Wilmer's stuff - Life

edns-client-ip

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:16:09 +0100

Finally, the Internet-Draft I was working on with my team over the last months made it to the public.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/01/proposal-to-extend-dns-protocol.html
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-00.txt

This draft was the main purpose of my visit to IETF76 last year. I'll have to go to 77/78 this year then to hopefully get this idea accepted as a working group item.

It's interesting to see all the comments coming up claiming that this is evil and meant for tracking purposes just because it has the name Google on it... :-/

Google Public DNS

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:13:03 +0100

Today at work my first user facing product was released, Google Public DNS. I've worked a lot on it over the last months and it was actually the reason for my visit to NY this Summer. :-)

But now, finally after a long time, I can actually start calling the thing by its name instead of saying "my secret project at work", which makes me very happy.

Praise, complaints and comments about the service are welcome! :-)

Back from Japan

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:06:55 +0100

I'm back ... for almost two weeks already. Getting used again to bad weather (today's a very foggy and cold day in Dublin), working and all the other things of daily life. Japan was fantastic. I'll be careful to not sound like your average "everything's better in Japan" idiot, but admittedly, there were some things there I really liked.

One of the first things I noticed was that a rule about escalators I really like is actually enforced over there. Wherever I've been so far escalators are always full of people who don't understand how stairs work; they think the fact that the escalator goes up means they can just put their lazy feet on it and wait (forgetting that for lazy people we already invented elevators :-P). Many civilizations have tried introducing a "stand still on the left, walk on the right" rule, but Japan's the only place where I've seen people all obeying it.

Getting around there indeed turned out to be challenging at times. Even though people (at least from "my generation") learn English for about ten years at school, many people still don't or hardly speak it. This was never really a problem though. Menus in restaurants have pictures and pointing at things is the most successful international language ever invented. :-) One of the first days I had sushi in a place just a few steps away from my hotel in Tokyo. While eating my meal, the man behind the bar (probably also the owner of the place) came to me with a map, asking me to point at where I come from. Also, the little origami bird he folded for me from my chopsticks wrapper is still sitting on my desk here. :-D

The ramen place I went to for breakfast one of the first days was also amazing. Not so much because of the food (which was also good), but because of the size. Literally, it was a room of maybe just over 2m wide, about 10m deep, with a bar separating it into two small 10m × something areas. Two people working on one side, and ten seats on the other (all occupied, most of the time).

My camera claims I made over 700 pictures there. Obviously there are many duplicates and worthless pictures, and after soring there will probably only be around 100 left. I hope to put them online soon, and probably with some more stories. I wrote too much now already.

All I know is that I'm definitely going there again.

Good morning from Tōkyō

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:14:02 +0100

It's always morning somewhere, and right now it's still morning in Tokyo! (Although not for long anymore.)

I arrived here yesterday morning, found my hotel and some good food. I'll spend the next three or so days here and then take the Nozomi (very fast train) to Hiroshima for IETF76.

My current plan is to find some breakfast, then go to Ueno Park and Akihabara (which is supposed to be like Fry's but then good). And generally just see what the city is like. Planning to join the Tokyo Bicycle Tour on Saturday, also. Any suggestions for other things to do here are welcome, assuming they have nothing to do with anime. :-P

Fun in Irish shops

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:58:31 +0200

The Daily WTF once posted an image like this IIRC, and I thought "Come on, I see this all the time in Irish supermarkets!". For example, I saw this in Tesco last Saturday:

One 2l bottle of 7up for EUR 1.92. (How much does that cost in The Netherlands BTW, I wonder...) Now 2l is more than enough for me, but imagine it's not and maybe I want two bottles. HAVE THEY GOT A DEAL FOR ME!

TWO bottles for only EUR 3.95! What a bargain! But, wait... 2×1.92=3.84, so I pay five cents more per bottle if I get two. At least they're nice enough to give the price per litre for people who don't like maths. :-) Maybe this is Ireland's way of keeping its people on a healthy diet?

In other news, I miss Maplin from two years ago. It used to be a useful store for electronics (and components) and there used to be a guy who pretty much knew my name and actually knew what he's selling. But now... Jelena went there to get me some 2.5mm heatshrinks. I gave her a pack of 1.5mm ones with order numbers of what I need written on the label. Back home, it turned out that the guy in the shop tossed away the 1.5mm pack she had with her, for one reason of the other ...

Or not? Last weekend I was in the shop myself, and guess what I saw in the rack of 1.5mm heatshrinks? MY PACK OF HEATSHRINKS! With my handwriting on it and everything. Even better, opened and everything (I already used quite a few centimeters since I bought the pack months ago).

That's not how you get yourself happy customers, guys...

One week of New York

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:53:52 +0200

One week passed and in 24 hours I will already be almost halfway on my way back!

New York is great, both as a city and as a Google office, and I'll definitely try to have some more trips to here in the future. The first night I walked here, on my way from the Penn Ave LIRR station to the apartment, I already decided I'd spend as little time in the apartment as possible. Weather forecasts looked like they were going to get in the way, but the actual weather was pretty fine (almost) all the time.

What did I see? Loads of high buildings, walked along the water quite a bit, saw the building site that used to be the WTC (I expected to see some monument, but nope!), Times Square, a view from on the General Electric Building, the Statue of Liberty from far away, a tiny piece of Central Park, another park near it closer to the water, and blisters on my feet after walking for many hours especially during the weekend. I tried to not be a typical tourist and probably failed, but I must say that I saw a few of these things by accident by just running into them while pointlessly walking around through the city.

I made over 500 pictures and will try to make a decent selection of what's actually interesting and original. This is probably going to take a while... :-(

Time to catch some sleep now; in the morning I will finish packing and spend half a day at work. After that I'll get the joy of travelling to/being at JFK airport the night before the Independence Day weekend. My planning was definitely "splendid" with that detail in mind...

New Amsterdam

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:49:43 +0200

For the next week I'll be writing from (who knows how often, keeping my blogging frequency in mind :-P) New York. Arrived yesterday, flied Aer Lingus long-haul for the first time and I'm actually quite satisfied, especially because they did not charge me for sitting at the exit. :-)

Staying in the middle of Manhattan and will spend most of my time at work, not so much doing touristy stuff. Although the nights will be long and this place does look like it's suitable for night photography. So let's see if I can finally put my Sigma f/1.4 lens to work.

Ooh. Also this seems to be my fiftieth blog post. 50 posts in 32 months. I guess that's not too bad. :-P

Returning to Dublin already

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:30:38 +0200

And my time in Mountain View is over again!

Had a busy time. At work, but also pretty cool weekends. Best of all was a one-hour flying lesson last Sunday, in a real Cessna 182. Pictures will definitely come!

One picture I have now is a fine piece of Macintoy PoS X security. And yes, those buttons are clickable even before I type my password to "unlock" my screen. I'm starting to wonder why we're even allowed to use these things for work purposes.

My laptop received a tour through LA!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:43:08 +0200

This week I'm frantically reloading the UPS package tracking page of my laptop shipment every few hours, and it looks like last night my package received a free tour through LA!

Back where it was about 24 hours ago apparently. :-( And LA is over 600 km away from here so I really wonder if they're still going to make it for delivery tomorrow... While looking at the map to see where these places are, I did notice one odd detail:

Apparently there's another thing called Mountain View in California. Did the package courier get confused? :-)

Update: Apparently it arrived in San Francisco at 17:40 today even without a departure scan from Vernon. I guess I should just take this tracking page with a grain of salt. :-)

Mountain View, TAPFS and yet another gallery

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 03 May 2009 06:28:58 +0200

Writing from Mountain View again! Landed on Thursday, spent one day at work so far and today I got my bicycle fixed up so I can use it for commuting again. It's nice how year after year, the thing still works for me, all it needs when I come is some extra air in the tires. :-) One thing California is really not doing well this year is the weather, though. It's raining for two days already!

In other news, I should definitely be plugging The Australian Pink Floyd Show in this post. They were in Dublin about a week ago and they're amazingly good. Even a singer that sounds a lot like Roger Waters! The show was great too, with inflatable animals and everything, and the music sounded perfect. This tour they're playing all of The Wall, and for that that means not just a "copy" of the CD, but also many of the little filler pieces that PF used to play during the concerts.

Also working on a bit of OSS these weeks, adding more "diversity" to the already bloated landscape of gallery webapps. I'm making a difference though, SRSLY! I found myself making a lot more pictures since I bought my first dSLR and many of them aren't really part of an album/event or anything like that. I could just put them on Flickr or Picasa and be done with it, but that'd break my time-wasting tradition of hosting everything myself.

I already use F-Spot to manage my pictures, so it'd be nice to have a web gallery that can automatically use tag information from F-Spot. Turns out there are two programs that can do this already. They're not for me though; they automatically export everything, and there are pictures that I'd rather keep for myself. :-P

I then tried to adapt "original" to my wishes, but gave up when I saw it doesn't quite use templates and am rewriting it now using web.py and Cheetah templates. Going well, but TBH I feel homesick to PHP. Not that it's such a great language, it's more that I fail to understand why there are 982397832 different webapp frameworks for Python/WSGI/mod_python/whatever instead of just one that actually works.

This is a work in progress, and the progress is good. :-) Once it's done, I'll be able to post pictures here of my new radio-controlled airplane and other neat stuff. Yaaaay...

Oxegen 2008

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:54:07 +0200

As Jelmer already said, Irish people rock. Spent last weekend at the Oxegen festival, and I really meant to write something about it, so that's what I'm doing now. :-)

A little while ago Jelena saw an ad about Oxegen on TV. As soon as I heard of it, I checked the lineup and got as happy as a four-year-old kid on his birthday. I absolutely had to go there! Until then I really had the impression none of the bands I care about ever come here but just to the UK. Turns out I was wrong.

Aphex Twin was there, the schedule promised a half-an-hour gig, which turns out to be a whopping ninety minutes of, errrm, eargasm. And of course RATM on Sunday evening was great. But what we both really liked were the people. Some say that at Lowlands everyone's your best friend. Sure, the atmosphere there is nice, but still, it's a festival full of closed and shy Dutch people who live for themselves. :-P

The Irish at Oxegen, however, were absolutely lovely. Everyone seems to know you. People are more open (like how people here are anyway, especially outside Dublin), kinder. Random people walk greet you and/or want high fives, especially after good gigs. Of course the free hugs, people who ask how tall I may be (complaints about my hairs also appeared near the end of the festival, but I must admit my hair "styling" doesn't really improve from not seeing any shampoo for four days ;-)), someone even asked if we were maybe speaking Finnish (I guess this was the first time he heard Dutch)... At the Seasick Steve concert I helped someone to make one movie, since it was easier for me to hold his camera high enough to actually see something. The guy thanked me at least three times. :-D At Lowlands, where everone's supposed to be "your best friend", nobody trusts you enough to hold his/her camera in the first place...

The camping really never "slept", many people had a guitar with them, everyone speaks with a great accent, neighbours who explained us how to say "Shut up" and "Kiss my ass" in Gaelic. And of course, at the end of the festival, most people were too lazy to actually clean up their tent. We left a camping that was so full of tents, but otherwise so empty...

It was fantastic. Just a little bit expensive. More than 200 euros for the ticket. Any decent food costed at least seven euros. You even had to pay ten euros to get a programme (which was 50% advertisements). A beer costed eight euros (although you could get three back if you return the cup) There were lots of security folks on-site, I suppose a lot of the money went to them. Even at the campings there was always a security person on every 50 (?) meters. Not that they could prevent some tent graffiti and camping fights from happening, but okay...

Maybe the most amazing thing was that, even though this was a festival with almost 80k visitors, we never ever ever had to queue for ANYTHING. Well, okay, we had to wait for a few minutes to enter the supermarket once, but once we were inside everything went very smoothly, and we were back in the tent in no-time with some buns and slices of cheese (much better/lighter on the stomach for breakfast than the hotdogs most people were eating).

Anyway, it was absolutely great, and well worth the extra money. I can go on about this for ages, but I should be sleeping now. Thanks for reading this until the last line. ;-)

knock knock from Mountain View

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:07:20 +0200

Maintaining a weblog indeed seems to be one of those things I'd better not be doing. I'm in Mountain View for a month and two days already and this is the first time I actually write something here instead of postponing it. Good, because in five days I'm leaving already so it'd be too late. Today's Memorial Day, an American bank holiday, so I'm not even at work.

Had a good time here, both at work and in the weekends. More productive than last year, and more exciting evenings and weekends. My bicycle was still waiting for me, and after I blew off all the dust it gathered in almost a year time, it's quite capable of getting me to and back from work again. :-)

Of course with how well EUR is doing compared to USD, one should always spend some of his/her time in the US on Amazon.com. I decided to do the same and am quite hooked to Mario Kart DS now. It's just a fantastic and very addictive game. Also bought a Nokia N800, which is a great toy, but not as great as the DS.

Last Saturday hoyhoy took me to a comedy club in Santa Cruz. Kasper Hauser (of SkyMaul fame) was there, which was quite amusing. We failed to see what was funny about the other artist though, especially since we were pretty much the only persons not laughing at all. :-)

Other hilights include how I found out telephones do not like salty water and taking a non-triband spare phone to the US is pointless. I'm a bit sad about my poor 6310i (I tried to save it by washing it out with non-salty water and then letting it dry for more than a day but it didn't help) and am not sure about what to get now. I'll probably wait for the GPhone, which' existence I don't have to deny anymore. :-)

Anyway, it's almost twenty degrees (Celsius, obviously, Fahrenheits are just too confusing and illogical :-P) outside so what am I doing in the living room? Time to check out this "sun" thing while I still can!

24!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:31:27 +0200

Yep, another birthday passed, and I celebrated it with my father and grandparents, here in Dublin. My grandparents never travelled by airplane so far, so it was quite an adventure. Unfortunately they had to get to know the great Irish weather here. But then again, it isn't all that different from the Dutch weather...

So a little while after my complaint about NTL blocking traffic to some sites, they now block access to all sites ... they cut me off. :-) Still waiting for my ADSL. This is Ireland, so if they say it'll take two weeks to ocnnect you, you do have to add two more. (That's how it works with appointments at least, I'm told. If you have an appointment at x, make sure you don't actually show up before x+15 min!) Oh heck, fortunately most bigger cities know these things called "security-unconscious neighbours" and "open access point"... ;-)

Still want to do some BitlBee snapshot release, maybe tomorrow. The new Jabber groupchat support works very well, it's working perfectly at work for over two months already, and I'm actually not even the only one who uses it. :-) And who knows when this will become a stable release... Clearly I've been too ambitious with adding new stuff, and too lazy to finish all the details to make it worth releasing. :-(

Oh yeah, and the new website rocks! But I suppose most people saw it already by now.

Got a place!

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:22:09 +0200

It's a week ago already since I moved into my new apartment. I managed to find one very close to work. I can pretty much walk from my desk at home to the one at work in five minutes. :-) It's not that I'm lazy, I was actually looking for a place a bit further away, but this apartment is pretty big and I like that. Might make some pics later.

Also working on BitlBee Jabber MUC support again, and it works pretty well already. Actually I use it all the time at work by now. No more need for crappy GUI Jabber clients. :-D

Panorama++

blog@wilmer.gaast.net (Wilmer van der Gaast) — Sun, 27 May 2007 23:41:21 +0200

Today I finally thought of making multiple pictures of things too big to fit in one picture, to merge them into one image at home. The results are pretty cool, I think. I walked to Saint Stephen's Green first, you can see the center of the park on the picture. There's one easter egg hidden here, you can see a father with two girls walking here twice. Thanks to Roel for finding that one. :-) On this picture I didn't force the same exposure settings for every picture, so it looks like the grass isn't the same colour everywhere.

I also passed by the department of the prime minister. Although the exposure is fixed here, the picture is a "bit" distorted. There's a second version, which is kind-of straight horizontally, at least. Not really perfect, though.

So yeah, I'm back in Dublin. Spent a few days in .nl when I came back, but it's time to go back to work, and find a house. I tried to get something last week, but someone else applied for the house before I did. :-( I hope to get something soon though, it's time to stop living in hotels all the time. :-/

cp: Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb (live) !!!