You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …

After Chromebook: for fun and profit? @ 2014-10-05 I got myself an Acer C720p for cheap. It’s new, just cheap, as that’s how Chromebooks go :) It has a new-fangled touchscreen, which I actually tend to use while on Chrome OS. I hadn’t thought I would do so (hey …

If you get an ugly rectangular dropshadow in Ubuntu Gnome 14.10 with the gnome-staging ppa (because Gnome 3.14 is so slick), install the Intel graphics driver from ppa:mgedmin/ppa; this ppa has a patched xserver-xorg-video-intel that fixes this for Utopic users. source

You have this interesting project, written in Django. Maybe even in the excellent Django Rest Framework. You want to run some tests on it to know how it will cope with load under stress. Or you just want to repeat a bunch of steps from the outside a lot of …

While I was standardising my dotfiles I wanted to have an easy and quick way to update my projects so repositories weren’t out of date when I wanted to use them (for example when being offline on the train), and I didn’t want to go through them by …

I’m thinking about getting me one of those Chromebooks. Preferably a cheap, light, small one (the 11” Samsung for example), which I can almost literally throw into my backpack and take wherever I go. The first reason I’d do so is because I’m curious to the platform …

To counterweigh my professional life in which I (thankfully) build nice things in Python/Django, I have hobby projects in which I can thinker with whatever I want to build. Python is still my preferred language, but Django is not a necessity. I have some legacy projects of my own …

Sixteen years ago I had a pda. Not one of those nifty Palm devices or expensive Psion’s. No, a regular organizer; a little electronic device with a whopping 128KB of storage which you could fold shut like a litte book. Opened, it provided a nice little qwerty-keyboard and about …

Lately my work laptop has been acting up a bit after installation of a graphical driver went wonky. As I’m running a beta of Ubuntu Gnome on it, I don’t blame anything but the flux in which the packages exist for the moment, so I took it in …

We’ve all been there. Well, I’ve been there at least; before discovering the virtues of a real version control system, I just created a snapshot of my projects by tarring and compressing the directory tree. That way I’ve a bunch of histories locked inside backup dir per …

I’m a fan of version control systems, as they allow me to thinker with my files (both source code and text files with notes and such) to my heart’s delight without having to worry about thing getting lost. I can change and update programs, websites and such and …

I recently built a new at-home server, which basically is just a self-built NAS. Sharing via NFS worked immediately and other services were set up soon after. Then came Samba. Samba (or smb) is used for Windows shares, but in our home our Linux-based NAS speaks the protocol with things …

If you are running a unix-like machine, like a Linux workstation, or BSD or Apple Mac, you might be acquainted with the ~/.ssh directory. SSH stores known hosts in their, as well as your public and private SSH keys and more important stuff. The contents of a ~/.ssh/config look …

Have you looked at SpiderOak? It’s a Dropbox competitor and way more secure. Use this link with referral to get more space if you sign up (it’s free etc). If you do use that link, also use the promo code “WORLDBACKUPDAY” in addition to going there via the …

Today I helped a colleague troubleshooting a form in one of our Wordpress websites that returned a “404 Page not found”-error when it was submitted to itself. Of course, this was rather puzzling as the address was exactly the same as the page where you just filled the form …

I grew increasingly tired changing the column settings of the folders of my IMAP account in Thunderbird; I don’t need the ‘Read’, ‘Junk’ and ‘Thread icon’ columns for example, but would like to have the ‘Size’ listed. However, I needed to change that for all of my dozens of …

You might have noticed that this weblog has moved. It’s still exactly the same rantbox as it has always been - hopefully with more regular updates than it has seen for quite a while - but now you can find it on its own domain: dammit.nl. Links to the old …

If you want to log in using your Google account as OpenID (as Google is a provider), make sure you are logged in with that account and then use this url as ID on the site you’re visiting: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id [source]

Stack Overflow is a lot nicer as a source for good technical advice, but Experts Exchange still has quite some answers too; might come in handy for a second opinion/solution on which you can base your own. expert-sexchange is much less annoying with this bit of CSS added to …