Frans Pop

I'm shocked to learn that Frans has died.

Even more shocked to learn that, due to me sitting with my head in the sand, I almost missed it.

You'll be missed, Frans. I didn't always agree with you or your methods, but I deeply respected you for who you were, what you did, and what you were willing to do.

May you rest in peace.

goudengids.be

... or, 'yellow pages.be'. Or something.

I like it that there is an on-line version of the Belgian yellow pages. Who wants to look up a phone number in a huge book, anyway? And that's ignoring the fact that it isn't any good for the environment.

I also like it that the yellow pages are now no longer distributed by default on paper. You can still get them, if you so wish, but you have to explicitly request them.

Of course, searching an on-line database is also faster than flipping through pages until you find what you're looking for. What's more, you can limit your search to your location rather than whatever shops just happen to be in the version of the book that is distributed to your house. That makes it much more efficient, since rather than all thousands of computer shops in the whole province, you'll find the computer shops in your municipality. Or the ones that are in a radius around your address, if you choose that option.

Rather, that would be the case. But for some unfathomable¹ reason, truvo, the company behind the yellow pages, decided to make the option that gets you the names and numbers of companies that serve your region, rather than companies that actually are in your region, as the default. And since there's really n o limit to what companies can enter as the 'region' they serve, you suddenly get a name for a shop hundreds of kilometers away when all you wanted was to find the closest grocery store.

D'oh.

1 Yes, yes, I can guess that money has something to do with it. But whatever, that don't matter.

PostgreSQL 9.0 is here

In the realm of Real Databases, PostgreSQL has made their long-awaited 9.0 release. It comes with a bunch of interesting new features, not the least of which is builtin replication, and another bunch of interesting improvements to already-existing features.

My personal favourite:

LISTEN/NOTIFY now support a payload. Previously, I'd done things like storing a changelog in a table and then calling NOTIFY, or hackery with a NOTIFY string that included the primary key encoded somehow, resulting in the need for many LISTEN strings. But this is just so much easier, and much more, well, reasonable.

Also:

EXPLAIN enhancements. The output is now available in JSON, XML, or YAML format, and includes buffer utilization and other data not previously available.

Cute.

The best antispam feature, ever.

My comment form on my blog contains the following, right above the <textarea> element where the text can be entered:

<!-- To any spammers out there: Any submission to this form is
moderated: this means that only I will see your URLs, and I will not
visit them nor link to them. Thus, you can stop wasting our collective
time. -->

That, combined with the fact that my blog comment system is a home-grown thing, has meant that I haven't seen a single spammy comment anymore in months.

The same comment form has shown the same thing since ages in a <p> element right above the <form> element, but that apparently was missed by some spammers. Since adding the above comment, however, I've not received a single spam submission to that form in over a year.

Who says spammers are stupid?

Playing tennis

Just to give you an idea of how much I can procrastinate:

16 years after I first said I would start doing so, I have finally bit the bullet, and started taking Tennis classes.

Of course my physical condition, after more than 10 years of not doing any sport in a structured manner, is terrible; and as a result, my muscles are complaining to me almost every day now. I'm sure that's something which will diminish over time, as I shape up. At any rate, I'm enjoying it, and it seems like I'm not doing too bad. We'll see.

In slightly-related news, I finally stopped procrastinating on my latest NM. Sorry 'bout that.