, I had my Jakarta Post feed set up.

The site asks for the URL of the page and then for some matching rules (think of regexps, but way more simple). It's really easy to work with! Keep it in mind if you ever come across sites that don't have RSS feeds available (yet).

rss, thejakartapost

All bloggers know the problem, you've got a one-liner in mind. A joke, message, concern, idea too small to dedicate a blog post too, yet maybe funny enough to post somewhere.

B10[m|g] now has a special place for such braindumps (for you RSS feed readers, check out the blog and look right below the header image ;-)

I'll try to update this as often as possible!

braindumps

I've ranted about the horrible PHP in the past enough so I won't yell at it for too much this time. In this post, I'd just like to point out the way of thinking of some (if not most) PHP coders.

As a big Flickr fan, I follow the discussion boards on API usage (I use the Flickr API myself at my Invitr project).

Yesterday, this guy posted the following:

Uploaded some new pics to a set yesterday. They showed up on our flickr page here, but not on our external site. Then this morning I go to check and see if they are visible yet, and I'm greeted with the following error:

Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 0 of 1171 bytes in /home/content/s/g/t/sgtattoo/html/includes/phpFlickr.php on line 238

Here is line 238 from my script:

$this->parsed_response = $this->clean_text_nodes(unserialize($this->response));

Is this one of those things that's going to suddenly start working again in a few hours, or has flickr made some changes they didn't tell us about?

I told him that he should always check and make sure that $this->response really contained the values he was hoping for, but of course, PHP programmers know better:

As far as I'm concerned, error reporting is really only there to aid in initial development. My script has worked fine for the last 6 months, and I haven't touched it since. So this is a Flickr issue, not an issue on our end.

Now this just really angers me! Error reporting is only to aid in initial development? Pffttt ... enough said. I hate PHP and its' users!

php