Fortunately, after a tip from someone on IRC I had already managed to get hold of the ‘sense’ nickname on Freenode. Despite the fact that now I have to cope with everything that makes sense on Freenode, I’ve decided to move mostly towards the nickname ‘sense’. There is a pending request on Launchpad from me to get the person who’s currently using ‘sense’ robbed of his nickname (inactive since registration), and I’ve already moved my wiki page from Qense to SenseHofstede.

In case ‘sense’ isn’t available, like on Twitter, I moved to ‘sehof’. On Identi.ca I’m also using the same username for the sake of consistency. On social networks, where the length of the username doesn’t matter, I am now using ‘sensehofstede’.

Summary

• Mostly: sense
• Twitter and Identi.ca: sehof

Blog

I’ve also registered a new domain name: sensehofstede.nl, and set my blog over. The new theme is completely own work, and a bit of an experiment. It’s still very much Work-In-Progress, and any feedback would be very welcome. I’m keeping the ‘qense.nl’ domain name, but it redirects to the new domain name.

It seems to be caused by a DDoS attack on their network in the city of Nijmegen attacking some specific servers within the network. The problem was solved by blocking the attacked IP addresses.

RewriteEngine         on
RewriteCond       %{HTTP_HOST}                 ^ubuntero\.qense\.nl$
RewriteRule         ^(.*)         http://qense.nl/$1 [R=301,L]

Easy, isn’t it? Now the search engine won’t get lost and on top of that I’ve got my authority at Technorati back to 15!

Content updates and action against creationism propaganda

Next to updating the current theme Minifrom version 1.07 to 1.1 I also updated the sidebar and added a page. Now you can see my FriendFeed at http://qense.nl/social-buzz. I did that to give a clearer overview of that and also to empty the sidebar a bit.
New in the sidebar is a Text widget containing buttons of things I support. One of them is in Dutch, so I’ll explain it to you.

Recently a believer of the creationism ideology created a leaflet about his beliefs together with some other Christian organisation. It is the year of Darwin and he thought it would be at the right time to have such an action now. A little bit more than 6 million families are going to get the leaflet which propagandises outdated denials of scientific discoveries.

You can read it at the website of the man: creatie.info. After I read it I felt slightly insulted because it portrays people who acknowledge scientific proves for Darwin’s theories as heartless beings, unable to feel compassion. I’m not a heartless person! However, it also amused me since most arguments are showing childish reasoning, something seen more often at people denying Darwin’s theories. Somehow they choose to not hear the overwhelming arguments and pick emotions as arguments.

Something I hear people like the writer of the leaflet say often: “But it can’t be that such a complex thing was just a coincidence!” Well, a traffic incident can also turn out to be very complex. Furthermore reasoning with ‘it can’t be’ arguments isn’t really scientific.

The button is pointing to a website that calls for returning the leaflet to the sender in case you got it. I think it’s a good thing to let the writer know we don’t want his uncontructive work that doesn’t only insult Darwin’s ‘believers’ — were you ever asked if you ‘believed’ Newton’s theories about the gravity? –  but also the human possibility for reasoning.

If you’re Dutch, spread the news!

Today I finally made some time free to have a look at the blog and decided to switch to the Mini theme. I really like the clean look and the three sidebars. The icons that are a part of this theme look much better than the previous ones.

Since I had more space in my sidebars I went looking for some more widgets. Next to some additions to the side panel I also installed some other plugins I stumbled upon. Here a list with a small description:

• Snazzy Archives, a plugin that creates a nice overview page of your archive. You can find it in the menu at the top of the page under Archive Overview.
• AJAX Shoutbox(aka Pierre’s WordSprew), the widget you can see at your right is indeed a shoutbox. Leave a message if you feel like!
• Live Blogroll, a plugin that shows the first parts of the posts on the blogs you link to when you hover over their names.Try it at the blogroll in the right sidebar.
• SEO Friendly Images, a plugin that adds and sometimes enhances both the alt and title attributes of images to make them XHTML Strict valid and improve the readability for search engines.

I’m curious to your opinions. What do you think of the new theme? Do you like the new plugins? Please leave a comment or a message in the shoutbox.

Although I didn’t find Google Analytics bad, it’s just easier to keep an eye on something that is integrated into the blog’s dashboard. Furthermore I find the way it presents the data better. I have a way better overview what blog posts attract the most attention and where my readers come from by showing the reffer URLs.

It also gave me some interesting information about what people think of my posts. So did I find this forum topic about Ultimatix at the forum of Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, a project that has strong ties with Ultimatix: http://forumubuntusoftware.info/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1365&start=70

One of the moderators of the forum found my blog post about the tool that should make the life for linux-newcomers easier: Ubuntu NL warns for Ultimatix.
He was pissed off, I could kiss his ass and should get the facts ‘strait’. Weird, I thought I just presented some facts.

After that some other users continued with this constructed criticism: criticasters of Ultimatix were cornballz, Ubuntu NL is arrogant and we arre all bashing something we don’t know a thing about. They continued with telling how great Ultimatix was; it did work, except for small things like the kernel not liking the mouse anymore or a broken Ultimatix. Fortunately that could be solved by reinstalling the system or removing the program from Synaptics and trying again. Easy!

What strikes me most is not the lack of constructive arguments or knowledge of the location of the Enter-key, but that the people who bashed the hardest were the moderators of the forum. This forum is the official support forum for Ultimatix and its staff doesn’t know how to behave or how to handle with criticism. Maybe they should read the code-of-conduct.

About them telling me to come to the forums to give feedback instead of critcizing. “What happened to being an open source community sharing and helping moto. Some people get super egos.”
First of all I’d like to say that what I posted was not just a rant on Ultimatix. It was a warning containing some detailed information on the problems, researched by members of Ubuntu NL. If I’m right some of them already have been fixed, but that’s not my problem now.
Secondly I don’t like to register on a lot of websites for things like this and I don’t see why it’s required here. I’m open to any discussion and (constructive) criticism and do not delete comments I don’t like. Reactions like this discourage me from contributing.

I hope I don’t sound too ranty, but I just would like to defend myself agains this. I have written better posts than this one, and more objective ones too, but I don’t like it when I’m attacked.
I appreciate that TheeMan tries to make Linux easier to use for newcomers, I don’t want to bash anyone. The intention of the post was to warn users for the possible dangers of the software.

Another change was the tagging. I requested to change the feed at Planet Ubuntu Users to ‘ubuntuweblogs’, because not all my posts are in English(sometimes they’re in Dutch, although that’s rare) and removed the ‘dutch’ and ‘english’ tags. Instead I’m using categories for that. Now I just need to change that all manually and I’m completely done. If you’ve got any suggestions, nice Twitter plugins or criticism, please comment this post. And I still need Twitter and Last.FM friends!

We zullen zien.

For my OpenID account, provided by Launchpad, I’ve added this code between <head></head> in /wp-content/themes/qense/header.php:

<link rel="openid.server" href="https://login.launchpad.net/" />

<link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/xxxxxxxx" />

<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="https://login.launchpad.net/+id/xxxxxxx/+xrds" />

This code comes from the Launchpad help page for OpenID. Of course, I replaced xxxxxxxx with my OpenID id. Now I can enter http://www.qense.nl/ when logging in with OpenID.
Now I just have to find a way to couple my WordPress account to my OpenID!

EDIT: I’ve just found out how to add OpenID accounts to your WordPress account. Just go to your profile and add your OpenID URL to Your Identity URLs. You have to login with that account to confirm it and you can login with that ID too.

And I’ve upgraded WordPress to 2.5, which included an improved admin panel. Now I’d like to change the tags dutch and english to two categories but I don’t know any tag to category convertors and it’s quite some work to change it all manually. So if you know a way, please leave a comment behind.

EDIT: I just discovered that it works for all things. If you just add /feed/ to a WordPress url you’ll get the feet for the posts displayed at that page. That means you can also get feeds from an archive.

Oh, maybe you noticed already, but I started to write in English. I will write in Dutch sometimes, but my postings about tech-stuff will be (mainly) in English.