Apparently, this year I am celebrating my 10th anniversary on sourceforge.net.  You can see this on my sourceforge profile page.

Not to be proud of really.  I did not created lots of open source code. 

Web front end for vacation

The first project I started 5 years ago was the Web Frontend for Vacation Program.  This is a very simple web administration interface for those using the “vacation” program to set out of office. 

This project started several years ago and has been downloaded 500+ times. That would be 100 download a year or 10 per month since the release of the “final” code. 

I always asked myself: “Does anyone care?”  In 10 years, no one applauded, congratulated or send me a thank you.  That probably would tell much more about the code quality than the friendliness of people.  But yet.

Ymlp.Net

This other project I started earlier this year: YMLP.net (a .Net wrapper for the YMLP API).  YMLP is an abbreviation for YourMailingListProvider.  The name is self declaring, it’s a (cheap)mailing list provider, with an API.  The sample code is only available in PHP and I ported it to .Net (C#).

The project has been downloaded 57 times since January this year.  That would be about almost 10 per month.  Not bad in my opinion.  But even here, no one applauded, congratulated or send a small thank you.  And I am pretty sure the code works.  I use it regularly.

But for the few bugs we had in the code, not a single person reported something on the discussion board, issue tracker or send me an e-mail. No one send his improvements or patches to codeplex, to the forum or to me. 

This project is meant for developers.  It’s an API wrapper.  End users don’t care and won’t use it directly.  So you KNOW that there must have been made changes to the code.  That is what developers do. Furthermore, I know pretty sure their are improvements, the API changed recently and I haven’t had time to implement all new methods last few weeks. 

According to Ohloh this project would cost $ 47 157 to build it up from scratch.  (Which is overrated due to the used calculation method). But still, their are lots of hours put into this project.

Someone has put time (and money) in the project.  Someone created value.  But do you think someone cares? 

No one cares. 

Since when did open source means: “profit from free code and don’t show any gratitude back to the community”.

WOOOW… Myspace finally understands that we do NOT speak French as mother tongue.

Until now i always got myspace in French, which is very frustrating.  I couldn’t change it to English.  I do understand French, but my English reading is more fluent.

Thank you!

Side note about languages for foreign companies thinking about entering Belgian market.  Belgium is small, nevertheless it has 3 (!) official languages: Dutch (59%), French (40%) and German (1%) (numbers from wikipedia ).  Most of the Dutch speaking part are more fluent with English than French.  So please consider to supply your site in English if you can’t support Dutch. 

Ik weet niet wat er aan de hand is, maar ik wilde mijn abonnement op Trends aanpassen. 

Surf ik naar abonnementen.be. Krijg ik daar eerst een compleet franse pagina.  Om vervolgens na één klik toch de nederlandse pagina’s te zien te krijgen.

Helaas krijg ik bij mijn abonnement beheren de gegevens van totaal iemand anders te zien.  ZELFS als ik op uitloggen klik en terug op mijn abonnementen beheren. 

Ok.  I admit.  I used a borrowed Microsoft Office 2010 key to install the software.  (But, I never clicked the activate button.  Knowing that the software won’t work anymore after 30 days of trial.)
Today, I looked up my MAPS product key and I wanted to change the product key.

I have no option, i say NO option, in outlook/word where i see “Change product key”.  Trust me, I can search.  I wear glasses which cost almost the price of an MS OFfice 2010 suite.

Or what to do what if you activated “by accident” with the wrong serial number.  (Read: I installed unofficially but now i have bought Office 2010 now)

Solution

Fortunately, there is an easy way to change the product key.  One you might not think of instantly.

Reinstall the software… Or just take the “Change product key” option on this screen:

• Go to Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features
• Select Microsoft Office (…) 2010 and click Change on the top of the screen

You will get the following screen.  You can guess it, choose “Enter a Product Key” an hit Continue.

The rest of the story is easy…

This is weird.  Yesterday my traffic on my side got some new traffic.  The website stats showed me (after a little bit of digging), the following figures.

Traffic with all the same keyword: “taggedmail profile”.  There were also some visits for the “tagged mail profile”, but much less.  The traffic initiated from different countries, but the majority came from Portugal.  I normally never get traffic from Portugal.    All traffic landed on this page: http://blog.dampee.be/?tag=/mail+profile.  It’s true, the tag “mail profile” is there.  But I doubt it was what they where searching.

I don’t know what it means.  I search Google, I searched Bing.  But couldn’t find any reasonable explanation. My guesses are:

• spam bots searching for user profiles for email addresses. 
• some company takeover of which i am not (yet) aware
• someone interested in buying taggedmail.com (currently pointing to tagged.com)
• …

After these ideas came up, I started searching TechMeme, Mashable and TechCrunch.  But none of them supplied me with some answers, expect for the CSE from Techcrunch: How do I get rid of tagged spam from taggedmail.com? Maybe some spam was send out from the domain taggedmail (.com, .net, …).  But what with the profile keyword?

If someone has any idea, I’ll read it in the comments.

Today I had an old "Palm Tungsten E" in my hands.  The user had a problem synchronizing it with Hotsync on the computer.  It always worked until I the day cleaned the computer from some junk a week ago. The synchronization worked flawless when using the cable, but didn't occurred when using Infra Red (IR).

The Error

Hotsync problem

Unable to initiate hotsync operation because the port is in use by another application.

The Solution

Just reboot the Palm.
(And select IR when opening hotsync on the Palm.)

Every tried to find out who is hosting a web site?  You can't be sure, but you might get some idea when you look at the organization who supplied the IP address for the web site.

If you want a web site, you need a server and an Internet connection.  To have an active Internet connection, you need of course a IP address.

The IANA delegates Internet resources to other regional organizations called a Regional Internet Registry. IANA manages also the DNS Root and information about top level domains (as country codes and .com, .org and .biz).  If you ever have 2 minutes: you should read the "IANA is attacking me" page on their web site. 

Like mentioned before, it is not IANA allocating the IP Addresses to your web hosting company.  There are 5 regional organizations called RIRs allocating the IP addresses to your web hosting company.  Currently there are 5 RIRs.

• APNIC - Asia Pacific NIC
• RIPE NNC - Europe NIC
• ARIN - American NIC
• AfriNIC African NIC
• LACNIC Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry

Instead of performing a reverse DNS lookup, you can look up more information on one of the NIC’s web sites above to determine the owner of the "netblock" that IP is related to.

Frameworks are THE way to develop web sites today.  In the PHP world there are several alternatives.

Today I received an error on the (new?) web site of Azur.be. 

Apparently they are using Symfony.  I didn't knew it so I looked it up.

Symphony provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.

Sounds a lot like a framework I am using a lot lately.  :-)

I know people die.  That is the way of live when you are old.
But life can be cruel. 

There are no words when thing like this happen. Therefore I dedicate this (short) blog post to Patrick Tisseghem (+ 3 september 2008). 

I wish lots of strenght to his family, friend and co-workers.  

I know that IT people and programmers struggle searching fonts with a zero (0) that differs from a 'o' (or O).  Very handy to show license key's with 0 (zeroes).

What would you think of this font?

The Raize Font is a clean, crisp, fixed-pitched sans serif screen font that is much easier to read than the fixed pitched fonts that come with Windows. Ideally suited for programming, scripting, html writing, etc., the Raize Font can be used in any IDE or text editor.

Oh by the way, it's free!

http://www.raize.com/DevTools/Tools/RzFont.asp