I’m going to post a few separate updates, but I will predate those, so you will see them below this one, just as if I posted them long ago. Nowbody will know I didn’t.

What a mess it has been to move our phone line and internet connection.

We started by calling KPN to inform them we would be moving on September 17. We received a confirmation that our phone line would be transfered on September 29! We called to say the date wasn’t correct and so we received a new confirmation of the corrected date.

We first received a letter saying that (because it’s a new house) some work still had to be done. Later, it was confirmed that all the necessary preparations had been done.

In the mean time, we had cancelled our old internet provider per September 17th and subscribed to a new provider per that same date. However, our new provider called to inform us the request could not be processed until the new phone line would be active. That would be, for all we knew, on September 17th. From then it would take up to 5 weeks to get the ADSL working!

So we called KPN to try to move the activation date forward. We called four times that day. We were told it wasn’t possible, because we had already changed the date once (which was their fault, not ours). We were told there was nothing we could do, not even request a new phone line. The KPN woman even hung up on us! So we called again, and got someone else, who put us on hold… forever. So we called again and got someone on the line who actually helped and moved the date forward. We even got a confirmation letter with the new date: September 9th. It cost us more than an hour calling to an expensive service number, but hey, we got a result.

September 10: we’re disconnected! The phone is offline. Luckily, the internet connection still works! However, our new phone line isn’t working… So we call KPN (with a mobile phone of course). They cannot seem to find a record of us being connected on September 9th. They even deny the confirmation letter we got! So they did disconnect our old line, but they cannot connect our new line. When we ask them to reconnect our old line, they say we will be called back about that. That never happens…

On September 18th, the day after we moved, we still don’t have a working telephone line. So we call KPN and they tell us they cannot give us an activation date! However, we will be called back about it within four working hours. Four working hours later, it is the next Monday, September 21st. We are called back and told that we will be called back the next day. The next day we are called back and told that we will be connected the next day! Then, on Wednesday, September 23rd, our phone line finally works!

So, our new internet provider had told us the request for the new ADSL connection could not be processed until the phone line would be active. We had told them that would be September 9th, after we had received that confirmation letter from the KPN. It wasn’t to be… The provider tried to request the ADSL connection after Septemer 9th, although they had said they couldn’t do that if the line wasn’t active and although earlier they could perfectly well see the status of the phone line. So the request failed because the phone line wasn’t active yet, and the request was cancelled. Yes, cancelled. But they didn’t tell us. Not until we called them on September 23rd to inform them that our phone line was active. So we had to request a new subscription. By phone of course, but not the number we were calling at the moment. We asked if they could put an “URGENT” on the request, but for that we had to call yet another number. Well, after some more calls in the following weeks, we finally got the installation package last week with a letter saying that our internet connection should work on October 13th. But boy, are we lucky or what? When we installed the modem yesterday, the connection worked immediately! How about that?

My old laptop had become soooo slow. Even after completely reinstalling Windows XP, but hardly any other software (yes, a browser, office suite, and a few more), it still seemed ten times as slow as when I bought it. I blame Windows for that; obviously XP is not what it was five years ago.

Anyway, I searched around, mainly at laptopshop.nl, and was about to order an Acer (Aspire 5738G, to be precise), when I saw that Dell had a discount on the Studio 15. The specs were similar to the Acer and now the price was almost the same as well. I chose the Dell.

The main specs are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 (2.1 GHz)
• 4 GB DDR2 memory
• 320 GB 7200 rpm SATA hard disk
• 512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 graphics card
• 15.6″ widescreen display (1366 × 768)
• DVD +/- RW drive
• Integrated webcam
• 9-cell 85W battery

The only thing that bothers me, not just with this one, but with similar laptops as well, is the low resolution of the display. Even the one I am working on right now, which is five years old, has a 15″ display with 1400 × 1050 pixels. If you want something like that right now (1440 × 900), you have to go for at least a 17″ display, or be willing to spend some more money on a Sony Vaio.

Anyway, if all goes well, my new laptop will be delivered next Wednesday.

Update (2009-7-22): my laptop has arrived. This afternoon, two packages were delivered at my door:

Some first impressions, after working with it for a couple of hours:

• Microsoft sure did a great job in creating the most annoying piece of software ever with User Account Control (UAC).
• Vista takes some time getting used to. Yes, I was still running XP on my old laptop.
• The first thing to go was the Windows Sidebar. The second was the Dell Dock. Yippee for all the free Dell software you get pre-installed on your machine.
• I already mentioned the screen resolution. The widescreen is nice, but the vertical size is quite limited, which is most obvious while browsing or working with digital photos. BTW, where did this resolution of 1366 × 768 come from?
• The battery life, so far, is great. The extra large 9-cell battery has worked for about 5 hours, although I haven’t actually measured it exactly. But even when it was at 0%, it kept working for another 15 minutes!
• Finally, this laptop is quite a lot faster than my old one! But then again, it would be strange if it wasn’t.

In the past years, I have had my homepage hosted at the TU Delft Visualisation Group. I have worked there for about six years, so all that time I had free hosting, lots of space and lots of features.

I had also registered my domain (bvrolijk.net), six years ago, without hosting, but with domain and email forwarding, at redirection.net. So no disk space, just forwarding to the TU Delft.

Ever since I left the TU, I’ve been thinking about hosting my domain elsewhere, possibly even doing it myself. My homepage consists of only a small number of pages, but I like putting some photos online, I have a wiki, which I use quite a lot, and a weblog (yep, this is it). But since there are so many good, free services nowadays (at the moment, this weblog is hosted at wordpress.com, for free and with lots of space; and I uploaded lots of photos to picasaweb.google.com, also for free and also quite spacious), I was in doubt whether it would be worth it to buy a hosting package.

After a lot of searching and comparing, I eventually decided to buy the hosting package at ANHosting. 500 GB of webspace, 5000 GB of bandwidth, and all the features you could possible want: MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python, unlimited subdomains, unlimited email addresses and SSH access to your account on a (shared) Linux server. Furthermore, they support WordPress, Drupal, Mambo and many other packages with auto-install scripts through Fantastico.

In fact, my search for a hosting provider resulted in three very similar candidates, of which I (almost arbitrarily) chose ANHosting. The other two providers were DreamHost and Bluehost. Take a look at this site for a comparison. You will see there are not much differences. Whereas DreamHost and ANHosting offer 500 GB of space and 5 TB of bandwith, with Bluehost both the disk space and bandwidth are unlimited. On the other hand, the first two offer unlimited email accounts and MySQL databases, which are both limited at Bluehost. Well, for me, and for my personal website, I think 2500 email accounts is enough. And 500 GB is more disk space than I have in total at home! So, in practice, I would say it’s all the same. BTW, contrary to what it says in the comparison table, ANHosting do offer SSH access. You just have to ask them nicely…

Why then ANHosting? Basically because they’re the cheapest. DreamHost is cheaper, but only if you pay 10 years in advance (instead of 2). And if you google for “anhosting coupon”, you can even get a bit of extra discount.

And what about my experiences so far? Well, the email support is very fast, they often reply within minutes. I’ve installed MoinMoin for my wiki and it’s working fine. Besides that, I haven’t done anything special yet, so nothing special to report either. The only thing is that I’ve had SSH access being disabled all of a sudden a few times now. They say it’s because of a server update or something. But every time they’ve fixed it within 10 minutes after I email them about it. So, as long as it won’t happen every week…

Unfortunately, I did stumble upon some other, external, broken links, for example to old news items. I’m afraid I cannot do much about that, except make screenshots of all pages I link to… Otherwise, the Wayback Machine might be a solution?

Anyway, if you find any broken links, or other things not working properly on this weblog, please let me know!

I am working on an old Visual Basic project. It is not my own, it’s just an existing project in which I have to make some changes. There’s an existing database connection and in one of “my” functions, I have run a query, and created a recordset (rs). In a loop, I am iterating through the records with a bit of code like this:

  If Not IsNull(rs!X) Then
    strX = rs!X
  Else
    strX = ""
  End If

or, if you like

  strX = IIf(IsNull(rs!X), "", rs!X)

Somehow, I get an error, “Invalid use of Null”, on the second line! So, rs!X is Null on the second line, but it wasn’t on the first line, or else the code would never have come to the second line! How is this possible?!?

I tried debugging the code, stepping through the code in the IDE. On the first line, when I watched the value of rs!X, it had some real value. Then, either the program would continue on the second line, but result in the above error, or the code would jump to the fourth line, as if the value had been Null!

I suppose there’s something wrong with either the recordset or the database connection, but I cannot yet figure it out. The only way I have got it to work, so far, is with an intermediate Variant-type variable, because a Variant can be assigned a Null value:

  varX = rs!X
  strX = IIf(IsNull(varX), "", varX)

As you can see, my weblog has been moved to WordPress.com. If you haven’t done so already, please update your link or bookmark to bvrolijk.net.

I have used the import function of WordPress to copy all of my old (Movable Type) weblog entries to this new system. I hope the conversion went all right, but if you see anything strange, please let me know.

Many thanks to Charl for hosting my weblog these past four-and-a-half years and for his help in the conversion.

First of all, I found out that you have to be careful with floating point numbers in your SQL-statements.

(en-US)
UPDATE TableX SET FieldY = 3.1415

works fine, but

(nl-NL)
UPDATE TableX SET FieldY = 3,1415

results in an ODBC error.

Ok, that’s fair. And it can easily be overcome by using a different NumberFormat

Dim nfi As System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo = New System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US").NumberFormat
Single.ToString(nfi)

or by setting the CurrentCulture of the CurrentThread

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = New System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US")

However, I keep running into trouble with dates in my queries.
I have a table with date and time values, and I want to retrieve records for a certain date. So I want to use a query like

SELECT * FROM TableX WHERE Format(Datefield, "yyyy/mm/dd") = '2007/01/23'

But no matter what I do, and how often I set the CurrentCulture, this query doesn’t work if the service runs as a user with Dutch settings.
As a test, I ran the following query (with Dutch settings):

SELECT Format(Datefield, "yyyy/mm/dd") FROM TableX

and it returns “2007-01-23″ instead of “2007/01/23″.

It seems as if the OdbcConnection, or the ODBC driver, or something else (?) still uses the Dutch settings, although my CurrentThread uses “en-US”-settings.

Can anyone explain this? Any ideas about how to solve this? Clearly, I want my program to work independently of the regional settings!

For now, I have solved it using

Format(Datefield, "yyyymmdd")

but surely it must be possible some other way?

The last time we did that, we uploaded the photos via the website. Unfortunately, the user interface wasn’t very good. Certain selections you made were forgotten and you had to make them again. We only had about 10 photos that time, so it was not such a big problem. And the print quality turned out to be very good!

But this time, we wanted to upload 144 photos, so I didn’t feel like doing things two or three times. Therefore, I decided to try out the offline order software. Well, I’m not very enthusiastic about that either, but at least it remembers the selections you make.
When it finally came to uploading the pictures, I was quite surprised that it went so quick. I am pretty sure that my 256 kbps uplink cannot upload a 3 MB picture in about 10 seconds.

I noticed that the HEMA order software had made an “Upload” directory in its Album directory. All my original HiRes photos had been copied there, and they were disappearing one by one. But every time, the topmost picture was first replaced by a much smaller, low resolution version, before it was uploaded! I quickly copied one of those files as “evidence”. Apparently, the photos are resized to 1600 x 1200 before they are uploaded. OK, I didn’t say they could do that, but if the pictures really have to be resized before they can be printed, so be it. But the pictures were also compressed! And not just a little!

My original photo was 2724 kb, with a resolution of 3072 x 2304.
The uploaded picture was only 369 kb, with a resolution of 1600 x 1200.
Of course, I tried resizing the picture to the same resolution myself, (without compression!), and got a photo of 1658 kb. That’s 4.5 times larger!

I thought I would wait to see the result. So today we picked up the pictures, but they’re terrible. You can clearly see the JPEG compression artefacts on some of the pictures. So, I’m certainly going back tomorrow!

Update (Sep. 7): I went back to the HEMA with my pictures, and with a CD with the original HiRes photos. The woman behind the counter said they normally don’t take back digital photos because they don’t know the original quality. So I told her that I did, and that they didn’t use it! Well, she would send them back, but said she couldn’t guarantee anything.

Update (Sep. 16): Today, I went back to the HEMA and got all new prints of our photos. These photos are all ok, no visible compression artefacts or anything like that. So they can do it at the HEMA. If you just make sure that they get your HiRes pictures, for example on cd. But don’t use their offline order software!

Before I went to pick up the hard disk, yesterday, I also (finally!) bought a digital camera. I ordered the Canon Powershot A620 at Digicamshop.nl. It was delivered this morning (at no cost) and it looks very good. I’m anxious to see it in action. And of course, you will probably see some pictures here, now and then…