This will be my last post at benjaminvrolijk.wordpress.com.

Since I moved my homepage to ANHosting, I have installed WordPress on my own domain and copied my weblog there. I am also using WordPress for the rest of my homepage now.

So, please update your links and continue reading at bvrolijk.net.

Right now, (it’s Thursday 21 Aug, 2008, 13:37 CET), the ladies are playing the water polo final at the Beijing Olympics. The Netherlands are playing the United States. You can see it live at http://os2008.nos.nl/.

But when I looked at Wikipedia just now, I found something interesting:

Apparently, the Dutch have already won!

(As you can see in the image, the score is 5-5 at the time of the screenshot, but on the Dutch Wikipedia page, it says the Dutch have won the gold medal in the final against the US!)

We have not only moved home, I have also moved my homepage.

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…

Again, it’s been way too long since I posted anything on this weblog of mine. But, a lot has happened in the mean time.

As I wrote a while ago, we have been searching for a new house. In fact, we have sold our old house, we have moved to another house, and we have bought a new house.

Let me explain…

Initially, somewhere around November last year, we were thinking about moving to a new (existing) house. We decided to put our house up for sale, because we thought it might take about half a year to sell it.

We had been looking at a number of (existing) houses, when we received a leaflet about a project of new (yet to be built) houses. We both immediately fell in love with these houses, so shortly after we had taken an option on one of them.

At that time they told us construction of the houses probably wouln’t start until May, because at least 50 % of the houses has to be sold first. This was in January.

The day after, we heard from our own estate agent, there were people interested in buying our house. So, a bit of a dilemma: should we sell our house now and try to find something (temporary) for about a year, until the new house would be built, or turn down this offer for our old house and wait a year, hoping there will be other offers.

We decided to go for this offer and sell our house per May 1st. However, this meant we had to find another home quickly. Of course, because it would be only temporary, for a year or two, we decided to look for a rental house.

April 25th we moved and a few days later we had officially sold our house!

So, here we are, in our home-for-a-year. And it’s nice! Of course, we haven’t spent much time or money, but we have tried to make it a bit our own, although it’s not our own.

In the mean time, we are still busy with our next new home! A couple of weeks ago, we (finally) signed the contract for the new house, after we heard construction will probably start by the beginning of October. Although we are still the only ones who have signed, the new (!) building contractor decided he did want to start building, hoping that ’seeing is buying’. Of course, we were thrilled to hear that, the good news we’ve been waiting for ever since January.

Right now, we are in the process of getting the mortgage and life insurance. For the insurance, we will have to undergo a thorough medical examination; you wouldn’t believe the things they want to know! We are both pretty healthy, but this questionnaire sort of scared us!

Well, we are very much looking forward to seeing the house being built. I will keep you up to date with some pictures, now and again. For us, the next steps will be to think about the extra work we want done (electrics, etc.) and to go shopping for a kitchen and bathroom. So that’s the fun stuff! I’ll keep you posted.

Found in the local newspaper (therefore, in Dutch):

I’d sure like to be there when they start dumping 430.000 euros on the sea dyke in Westkapelle!

A few weeks ago, I found out that all links in my weblog to other weblog entries of myself, (or of Charl or Ari) had been broken after moving from cpbotha.net to WordPress.com. But I believe I have fixed them all, now!

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!

That is the question…

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)

It’s been a bit quiet here, lately. On my weblog, that is.
I (we) have been very busy with work, with our search for a new house, my parents moving, and with Marijn, of course.

Anyway, just the other day, I found out that since my weblog has been moved to WordPress, all internal links on my weblog are broken. All links still point to cpbotha.net. I plan to fix them all, but please be patient with me.

Hello world and welcome at my all new and shiny weblog.

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 benjaminvrolijk.wordpress.com.

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.

Last Tuesday, October 2nd, at about 9pm, Irene gave birth to a little boy: Marijn Ruben. We are very proud and happy to be the parents of this tiny new human being. He is a wonderful, sweet little baby.

Feel free to check out the first pictures on “his own website”!