The owner of this car we saw parked the other day at South Point must not like his or her job very much.

The Dutch national public library has a research service. You can ask them questions, typically about books but also other topics, and they will research the answer for you.

Mieke suggested that I should post a question that has been in my mind for a very long time: to find the author or title of books that I read at school when I was around 11 or 12 years old.

Unfortunately the research service could not answer my question, so it is now published as a hersenkraker (challenging puzzle) on Aladin.bibliotheek.nl:

"Ik zoek een jeugdboekenserie, maar ik weet de titels of auteur niet. Ik las het toen ik zo'n 10 tot 12 jaar oud was, in 1988 - 1990. Het was een spannende serie, met meer dan 1 boek, ik meen ieder geval 4 stuks. Het ging over kinderen die in aanraking met heksen komen. Het verhaal speelde zich veel 's nachts af. Een belangrijk plot element was dat heksen niet over stromend water konden vliegen. Hierdoor konden de hoofdpersonen zich af en toe in veiligheid brengen."

Michael Jackson died this afternoon, sad news.

I have fond memories of a concert he gave in Amsterdam and not just because of the concert, it was a lot of fun.

A great musician.

You may have noticed that the website has been really slow in the last month or two. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and I'm happy to say that the speed is back to normal.

The problem started two months ago when a new DSL modem was installed and the website started to work really slow. Jaap and I have done a lot of research to see what happened, including re-wiring lots of cables and switches and network cards... thank you so much! The first suspect was the new modem, a "Fritzbox", but all the settings looked fine and there was nothing in the log files. Traceroute told us that performance was quite decent. Thanks also to Ben from OpenNMS for your help.

In the end, it turned out to be unrelated to cables -- instead, there was a configuration setting on the server ("DNS servers") that needed to be updated. Once that was done, performance was back to normal. A great relief.

Before (41 seconds for the main page):

[guus@server ~]# curl http://www.guusbosman.nl > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 23813    0 23813    0     0    579      0 --:--:--  0:00:41 --:--:--  6034

After (less then a second for the main page):

[guus@server ~]# curl http://www.guusbosman.nl > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 23813    0 23813    0     0  36469      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 69431

The quick fix (before updating /etc/resolv.conf):

#
# HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP addresses
# e.g., www.apache.org (on) or 204.62.129.132 (off).
# The default is off because it'd be overall better for the net if people
# had to knowingly turn this feature on, since enabling it means that
# each client request will result in AT LEAST one lookup request to the
# nameserver.
#
HostnameLookups Off

Tonight I saw a deer from really close by.

For a lot of people here deer are very common, somewhat likes ducks are in Holland, and deer are even considered somewhat of a nuisance since they damage gardens. For me seeing a deer is something special. It seemed to be a younger deer, and it wasn't scared at all.