Oliver Thylmann

Just submitted my Second TMA to the OU. That one was a lot harder to write then the first one but I think that I did ok. Some of the parts are better and others worse. But that is just how it is The first one got me 77 of 100 points, which seems to be very good, as you are really only going over 85% very rarely. 100 is not achievable as they would ask something like “ok, this guy has been perfect right? Nothing that could be improved? No better wording or other idea that could be introduced somewhere?”.
Otherwise, I have not posted a lot in the last few days. Well I have been very busy. Seems like our server from Dell should be done soon and I also have the tax stuff settled. Seems like you can import servers in the US without a problem and only need to pay a 0.21% handling fee, which is ok really. The server will be send to brussels and I will pick it up there and bring it here. Might be an idea to set it up in our place I figure rather than over in the US. We will see.
The other thing is that I have installed FreeBSD on my desktop and I must say that I really like it. KDE2 is looking rather nice. But then I tried using drag and drop to play an MP3 file with x11amp. Boy does BeOS get you spoiled
I had the idea that a ports section like in FreeBSD would be a great thing for BeOS. That would really rock. Just get apache installed and php4 and mysql, have a few depends there and you are ready to rock. Just update that with the help of BeBits each day and people can update that section also. Then they can just automatically be queried for action if some software is updated. Would be really cool. I think we need BONE so we can run httpd and php4 and mysql or something as this would really rock. I just like having that on my box. Hmmm…
Well I need to get ready for a birthday party today, so see you all soon and have a great day everyone, life rocks.
“If the average internet user gets a subpoena… he’s not going to the big law firm around the corner and say “defend me.” He’s going to stop talking, they’ve won. – Lauren Gelman, Director of public policy, EFF”

Good party

Server move is starting.
We need to move all e-mail and www to another server. Ship the mail and web server to a new location and then sell the other two servers and move all of their stuff to the new server. Wonderful. The party is starting.
Sendmail sucks (dmail rules! ) and I need to set up sendmail to take over mail for a few days from the mail server. Grrr…. this will be fun. Somebody remind me why I am doing an MBA?!?!?
Party time.

A lot of things happened in the last few days and most of them were really fun
First of all I started doing Tae-Bo, full body workout (as they put it) through a mix of kickboxing and fitness moves, via their instruction DVD. I really suggest everyone looking into this. It is a really fun way to get a bit more fit. I mean you really have fun doing it and I went a lot further in terms of effort with this than with other methods. I mean you have to do some work obviously to get an effect but I really see this working. The main problem at the start is that you have a hard time keeping up with some things, but if you do it with some friends together then you will have a great laugh. I mean you are doing some punch, punch, punch, kick series in slow motion and then the instructor says to speed it up and at first you are totally lost. I still have no idea how they do it in the fast version. I cannot even move my limbs that fast But I see myself getting there. Enough talking. Try it out or just ask something. It is hard to explain it really.
Of course other things happened too. I am really starting to dig php and scripting. It is getting more fun each day. I have now edited my homepage to be total php and I really dig creating only one main file and including some others depending on variables. I might totally remove that though once it looses it’s coolness factor. I am not yet sure if it is better to create one file and include others or create the content files and include the formating files. Hmmm… live is hard once you get to use its potential
We also moved our counter site lists to php now, which you can see at Counted!. It really rocks. And to add on that my brother just moved Counted! to the new statistics system and now we have a lot more added features in there. You have a total multi page statistics, a really advanced referrer system (which tells you if the people that come are new or old visitors from every url) and a lot more nice things. I still need to write the news items for the counters to tell people about it.
Grrr… we still need a mailing system to mail all webmasters though. Damn. You always need things don’t you?
Next to that we are close to getting our new server. We are moving hosting to Like Whoa (cool name eh? ) who are great and are buying a new server for that. We actually decided on a Dell server now. IBM is just too damn slow. Actually we are not even dealing with IBM anymore who said that they are not selling servers (yeah right, that’s why it took them 3 days to say that) and referred us to econocom. Those are nice people but also rather slow. Especially compared to Dell. So Dell got the cut.
Just one problem with all of them is that we need to buy the server in Belgium, get it delivered in Belgium and then we need to ship it to the New York. So much for global corporations.
Oh. I am currently at Deutsche Bank 24, and my brokerage account is Brokerage 24. Good. Now they changed everything, actually for the 1st of next month. To MaxBlue. Woohooo. And I will have no fees for my brokerage account. Well not exactly. If I buy something then I will have fees and those have just risen 33%. Aha! Well it is flat fee. Which is good if you buy stocks in 10000 EUR chunks but that is not really what I am doing (yet ) so it is rather bad for me. I think I need to talk to them.
Another tip. Always talk to companies before you cancel an account. Mobile phone providers will give you kick ass deals if you do that
Back to doing stuff. So many company ideas in my head it is sickening. I would like to form 3 other companies from the top of my head. Grrr… Oh did I tell you I need beaming?

Just read an article on fastcompany.com about a very cool e-mail. Seems like the statistics represented in there are roughly correct. Very insightful.
If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans; 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 ( yes, only 1 ) would have a college education
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
Something to think about.

Ahhh… I finally found a picture that is not 3 years old. This one is from 2 articles I have written for clickz.com. They can be found here and here.
I actually went further with scripting which is really cool. I now have a backup happeneing and mails sent to be once a day to tell me how big the directory is and how much space is left on the drive.
The one I just wrote will send me an sms message when the database crashes and I need to take a backup and copy that over. Doing that automatically is a bit too risky in my mind until I see that the system is fully working. I am not sure yet, the if statement is kind of a hack
Next thing will be a password protected wap page that will let me perform the required operations to get the database back online
This is fun. And I just started converting my homepage, which barely exists, so it is a good time, to php. Learning php is fun I have to say. Once all our domains are updated then I will go working some more with MySQL too. Woohooo… turning coder again on my old age

Wow. My mother just called. Did I ever tell you that my parents are going nuts on their old age?
They just called to tell me that they rented a place on the cost of Belgium (my parents live in Brussels) for several months this summer starting May. Right at the sea front next to the beach. It rocks! I really don’t know what went into them, but quite frankly I do not really care
This place is just 2 hours or so by car from where I am (Aachen/Germany) and this means that I will be able to have a few days of relaxing from time to time at the cost in belgium. It is even big enough to bring some friends (some, not many ).
I really have to be very thankful to be blessed with so wonderful parents. And no this is not just because they just rented the place. I have so much to thank them for it is amazing and I will try my best to pay them back to the best of my abilitiy.
To quote the Dalai Lama: Live a good, honorable life. Then, when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

Ok. I know the US holds their right to carry guns high but come on!!! How does an 8 year old get his hands on a gun??????
Here is a story about an 8 year old, 3rd grader!!!, that threatened a 9 year old girl with the gun. In January a 10 year old student was arrested with an 9mm pistol in his hand bag. In a report from 1998-99 they found 39 fireamrs, 457 knives and 449 other weapons. Damn!
Come people, think! I know we have knives in school here too (Germany) but there is one simple thing you can do. Get those damn guns of the street. Yeah yeah, they will always find a gun if they really want to. But they will not find it in some drawer at home! And no, tighter laws on where to keep the guns is not an option.
I really do not get it why people still need to be able to have a gun at home. It’s not as if 70000000 people die here each day because some nut comes into their appartment and their only option would have been to kill that person with their own gun. I actually feel quite safe here in germany.
And another thing. What does the world expect happens. I am a small school kid (no I am not, I am just making the assumption ) with not enough attention. Now what do I see on TV? These kids with 100000 cameras in their face and articles all over the news that killed somebody in school. I desperately want attention. I need attention. I want to be noticed. I can find a gun easily. If I am neglected and see no other way then I would also go into a school with a gun and start threatening people. I doubt I would shoot, I mean I just can’t imaging what these kids are thinking, but I can see that they might just see no other way at the time then to prove their point.
Hmmm… back to work.

Woohooo… good night. I just started with scripting a bit again. This is something I started doing reading the BeOS Bible from Scot Hacker and especially the Scripting part from Chris Herborth. Scot did an amazing work with that book and Chris’ Scripting part is just amazing I think. Especially if you want to start learning scripting. It is very basic at the start and get’s into scripting in BeOS at the end. Very cool stuff.
Actually now I did a backup script on a FreeBSD box and also another one that sends me an e-mail daily about the free space on the hard disk. Not too fancy but really a cool thing if you just did very little scripting up till now and also did not do this for some time.
One of the great learning experiences for me was, among others, trying to alter Scot Hacker’s TrackerBase script which runs BeTips.
Enough praising Scot now though
I really hate looking at the laptop running Windows as I write this on the desktop in BeOS. Grrr… Somebody code a driver for Lucent’s WaveLAN cards for BeOS!
Ok, it is after 3am, I might be a bit confused in my head. Especially after I was taken out for dinner today to a Thai restaurant and choose to eat something spicy. I actually like spicy. Really. But boy was this spicy. They had something like 6 different degrees of spicy and my brother told me that 4 would be ok as 3 is really still ok for him. I generally eat more spicy then he does. Ah well. I took 4 and I will not do it again. I mean it was _very_ good, but I am only now starting to regain feeling in my tongue.
I really have to go there again. There are so many things I would still like to eat so many things, do so many things, see so many things, feel so many things, … live is good today.