Guus Bosman

Today at around 16:00 o'clock Dutch time the server for this website went down.

My father was home, and he quickly fixed the problem. He took a nice picture of the screen, to allow me to see the error message.

It's a strange idea, that the server is so far away and I'm happy that I have good backups in place. The error message "kernel: page fault trap" is not a very healthy sign.

Yesterday evening we moved the server to a new location. First we had a cosy dinner together, and then we went to Middenmeer and took the server with us. My parents have ADSL, so there is a permanent internet connection here.

The server is now located in the attic of my parent's house. Yesterday evening at midnight I changed the DNS entries for Guus Bosman.nl, so most users should see the website again now instead of a 'temporary offline' page.

Yesterday I installed new software on the website's server. Guus Bosman.nl is running under OpenBSD, a secure unix-like operating system.

I felt it was time to install version 3.5, because version 3.3 is no longer supported. On November 1st a new version will be released again, but I wanted to update the server now as I don't think I'll have a lot of time in November.

From 20:00 o'clock to 0:30 I was installing the new OS. About an hour of that I spent trying to fix the server's diskdrive. Then I realized that the floppy disks just didn't enter the diskdrive completely, because of a mechanical issue. A screw driver helped out and after that things went smoothly. The installation program of OpenBSD is really good.

For a long time there has been an issue with displaying this website correctly in Internet Explorer.

The problem is that sometimes text on the frontpage disappears. This happens when there is an article with a picture; the picture would be visible but the corresponding text not. Reloading the page sometimes fixes the problem, also selecting the invisible text with the mouse would make the text readable.

I never knew how to fix this, but today I found a detailed description of the problem, and a number of possible solutions.

A week ago I placed an article about a game with a penguin. It was a great success: many visitors had a lot of fun trying to hit the poor bird as hard as possible.

The article is truly a record for this website. It has been read more than 1700 times already, and attracted a huge number of visitors (through Google and Altavista). And so many comments! Today I've decided to "close" comments for that article for anonymous users.

If you would like to see some information about the visitors that were attracted by this game you can see a NedStat counter I've put online for a few days.

We are now officially P3P compliant:

> Thank you for making your site P3P-compatible.
> I added your site to the list.

For my work I came across a new Internet standard: the Platform for Privacy Preferences, or P3P. This allows a website to inform its customers of its privacy policy: how does the website deal with the personal data of its users.

An important aspect of the standard is that the format is both human- and machine-readable. Internet Explorer 6.0 knows how to read this information for example (see the screenshot below). You can tell Internet Explorer what your preferences are, for example that you never want to give your e-mail address to sites that sell e-mail addresses to third parties. Your browser will then warn you if you enter such a website.

I've created a policy for Guus Bosman.nl, to see how it works. My privacy policy is pretty simple: I don't sell, share or give away information on my visitors to other people. However, the website uses "cookies", to keep track of logged in users and to remember your username. <

All this you can read in my Privacy Statement.

Yesterday at the end of the afternoon Mark and I did an experiment with my website.

We were looking at a program that can be used to measure the performance of a website: how many visitors per minute can it reasonably handle? We need such tools for our work, and we did a quick experiment with a new program that Mark found.

I don't know exactly how many visitors my website usually has. I should really find that out once! A very rough estimate (for last Tuesday) indicates that every two minutes a page of our combined websites gets visited.

A nice news message from my internet provider:

"The speed of the XS4ALL subscriptions Lite, Basic en Fast ADSL will be increased once again, starting January 15 2004. " - XS4ALL.

My current connection speed is 1024/320 Kbit/s, but from January the downstream will be doubled to 2048 Kbit/s. Wow... I remember the time that I was happy with a new modem that had a speed of 14.4Kbit/s.

I've installed most of the tools I need to create a website in MMBase. These include Eclipse, Tomcat and a Tomcat-plugin for Eclipse. This way I can program on my desktop computer, which is easier than on the webserver.

The latest version in CVS of MMBase requires Java 1.4, which doesn't work yet on my server, so I'll stick with an older version of MMBase (1.6.5) for now. I don't think it matters too much for Guus Bosman.nl; the main changes seem to be in multi-media libraries. I'll upgrade later, when OpenBSD has a working JDK 1.4 port.