Guus Bosman

Tonight I attended a lecture by Sapna Kumar, a faculty fellow at Duke University Law School.

The lecture was organized by TriLUG, the Triangle Linux User Group at Red Hat in Raleigh. Before the meeting Larry and I had dinner and later a cup of coffee with Donald K. Rosenberg, author of a book on Open Source licenses.

The topic of Ms. Kumar's lecture was v3 of the GNU Public License (GPL), a popular open source license, and the relationship between patents and open source software.

Ms. Kumar gave a good talk on the new provisions and new aspects of the GPLv3, insightful and brought with a sense of humor. She gave an excellent overview of the recent developments around software patents and how they relate to GPLv3. She took a lot of questions from the audience.

A few months ago we bought a sound system for in the living room. Nothings fancy, but it's a nice system with surround speakers and a stand-alone amplifier. I've connected it to the TV and DVD player, and now we can listen to FM radio in the living room also.

Most of the time I listen to music through the computer thought, and tonight I finally connected my laptop to the sound system. It's nice to be able to listen to internet radio.

The cables I have at home aren't long enough, so I connected 2 cables using a switch. When I moved to the U.S. 2,5 years ago I brought a lot of cables and this switch, and now I finally found a good use for them, if only temporary.

I found a nice website that allows you to track where a GSM cell phone currently is.

I tried it with a Dutch GSM phone number and it's pretty accurate, even with satellite pictures of the Netherlands (the resolution isn't great but still reasonable). I couldn't try my own phone because Verizon doesn't use GSM.

Try it at http://www.sat-gps-locate.com.

Firefox 2.0 was released today.

Firefox is the web browser that I use. I'm not a big fan of running beta versions of my browser because it is so important in my daily use -- I can't afford to loose time with a potential broken browser -- so this is the first time I see the new feature that were added.

Over-all, the browser has not changed all that much but I like the new features, such as the improved search support and better RSS support. The inline spell checking will help me improve the quality of the articles for my website.

The first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, has a website where she describes her experiences on the International Space Station.

From her Space Blog:

"It is about 11:30 GMT here on ISS. It looks like my first entry from space made it down there.. Amazing, isn’t it…?"

A week ago I received an invitation to use a free version of Google Analytics, a visitor tracking website.

I installed it and have been using it for a week, and I really like it. It has a lot more features than most other visitor counting tools, such as the Onestat counter that I also have.

For example, it is possible to define "conversion goals" -- a custom goal that will be tracked by Google Analytics. I added "Posted Comments" as a goal, so now I will have a nice graphic overview of the amount of Comments posted over time.

An interesting piece of information I found is that the most commonly used search-phrase to reach my site was (last week) "how+do+you+pronounce+guus".

The Postbank, my Dutch bank, is introducing a new centralized phone number. It's a 0900 number though, which I can't dial from the United States. Neither Skype, calling cards nor my new phone support dialing these special numbers.

Fortunately, the Postbank is a really cool bank and has an experimental Skype number. I called it the other day, and it works great.

The skype name is postbank_jongeren. In addition to that, they also have a regular phone number that can be used when calling from abroad.

I have found an even better Dutch phone number, one with the same area code as my parents.

The number is: 0227 - 71 20 00 (+31 227 - 71 20 00 from outside the Netherlands).

This one I have through Budgetphone, and they charge $6,00 per year for a phone number, that can have any area code.

My Grandstream phone is on its way -- I bought it last Sunday but I requested shipping per Fedex Ground. I forgot that the shop is in California, some my new phone is currently in a truck crossing the entire United States. Its estimated arrival is next Monday.

The last week I have been reading up on VoIP, and I found that it is possible to have a Dutch phone number and subscription that I can use from here.

I applied for a Dutch TN through XS4ALL, where I have a subscription for my website. My phone number is +31 878 721 747 (or 0878 - 72 17 47 in the Netherlands), and for most Dutch people the rates is 2 or 4 cents per minute, depending on the time of day ("interregionaal tarief"). There are also some other providers that offer DID numbers in Amsterdam and Utrecht but they charge about 9 euro per number per month, whereas this XS4ALL number is free.

Currently, I receive these types of phone calls on my laptop through a so-called Softphone application, but I have ordered a real SIP phone that will be delivered sometime next week. The great advantage will be that I will no longer have to have a computer running to place or receive phone-calls.

Sasha gave a me a very nice present for Christmas: noise-cancelling headphones!

This is truly a very special headset -- it filters out monotonous low noises by generating an "opposite" sound waves for those noises. Even when you're not listening to music it sounds like someone lowered the sounds of the world around you to a really, really low volume -- awesome.

I tried them for the first time on our long bus trip from New York to Washington and they worked great.