Archive for August, 2007
Holidays
This time of year, it seems a lot of people are taking a few days off to go some place the sun always shines.
Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Egypt are popular destinations, as is France for most Dutchies.
Next week, I’m also AWOL, I’m going to Austria with my girlfriend to breathe in some healthy and fresh mountain air, and get some excercise by walking the mountain trails.
Because of my holidays, I will most likely not post anything for the upcoming couple of weeks, unless our accommodation not only features a stunning view but also (wireless) internet.
I’m definately not counting on it, so you’ll have to bear with me here as I’m already starting to show withdrawal symptoms by simply thinking about it.
Oh well, I’ll just drink another coffee and start pondering how to get through the day 
Government regulation of market functions in NL
Posted by Maarten in Argumentation on August 15, 2007
Yes, today I will post a message about market functions. As many of you know, I study Economics and Informatics which kind of tells you the theoretical how of this post.
"de Volkskrant" informed us August 7th about plans made by dutch parties SP and CDA to limit the trade of tickets to concerts and festivals via the internet. Unfortunately, the original article is in dutch, so for any english speaking visitors I apologize.
This unlikely combination of the CDA (centre-right) and SP (outright left) produces a proposal for a law which a) cannot be enforced, and b) goes straight against the government’s idea to let the market function in a realm of different markets flourish.
The reason for all this is the fact that internettraders often buy tickets to concerts and festivals by large quantities (the article says ‘some’ to ‘dozens’) and try to sell them when the concert or festival is sold out for a much higher price. An example are tickets to the Lowlands festival where tickets were available for around €125, they now ‘do’ between €250 and €300 via traders.
Unpleasant as it is, to pay more than the regular price; we are Dutch after all, it is regular market function at work. When the demand is higher than the supply, the price goes up. Regular fans already bought their tickets to the festival or concert directly after the sales started by going to sales points as soon as possible, and those who want to ‘outsource’ this quick response just pay the price for doing so.
Yes, they may be mad by paying twice the price (or more) for a ticket, but it is a consequence of waiting (too long). Yes, it is unpleasant, and yes, the high prices are there because of the late buyers and clever sellers. But approving legislation to monitor and even limit prices of tickets to maximal the original price is unwanted interference in the market, and should not be accepted. My advice to the CDA and SP: please follow the government on this subject: do not propose laws the regulate the market.
Commuting boring?
People always say commuting is very boring as there is nothing to bee seen, and as they cannot do what they want at that time.
I very much disagree; in the public transportation there’s always something going on. And no, I don’t mean the trains not running on time.
The public transport is always filled people, and as some might know: looking at people is the best thing to do.
Safely chuckling at them from within your seat is the best you can do in a train or metro.
While looking at people can be fun; doing so for three hours can get a bit lame so there’s always other thing to see, such as the following. I saw and photographed it on the train between Rotterdam Centraal en Schiedam Centrum and thought it might be from someone else particularly bored (and in love).
More maintenance work
The folks over at WordPress keep on working to create a better experience for us all.
This time it is a security upgrade for the 2.0-branch, which brings the software up to quite a nice number: 2.2.2
Several updates have been fixed, including several severe flaws, including a XSS-hack.
All solved bugs can be found here. I usually don’t post these kinds of upgrades, however this update is quite important due to the XSS-vulnerability, so I’ve posted it nonetheless.
EDIT: It is becoming more and more apparent: I’m tinkering with the blog quite a lot. I’ve (re-)created the link-widgets that can be viewed on your right as they’ve been absent since a previous upgrade. I’ve been foolish enough to simply discard the parent folder as I figured nothing important resided in it; but I was wrong.
However, rewriting them was a simple job, and so they’re back.
Technical problems & migration issues
Yesterday my hoster decided to migrate from version A of his software to version B, which wouldn’t be such a problem when everything went well. However, you’ve probably guessed by reading the title of this post that it didn’t went well. Backups were made, and the migration was done, backups were restored and everything failed to work. Bugger. It turned out the auto_increment values of the primary keys in my database didn’t get migrated as well, so all tables in the database didn’t have any primary keys nor did the have auto_increment values where they should’ve had them. Luckily, I’m not a tech-savvy so I was able to fix it quite easily by walking through the database and editing the tables manually. Therefore, it all works again. Luckily. So: re-enjoy browsing my now repaired database 
Update: Today I’ve added a code-highlighter to this blog. Why? Well, you’d never know it, but I used to, and still do actually code quite a bit. Mostly PHP now, but Java, C# and JS are also part of my repertoire. An example of this highlighter is the following: [source:php]/*
* Comment
*/
function hello()
{
echo “Hello!”;
return null;
}
exit();[/source]