B10[m|g]

Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia has seen some name changes over the years. I trust Wikipedia on the dates here, but in history, the names have been Sunda Kalapa (397-1527), Jayakarta (1527-1619), Batavia (1619-1942), Djakarta (1942-1972), and now Jakarta.

Dropping the 'd' in front of the name has to do with the new spelling of the Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia). Again, I trust Wikipedia on the dates and history, but since 1972, the "new spelling" mandated that the 'd' was dropped.

So far so good, but recently I noticed that Google has trouble keeping up with this new spelling. On maps.google.com, they tell me the city is called "Djakarta", as you can see here:

Oddly enough, they do write Jayapura correctly. Also Bandung, instead of Bandoeng (which changed in 1947) is written correctly. Other mapping websites all seem to handle the 36 year old name change correctly.

Expedia.com:

Maps.live.com:

Mapquest.com:

NationalGeographic.com:

UN.org:

Maps.yahoo.com:

Since I find this a strange error, I decided to write an email to Google asking them for the reason for this and whether there are plans to update this. I'll keep you posted on the results of that mail (if ever get a reply).

google, maps, indonesia, jakarta, djakarta

At the train station in Amsterdam, a big advertisement caught my attention. Since I'm not a so-called early adopter, I don't have a phone that can take pictures, so you'll have to do with my description of it, rather than a photo ;-)

The advertisement had an orange background, and in big bold letters it stated "In the Netherlands, more than 200.000 professionals work together to fight terrorism" followed by the text "What can you do?".

My initial thought was to write beneath it: "You can stop the FUD!" But of course I didn't have a big marker with me ...

200.000 professionals? Fighting together against terrorism? We don't have terrorism in this country and please stop trying to convince me that we do.

Sometimes, bad things happen in this country, of course. Floodings, explosions, huge car crashes, anything can happen, but usually, a pointless, expensive report later informs us that the authorities did not work together at all. So now I have to believe everybody is working together? Nope, I don't buy it. Besides that? Who are these professionals and who is paying them? Me? Time to visit the website. (www.nederlandtegenterrorisme.nl)

The 200.000 people include army, police, train personnel, cleaning personnel etc. They all keep their eyes open and bravely fight the terrorists. So, yep, most of them are paid by me, the tax payer.

Now the good thing is that the website offers you to download close to all publications they've made (also, probably paid for by me), except for this poster that got me angry at the train station. But oh well, let's see what we're supposed to do, according to my government. There's even an English PDF document

The document states under the header "what can you do?" that first of all "we must not distrust eachother". Great! I love, but wait, there's more, "but we have to be vigilant". What? We have 200,000 people guarding us, but we have to be vigilant? I'll quote from the brochure:

If we all stay alert, we can reduce the chances of an attack.

• Pay extra attention in places where there are a lot of people, such as metro and train stations, festivals, concerts and shopping centres.
• Check where the emergency exits or escape routes are in every building you enter.
• You might come across websites that incite hatred or violate the law in some other way. Report this at www.meldpuntcybercrime.nl.
• Never leave your belongings unattended.

Ok, fair enough. After that it explains what should be "suspicious" and in most cases the advice given is: call the police

My god, what happened to this country? Why should we spy on eachother? Oh yeah, don't distrust eachother, but do spy...

Probably the best part is that they try to justify the stupid compulsory identification act (search for it ;-)

The Compulsory Identification Act was introduced in part to prevent terrorism. Individuals aged 14 and over are required to carry a passport, driving licence or identity card with them when they are out and about. This makes it much easier to get the personal details of individuals who behave suspiciously.

Even if there was a terrorist. You think he'd carry his/her passport around?

All bullshit! The only thing you can do to stop the godforsaken government is to STOP THE FUD!

terrorism, fud, nederland tegen terrorisme

Based on Brian's blog entry we started discussing email encryption (using GnuPG).

We both believe way too few people use email encryption and we'd both love to see an increase in that. The reason for people not using it is pretty simple, I think. GnuPG is just too damn hard to use for the average user.

Every time I have to use the gpg binary, I find myself opening the man pages. Besides that, the whole "Web of Trust" concept just takes some thinking and understanding. Who do you trust, how much do you trust someone, why shouldn't I give someone my ultimate trust, etc.

Nerds usually don't mind a little complexity when it comes to basic things, such as emailing, yet the average Joe probably loses interest in this rather quickly. Such a shame!

So how can we get more people to encrypt their emails? Make it easier for people to use and stress the importance! You're not paranoid if you think encrypting mails is important. And don't fall for the "if you don't have anything to hide" dogma. You don't want people to read your snail mail (the mail on paper), so why would you want people to read your electronic mail? Unfortunately, as of right now, we just have to accept that it takes a little time to get started, and the documentation isn't the easiest, nor funniest stuff to read (reading other people's email is way more interesting ;-)

Besides the learning curve, there's nothing that should stop you. There are some "new" initiatives that allow you to use encryption for webmail services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail (see freenigma and keygloo for example). And of course, there's a way to use it with close to every non-webmail mail client, like MS Outlook, Thunderbird, The Bat, Eudora, pine, mutt.

Wonderful! Let's take a few minutes to create a key and read up on the concept. After that, let's all use it!

gpg, pgp

I probably blogged about this before, and people around me have heard my rants on this many times before, yet I feel the urge to blog on this now: ignorant l-users.

For some reason, a lot of people think error messages exist only for one reason, to annoy them. Popups, other error messages, not relevant, just call B10m, he knows/should know everything.

A lot of times, I receive e-mails telling me that the email is not working. After many times, I refrain from replying "it seems to work rather well, I got your message". Those senders usually mean that some email got bounced. So of course I ask them why and they usually respond with something like: "That's what I would like to know".

So I start explaining that if they received a message claiming the delivery failed, it most likely also tells them the reason for this. Either some zealous spam filter, blacklist, or the recipient's mailbox is full (yes, that still exists too). Anyways, in 99% of the cases, it will tell you why the delivery failed and if you're lucky it even provides you with a link that explains it in more detail.

But of course they deleted that bounce report and I have to start guessing what went wrong. The tea prices on the Chinese export market, alignment of certain planets, any BOFH excuse ... it really can be anything.

Or, like I noticed today, someone claimed to get an Internal Server Error and was friendly enough to pass it on to a coworker. He forwarded it to me with the question: "What is he doing wrong?".

I have to admit, the 500 Internal Server Error isn't too descriptive to the end user, yet the least you could do is tell me when this happened, and what caused this behavior. Makes debugging and going through logfiles a lot easier. But of course, I should have known exactly what the guy did wrong...

Or what about a broken laptop? I received a phone call from someone, who told me the laptop was hanging. Rebooting didn't help, it kept on hanging. During the booting, some text was displayed, but it would hang again after that. "What the text said? Oh I don't know!"

"B10m! This stupid program isn't working! What should I do now?" For some reason, some people think that I am watching their screens constantly, which is -of course- not true. I watch it sometimes, but not constantly ;-) So, I walk over there to check out what's going on. "Please replicate that error, so I can see what's going on". And before you know it, I see an error popup, but within 10 microseconds it was gone again. "Let's try again, and try to click that OK button with a little delay, so maybe I can read parts of it this time".

Computer users please remember a few things before you call your local victimcomputer guy:

• We are not watching your screen so we have no clue what you're doing
• We usually do not know what you want a program to do
• We do not like spending evenings, even weekends on your problem
• We don't ask you to paint our house for free either
• We do have other (useless) things to do besides fixing your stuff
• We do like you to search online for a solution
• We do like to hear what the error message said, even though we know you couldn't care less

l-users, error messages

The title of this entry might seem a little blunt, yet it is how I feel at the moment. I always loved HTML and often even spent a lot of time to check out W3C to keep up to date.

The reason I dislike it is fairly simple: too much typing.

I know, I can use products such as Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, or way too many other WYSIWYG editors to avoid typing, yet I never really gotten to like them either (and yes, I do realize they don't produce the crap output that they used to do anymore). And, it doesn't solve the real problem here, that it's fairly unreadable.

Let's look at an example. For instance, when I want to emphasize something, I would use <em>something</em>. It takes me nine characters to make your browser understand that I want to put emphasis on one word.

Most browser will use italics for that emphasis. Now if I'd use POD, I'd type I<something>, a lot shorter, with the same result.

Because I'm obviously not the only one who is lazy enough to dislike all the typing/reading, people started coming up with other methods to generate ugly HTML out of more readable, workable, editable markup languages.

Currently, Textile seems to be my favorite, and I'm happy to type my blog entry in that right now. But a very reasonable other markup language is Markdown.

In Textile, I'd type _something_ to put emphasis on something, and Markdown would accept *something* and also the Textile approach. That is a hell of a lot easier to type and a hell of a lot easier to read!

Now why do we really want to use (X)HTML? Probably because changing the HTML standard would involve a lot of problems and frankly, I'm not perfectly happy with either Textile, Markdown, POD or any other markup language for that matter ;-)

Oh well, by now you should understand that I just had to write (and format) a document in HTML, which I thought would be small enough to hack directly in HTML, but turned out too big that I wish I started in Textile...

html, textile, markdown