Helvensteijn.com

Dopey is a newborn robot Camarasaurus. That’s right, I got myself a Pleo. Not a Xmas present (otherwise I’d have unpacked it too soon), the timing is purely coincidental. It has actually more to do with the fairly generous end-of-year bonus from my work, in spite of the financial crisis. So Dopey has just “hatched” … Read more

Just a post to commemorate that 40 years ago today, Douglas Engelbart held The Mother of All Demos (video), introducing concepts such as the computer mouse, hyperlinks and e-mail. Taken for granted today, back in 1968 those were things no one had ever heard of. Just think, without the mouse, graphical user interfaces probably never … Read more

This post is in Dutch as it concerns Dutch politics. Als het goed is heeft ieder huishouden afgelopen zaterdag een brief van minister Ab Klink ontvangen over het Elektronisch Patiënten Dossier (EPD) dat op stapel staat. Ik, en met mij vele anderen, zijn het totaal niet eens met deze gang van zaken. Niet alleen vanwege … Read more

I spent the last few hours copying everything from the old server to my new virtual machine. And a few minutes ago, I updated the DNS entry for the helvensteijn.com domain. It’ll take some time for the change to propagate across the internet, but soon, everybody should have this web site served by my new … Read more

Just two days ago, I received my new iMac. And this night, my new virtual machine went online. It will be running this web site in the near not-too-distant future. Right now, this site sits quite comfortably on a shared hosting account. However, shared hosting has its limits, and with a virtual machine (a so-called … Read more

Today, I received my new 24" Apple iMac. I opted for the 2.8 GHz model, with 2 GiB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive. The full specs can be found here. Oh, and I chose the Bluetooth keyboard, because I already have the corded version. As usual, here’s a picture of the beauty: … Read more

Last Monday early in the morning, my sister gave birth to a daughter, making me become uncle for the first time. The child has been given the name Janna, and on birth she weighed 3140 grams and measured 48 centimeters. I’m not exactly an expert in these things, but according to both her mother and … Read more

I’ve made a few small tweaks to my new design. There are always some things that don’t exactly work as planned, things still needing to be worked out, and things that simply came up along the way. First of all, there was nothing to open full-size images in-page for thumbnails, they just behaved like normal … Read more

Yes, it’s finally finished (I think), so a few minutes ago, I took my new theme online, the third one in about 16 months. I call it TWAIN, or Theme Without An Interesting Name in full. If you own a scanner, you’ll probably know where I got my inspiration for that. So, besides the looks, … Read more

Last Monday, WordPress 2.6 was released. Because I grew more and more unhappy with my WordPress installation hanging together by plugins and hacks, I saw this release as a good moment to do a completely clean install. I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all … Read more