Archive for the 'internet' Category

A while back I bought the whole suite of Edward Tufte books: “The visual display of quantitative data“, “Envisioning Information” and “Visual Explanations“.

Today my copy of “Beautiful evidence” arrived in the mail. Actually a Belgian Post employee came to drop it off, because I had to pay 10 euro douane/customs. For a book of $52, that is an unpleasant extra 25%.

The legislation that was printed on the back of the receipt states that any item from outside the EU, with a value higher than 22 euro, or not conform to ‘small letter mail of non-commercial kind’ (up to 45 euro), or containing goods from outside the EU should be presented to customs. Standard fee: 10 euro. I have just ordered a t-shirt from SomaFM ($50), I wonder what customs will think of that.

Continue reading ‘More globalisation, please’

If you have sent me an email in the last two days, you will likely have gotten a bounce like “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender“. Please resend your message because your mail server is indeed right: my email addresses @forret.com were unavailable this Friday and Saturday.

The reason: I was too late for the renewal of my domain smoothouse.org so it expired, my Coditel broadband connection was down so I didn’t notice that my mails stopped coming in until Saturday. I did some emergency DNS adjustments, changed those, and then still did some other stuff, and so this is the situation 24 hours later:

• my email addresses @forret.com are now served by Dreamhost and they should work. (when all DNS updates have propagated through this universe)
• my DNS management for forret.com is now also at Dreamhost, which makes life a lot easier for me now (e.g. creating barcamp.forret.com was a piece of cake – with an external DNS that’s always a bit more tricky)
• my web tools are now at web.forret.com/tools instead of at www.forret.com. In short: the domain www.forret.com can not be hosted by someone else than Dreamhost, but my web tools have to run on Windows (ASP), which my Dreamhost account does not have. Hence: web.forret.com, which is my Windows hosting account. However, since www.forret.com now runs on Apache, I can do automatic redirects with mod-rewrite, so that *should* be transparent to users.
• I’ve lost my domain smoothouse.org – must check with Hostbasket if I can get it back during the DNS holding period.
• my Smoothouse content can now be found on xampled.com/smoothouse (e.g. my collection of house podcasts)
• my Smoothpod Mashup podcast has moved to www.xampled.com/smoothpod.
  UPDATE : and it has now moved to mashup.xampled.com
• The Webjay wizard has moved to my web tools, where it belonged anyway.
• my HTTP header analyzer has also moved to the web tools, together with it’s companion the Squid Cache policy checker. (I bet you don’t have one of those, right?)
• I have at last been able to give my sister and father back their @forret.com address (long story). And I gave my mom a new one, for Mother’s Day!

So: please resend your messages, certainly if they were about Barcamp Brussels.