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April 28, 2006

MacWindows OSXP

OS X on a Dell? Yuk! Question and answer formed the two first sentences of this column - a.k.a. 'Interface' until September 2004 - on February 29, 2002. Feed question and answer to Google and you'll find it over here (in Dutch).

A lot has changed in four years. While I made my entrance into the Mac-parish it has become possible - although not officially allowed by Redmond or Cupertino - to install and operate OS X on a Dell without too many sleepless nights.

Even crazier, which I couldn't have dreamed in 2002, the other way is officially possible, although only encouraged by the Cupertino Boot Campers: run XP on OS X. Ad yes, anno 2006 Macs are delivered with Intel processors inside.

Feed 'OS X and Dell' to Google once more and print quite a few nights of reading. Filter the junk, and study the bona fide sources like Slashdot, Mac forums, John Dvorak or Bob Cringely. Try to understand what the true analysts think of Apple's tricks and strategies, and deduct your own conclusion.

Mine? I haven't got a clue, I don't understand at all what Apple is doing or why.

Doesn't bother me, just like it doesn't interest me at all with what kind of ads, tricks, freebies or whatever, Mercedes Benz or BMW are trying to sell their cars. For me, the user, only counts how the wheels are driving once bought, because I'll have to drive the car for a while, at least.

So how do I like my snow white FatCat (iMac PowerPC G5) that's purring on my desk since december 2005?

Grrrreat, thank you very much! One way or another OS X fits me like a tailor made suit, while the white plastic suits my living room nicely.

Last week I've bought an Airport Express, and iTunes now streams my music to our 25 year old Pioneer stereo, another happy marriage of old and new.

A really great bonus is the fact that the Escenic Content Studio, a Content Management System written in Java, by means of which we have to edit the newspaper portal, runs even a bit nicer on OS X than on my XP Optiplex Dell at work.

Want some bad news too? Very well, it's all technique and where there's technique, things will go wrong.

Yesterday my ten month old 1gb iPod Shuffle went kaflooie when I connected it to one of the iMac's USB ports, just like that. When something like that happens it doesn't matter if you're running OS X or XP, because the result is the same: you keep trying all kinds of solutions for hours before accepting the final kaput.

It took the lady at the local Apple dealer less than ten seconds to come to the same conclusion. She connected the Shuffle to her Mac, and when her machine didn't see it either, the iPodd was diagnosed as definitely kaput. No problem, it's send to Apple, and and they will return it repaired or send me a new one, cause it's still under warranty.

One more thing: a riddle. Every once in a while, unprovoked, Airport and Pioneer get bonkers and start to fight each other in such a way, that there's only one way to end the hostilities: a reboot of FatCat.

Must be a config error, but where?

 Posted: April 28, 2006, 11:31 AM | Comments (0) |

April 18, 2006

In memoriam Donald Dukeman

Picture: Donald Dukeman and Mrs. Gertrude Stuber-Kirlin, sister of Bill Kirlin, Donald holding a model of Baggy Maggy. (May 2004, Honeybrook, Chester County, Penssylvania).

Bad news these days arrives every so often over the internet, one way or antother; web, VOIP, sms, chat, rss, any possible way over the ever increasing GooglePlex, copper or wireless.

This time is was Gmail that prepared us for the death of Donald Dukeman, followed by a sad post on Easter Sunday under one of my old Baggy Maggy postings: ‘Donald Dukeman has passed away’.

It was the internet where I met Donald for the first time, exactly two years ago. ‘I was the flight engineer on that fateful day’, he e-mailed, only days after I started an internet search into the origins of the little Baggy Maggy monument I’d biked into at Hoogstratensebaan on a sunny april Sunday morning, somewhere in the border area between Castelré en Hoogstraten.

My contacts with Donald – and Larry Hewin - resulted in a trip to Pennsylvania and West-Virginia, one month later, doing the interviews for a story in the our newspaper that ran later that summer.

The story was commemorating the 60th anniversary of the crash of Baggy Maggy, the B24 Liberator that came down on september 18, 1944 on the spot of the little monument that I’d run into.

While that story will be alive on the net for ages to come - just ask Google for Baggy Maggy – we cherished fond memories – of Donald and Pauline Dukeman, an we stayed in touch, over the internet.

With Donald who, like so many veterans, discovered the internet years after his retirement as a way to rediscover lost friends and crewmembers, decennia after they’d lost each other.

Like the survivors of the Baggy Maggy crew who had last seen each other minutes after they came crashing down from the heavens, and layed down in a Dutch meadow, wondering, thanking God that they had survived.

Then the Germans came running in for nearby Hoogstraten, separated them and kicked them to various prisoner camps in Germany.

Some survivors would only meet each other fifty years later, the Baggy Magy crew on behalf of amateur-historian Jos van Roozendaal, and all of them were using the internet intensively over the last ten years.

‘Duke’, like more men of his age, lambasting that devilish computer, wich he learned to operate when he was almost eighty, ‘so much more difficult than the instruments of a B24’

We will miss deerly the ‘warm regards’ under the regularly mails form dukeman dee at epix.net

Link: Photoalbum Baggy Maggy

Link: Baggy Maggy; Living on Borrowed Time

Link: Orbituary on LancasterOnline.Com

Nederlandse versie

Slecht nieuws arriveert dezer dagen steeds vaker via internet; web, mobiel, sms, chat, e-mail, rss, Google of een combinatie van moderne mogelijkheden, al dan niet via (draadloos) breedband.

Ditmaal was het Gmail dat ons voorbereidde op de naderende dood van Donald Dukeman, waarna op Eerste Paasdag het noodlottige nieuws mij eerst via een comment op mijn blog bereikte: ‘Donald has passed away’.

Op dezelfde manier heb ik Donald Dukeman leren kennen, op de kop af twee jaar geleden; via internet.

‘I was the flight engineer on that fateful day’, schreef hij, kort nadat ik op internet een zoektocht was begonnen naar het hoe en het waarom van het Baggy Maggy monument aan de Hoogstratensebaan in het grensgebied tussen Castelré en Hoogstraten. De contacten resulteerden een maand later in een bezoek aan de Verenigde Staten, ten behoeve van een verhaal in de krant ter gelegenheid van het feit dat het in september 2004 60 jaar geleden was dat Baggy Maggy neerstortte, op een steenworp van de Nederland-Belgische grens.

Terwijl dat verhaal tot in de eeuwigheid terug te vinden is door Google naar Baggy Maggy te vragen, koesteren we warme herinneringen aan Donald en Pauline Dukeman, en bleef er frequent contact, via internet.

Met Donald, die, zoals zovele oud-strijders, ver na zijn pensionering het net ontdekt had om contact te onderhouden met ex-bemanningsleden, decennia nadat ze uit elkaar gegaan waren.

Of, zoals in het geval van Baggy Maggy, elkaar voor het laatst gezien hadden nadat ze samen uit de hemel gevallen waren. Terwijl ze zich af lagen te vragen hoe ze de crash overleefd hadden, werden ze door toegestormde Duitsers gescheiden, en naar krijgsgevangenkampen gesleurd.

Ze zouden elkaar pas vijftig jaar later weer zien, de Baggy Maggy crew dankzij amateur-historicus Jos van Roozendaal, en allemaal gebruiken vanaf 1990 internet voor de contacten. Duke, zoals zoveel mannen van zijn leeftijd, meestal mopperend op die duivelse computer, die hij tegen zijn tachtigste onder de knie kreeg, veel moeilijker dan het instrumentarium van een B24 Liberator.

We zullen de ‘warm regards’ onder de mailtjes van dukeman dee at epix.net missen.

 Posted: April 18, 2006, 11:56 AM | Comments (0) |

April 14, 2006

New pics, tagging, anybody?

New pictures, quickly batched over three albums: Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Since you probably know by now that my camera was snatched in La Paz, the Argentian pictures - so far - were all shot in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cataratas de Iguazu, Salta, Cordillera de Cucuy and La Quiaca.

ImageFolio: Argentina 2006
ImageFolio: Bolivia 2006
ImageFolio: Paraguay 2006

The Bolivian pictures were all made in to Potosi and Sucre, or somewhere else on our way from La Villazon to the Bolivian capital. Half an hour or so before we catched a bus to Cochabamba, I spotted a Kodak service in Sucre, and as the 512 mb flashcard in the Ixus contained over 200 pictures I thought it a good idea to burn a backup. Right I was, because after our visit to Cochabamba and short visits to some villages on the Altaplana, on the way to La Paz, the camera was stolen on march 23.

No pictures yet from La Paz yet, Chile, and Patagonia, but as we spent most time in the same places als last year, no problem. What's more; Anja still uses her old little Pentax that has served us well over the years. So a lot of pictures from La Paz, La Villa Agostura and San Carlos de Barriloche, Patagonia, are at a professional printing service right now. Looks like we've got some scanning to do next week.

Another Gargantuan job: the tagging of the pictures. Google the blog on South American of Australian cities and you see wat tagging does: Google spits out heaps of ImageFolio url's.

It may take a while, my guess is another couple of years, but I'm sure all cameras sooner or later will translate spoken words in IPTC tags. While - or during a certain time enveloppe around the click - you speak to the camera, the words will translates into IPTC tags, maybe a set of session-defined tags.

Even better, all camera's by then will also contain a GPS system, so longitude and latitude - and names, thanks to Google Maps, will be added to IPTC.

Far fetched? I bet Canon has the system almost ready, all we need is some mass, some time.

 Posted: April 14, 2006, 05:09 PM | Comments (0) |

Airport Express streaming

As I'm working a lot on my iMac a these days, decided to buy an Apple Airport Express, and was suprised again (twice) by Apple.
The day before a colleague gave me a baseball dvd; Astros - White Sox, impressive stuff, all about power pitching. Tried the dvd in my XP machine at the newspaper, but gave up, frustrated, after fifteen minutes of typical Windows behaviour; crashing media player, crashing XP, crashing machine. Took the dvd home, slipped it in the side slot of the Mac and it started playing.

Aiport; same story. Bought it because I wanted to stream music from the Mac to our 25 year old Pioneer stereo set. Plugged it into the power outlet behind the stero, and connected two old banana plugs (one red, one black) in what looked like two right connections in the back of the old Pioneer. Walked to the computer at the other side of the living, started iTunes, and opened the manual to check out how to set up the wireless connection.

I swear I hadn't even found the right page when the Mac started streaming, and the old stero started playing the Carlos Libendensky tango that we bought in Buenos Aires!

I'm beginning to wonder why anybody in a right state of mind would install any Windows on any new Mac with the Pentium processors. I can think of only one valid reason: to prove that even XP runs fine on a Mac. Even XP!

 Posted: April 14, 2006, 04:47 PM | Comments (1) |

April 13, 2006

Change

In the eleven years I’m publishing on the net (starting in ’95 on the Eindhoven DSE server, switching to krijnen.com in ’97), I’ve mainly done so in Dutch.

Like some other Dutch bloggers I’ve done the occassionaly post in English, looking, searching, for a definite course on the blog, one way or another. If you Google the blog you will find some of them.

My digital domain has never been and will never be complete, as I haven’t been able to blog everything that I’ve written over the years.

There are some five hundred sport columns hidden in our newspaper digital archives, so maybe I should hire a keyhobbit or typegoat to copy them one way or another to my own database.

During the eighties and nineties I’ve covered 34 Grand Slam tennis tournaments, 70 something other ATP and Davis Cuppers, not to mention countless billiard and volleybal games, the occasional soccer game, and some other sports.

To how many stories written they count I haven ‘t got a clue, and as I haven’t kept any newspaper prints from my past, they’re non existing – and not important at all - history.

My younger colleagues may not realise it, but every key they hit will result in a never disappearing hit, somewhere on the net, for good or for worse.

Waiting in archives or not, I’m not going tho translate my old stuff from Dutch to English, although it would be good exercise.

Exercise, training, is one of the reasons for the fact that I’ve finally changed my main language over here from Dutch to English: Google and the bigger audience generated through Google is another reason, as are our Australian and American friends.

Exercise and training, trying to achieve one goal: passing (starting in a non-English speaking country – or Australia for that matter- for a native English writer/talker).

I’m sure Graham, my Canadian teacher who undersigned my certificate ‘ English Writing For The Media’ two years ago, will frown his eyebrows on the previous sentence.

But I also know whe will applaude my descision and I hope he will start pestering me again.

Really don’t know if my blog is following a trend, but with the current number of visitors and pageviews the money generated by Google AdSense has become sufficient to live in one of the poorer South American countries. In Bolivia you can easily get around on three dollars a day, so here ya go!

Now let’s hope the change will result in a forty-bagger from he AdSense program, and we will soon have to decide where we’re going to spent our time blogging: back to Marin County, Bariloche, Big Fork, Mount Tamborine or Cerro Cathedral, La Vila Angostura, the Dutch Mountains, of maybe San Telmo, Recoleta or Palermo Viejo in Buenos Aires?

Following the regiment of exercise aforementioned only one post a week will be in Dutch, being my weekly XS column for the newspaper, immediately followed by the English version.

Or should I write XS in English, and then do the Dutch version? Maybe that would be an interesting exercise, with surprising results, I’ll give that at try at least once.

Fair dinkum!

 Posted: April 13, 2006, 12:07 PM | Comments (0) |

April 12, 2006

Sugar

Everywhere, in every country, you have a lot of nice people, and some assholes. I really don't know what kind of guys the three pickpockets are who robbed me of my Digital Ixus in La Paz (hence no pictures of La Paz over here).

Maybe they're very nice guys for their family and friends, and they were professionals for sure; it all happened in a second or so, no knife, no pain, pooofff, boom, and gone they were, with my camera. Well done, boys!

I also don't know which moron spraypainted this little white dog in Sucre, but he doesn't get my respect. Happily enough, she wasn't shy or stressed at all. We called her Sugar, and she followed us for two days while we were in Sucre. We tried to clean her head in vain, but to no avail, it was some kind of car paint, which will wear away eventually.

Sugar was a smart dog, doing the trick that so many stray dogs in South America seem to know very well: get aquainted with non Spanish speaking back-packers, because a lot of them will stroke and feed them. A pity we couldn't take Sugar to La Paz the next day; she probably would have warned me for the bad boys.

 Posted: April 12, 2006, 02:55 PM | Comments (3) |

April 11, 2006

Andrey Gofman of Andrey Anufrijenko?

Hoop rekeningen bij de post na zes weken Zuid-Amerika, maar ook een cadeautje: 'De Blokjesleggers van Turijn'. Dat het eraan kwam wist ik al, na het volgende mailtje dat ik ergens in Paraguay of Bolivia in een internetcafe in mijn onvolprezen Gmail tegenkwam:

Geachte heer Krijnen,

U heeft ons een oplossing gestuurd op onze 'Afgrijzelijk moeilijke schaatsvraag'. Helaas was die oplossing niet goed, maar u was wel de enige die in de buurt kwam. (Er waren in totaal twee inzendingen). Hoewel u voor Gofman Andrej Anufrijenko had moeten invullen willen wij u toch een exemplaar van het boek 'De blokjeslegger van Turijn toesturen'.

Vriendelijke groet,

Jon de Mari

bladmanager VPRO Gids

'Verroest', dacht ik toen, want ik was alweer vergeten dat ik er aan mee gedaan had. Dat was weer het gevolg van het gegeven dat we een dag of wat voor ons vertrek naar Buenos Aires de bezorging van de VPRO gids tijdelijk stop wilden laten zetten en zoiets doe je tegenwoordig via internet.

Op de voorpagina van de VPRO website stond bijgaande foto, onder de kop 'Afgrijzelijk moeilijke schaatsvraag'; wie wist wie de drie (Russische) schaatsers waren op bijgaande foto.

Nou weet ik niet zoveel van schaatsen, al was het maar omdat ik een gloeiende hekel aan koude voeten koester. Een groot gedeelte van de vijftien jaar dat ik op de sportredactie zat, bracht ik aan de rand van tennisbanen door, terwijl de net zo roemruchte als chagrijnige Rob vab Deursen tussen oktober en maart van heinde en verre schaatsverhalen naar Breda seinde.

De gitaar op de foto trok mijn aandacht. Daarop spelen kan ik niet, maar je kan zien dat de twee die dat instrument vasthouden, daar ook geen kaas van gegeten hebben. Al zou het kunnen dat het de vrolijke Trio Sovjetski een Boliviaanse opera aan het oefenen is; de afgelopen weken maar al te vaak gehoord hoe in die contreiën met twee handen tegelijk op alle snaren van een gitaar gemept wordt.

Het zou natuurlijk best kunnen dat het instrument in kwestie van Kees Verkerk is, ik meen me te herinneren dat die feestjes na de medailles van Ard en Keessie met Noorse ballades opvrolijkte. De zwart-wit foto leek me ook uit die tijd te dateren, dus maar eens even Google aangeslingerd en wat gedoold op gitaar, schaatsen, muziek, verkerk, russen, enzovoort.

Zoeken is de kunst niet, vinden wel. Na een half uur nog niks, en daar kan ik niet tegen. Maar eens gaan prikken op Russische e-mail adressen.

Eentje die me wel wat leek stuurde ik de foto met de vraag:

Dear sir,

Can you please tell us who the three skaters on this picture are?

I think they are Russian, probably somewhere around 1970 . . .

Thanks in advance, very kind regards, Leon Krijnen

Tingelingeling, vijf minuten later:

Dear Leon,
You are right talking they are Russians.
in the left side - Andrey Krivosheev
in the centre - Anderey Gofman
in the right side - Vladimir Bitkin

Kind Regards,

Russian Skating Union

Mooi he, dat internet :-)

De vraag blijft wie er gelijk heeft: de Russiche Schaatsbond (die Andrey Gofman met de linkerhand de hals van gitaar vast laat houden) of de VPRO (die denkt dat Andrey Anufrijenko is). De VPRO zou dat nog voor me uit gaan zoeken, maar aangezien er na dat mailtje (vanuit het wonderschone Salta in het hoge verre noorden van Argentinië) alweer bijna een maand verstreken is, reken ik daar niet meer op.

 Posted: April 11, 2006, 02:51 PM | Comments (0) |