Tomorrow the Dutch will have to cast their votes in an important referendum about acceptance of a European constitution.

I will vote "Yes"; in favor of the new constitution. But I ham not happy about it. Most of the discussion and propaganda has not been to the point and has not been based on a lot of emotion instead of arguments.

Some thoughts on the whole issue.

Consolidation of the existing treaties, a huge amount of text, is most probably a good thing. From what I am led to believe the Euro citizens get more influence through the Euro Parliament and have the opportunity to set agenda items (I have one, see below). Besides individual nations loose their possibility to "veto". The current "Nice" treaty was established in the times Europe was small, it was not designed to work with a number of nations more than 3 times bigger than then. Unfortunately we are still talking about a legal text that non of the 'demos' will have read before casting their votes. The problem is that this constitution is just not a constitution. Its not a statement of simple principles, it is a complex multi-nation treaty. Only "part II" is what I as a constitution.

I believe in democracy. The representive is the particular flavor of democracy is the one that I think works best. I trust a number of my peers to have a particular critical quality and spend time to make informed decisions. That in practice this does not always work well and our representatives are a bunch of nitwits is besides the point. I have the possibility to become a representing nitwit myself and I can choose others when I think that is needed.

I do not believe in referenda. An issue like this treaty has been prepared for years, the yes/no choice is often influenced by the "hype-of-the-day" which has nothing to do with the issue itself.

One of the more important influences on the "Non" result in the French elections has been the "Bolkestein Directive". Although this directive is an important European result and may touch many of the French workers directly in their wallets, the directive is just not related to the treaty. Besides many of the French just casted a "Non" vote as a sign they are not happy with their current French government.

Many proponents argue that the political elite is trying to force the this treaty down our groats. That that political elite has been elected by us seems to be beside the point. On the other hand I think that in a representative democracy important decisions, such as the change of the (or in this case "a") constitution should be left to our chosen representatives. If the issue is important enough new elections should be organized, so that the people have a change to influence the decision by choosing new representatives. I am realistic enough to know that our representatives are to much of a polical elite that reelections are never going to work.

I am pretty convinced that the new treaty will cause us, the Dutch, to lose prosperity. Europe is getting bigger and the prosperity will need to be shared among all of us. Actually (although it scares me) the prosperity will need to be shared on a global scale.

Finally a stable Europe with a colon economy is a safeguard against new wars. I have eared stories about the horrors of war from first-hand account -- Both my parents are from 1932 and grew up in Arnhem, they know.

The first agenda item that the citizens of Europe should push forward is "One office for the parlaiment". Strazbourg and Brussels is just a waste of resources.

(This has the possibility to turn into an Essay, but I just do not have the time to precisely phrase all my thoughts and arguments on this issue.)

White dresses, black dresses and a muppet with a speech impediment is.

I would love to build myself a very silent computer. But I'm affraid that in my hands such machine would become a little messy.

I reckon that other people might run into this problem as well. So why not document my workaround for googlersto find it.

I have configured postfix on my laptop to act as a smart relay. My mailclients use localhost as the sending MTA and the laptop postfix MTA sets up a connection (over TLS with SASL) authentication to my main server.

After updating to Tiger the mails started queuing and I found errors like:

/var/log/mail.log:May 17 19:32:38 secret-wg-mobile-warrior postfix/smtp[15714]: warning: SASL authentication failure: GSSAPI Error: Miscellaneous failure (No credentials cache found)

This problem is caused because postfix on Tiger is compiled with Kerberos support.

Unfortunatelly the version that ships with Tiger (2.1.5, I think) does not have the client side configuration option one can use to disable GSSAPI using the smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter. That is available as of version 2.2. This flag would allow to exclude 'gssapi' from the authentication mechanisms the client (the laptops mailserver) uses to authenticate to the server (my main mailserver).

One therefore has to muck around with the SASL configuration on the server end. All is nicely documented in the "SASL authentication" document.

The trick is to add a line mech_list: digest-md5 cram-md5 to the SASL configuration file (/usr/local/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf on my FreeBSD ports install of postfix)

My /usr/local/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf reads:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: digest-md5 cram-md5

Please leave a comment if you stumble upon this and it helped.

I stumbled upon Pleix, a site with all sorts of cool little movie clips. One of the more disturbing video's --- it has a pretty strong message conveyed through a very direct marketing like message -- can be found by going to the site in locating the link through the image below.

I recently bought "The Real Frank Zappa Book", the autobiography of a musician I admire for his music (I will probably blog about that another time).

On page 104/105 the Plaster Casters are introduced:

The way the Paster-Casters worked was, one of them would mix the goo while the other one gave the guy a blow job. As you can imagine, this sort of thing requires a scientific sense of timing

The blow-job girl had to take her mouth off the guy's dick at the precise moment the other one slammed the container full of glob onto the end of it, holding it ther until it hardened enough to make a good mold. Cynthia wouldn't blow the guys, that was the other girl's assignment. Cynthia mixed the goo.

One of the reasons the web is such a fabulous place is that Cynthia has her own website.

The guy in the picture shows that postitioning your keyboard to high and using an HP730 can lead to severe repetative strain.

I hope Virtual Bert catches on. Virtual Bert has been on the Bert site for quite some time but it just doesn't catch on. Maybe this Virtual Bert is a bad idea. A waste of time most certainly.

I also would like to find the time to work on the "traceroute clock". It would be the ultimate waste off time and that is why its not on the agenda. Its even worse than the Bert's Secure Reverse Polish DNS Calculator (BSRPDNSC), wich actually may become the only implementation of white lies, if time permits.

After last weeks debacle with the Saint Émilion Grand Cru we decided to open yet another 1996 wine this weekend. This week's "Craves" (Château Lagupeau) was fortunatelly not spoiled and although we cooked a normal dinner we did enjoy it.

Its not that often that I drank spoiled wine. I do not have the best means to store wine for longer than a few months. Besides, I normally buy wines that are ready to be drank. So last weeks spoiled wine was something of a new experience. The taste is just so different from a young wine that spoiled. Young wine will turn into vinigar after a couple of days. A spoiled old wine just has no taste, its flat, watery and has this brown rusty color.

Last week I had a couple of nice beers with Henrik, Geoff and Thomas. When Geoff had left we talked food. I recomended Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" which I own in the Dutch translation. When I came home and opened the "Graves" I noticed crystals on the cork. Also something that I do not see that often, being used to the younger varieties. My mediocre wine book did not describe this phenomena but McGee does refer to the cristals (mostly salt, but also apple and wine accids).

The same chapter describes that Louis Pasteur, we owe fresh milk to that bloke, was a researcher that actually studied why wine went bad. That is something I did not know. He scientifically demonstrated (with one vacuum and one open tube) that wine exposed to air will go bad. The picture shows the pigments separate and fall to the bottom to the tube.

Although the beers that I drank in the Stockholm brewery that Henrik took us to ---the name of the place has slipped but they served Heaven and Hell --- were absolutely fabulous I think I would choose for wine if I had choose what to drink for the rest of my life.

Finally, when talking food we also spoke about Jeffrey Steingarten's "The Man Who Ate Everything" which is also a very nice book about food and eating.

(the B/W picture is Pasteur's and came from the above mentioned McGee Book)

The next IETF will be in Paris, the one after that will be in Vancouver. I just found this list.

You know you're from Vancouver (BC) when....

1. Your coworker has 8 body piercing and none are visible.
2. You make over $250,000 and still can't afford a house.
3. You know what these acronyms mean: PNE, VPL, GVRD, YVR, VAG.
4. You're shocked when it snows in the winter.
5. You've had a California roll for lunch.
6. Know more than 10 ways to order coffee.
7. Know how to pronounce Coquihalla.
8. A really great parking space can move you to tears.
9. Your hairdresser is straight, your plumber is gay, the woman who delivers your mail is into BDSM, and your next door neighbour grows weed.
10. The guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing the baseball cap and sun glasses who looks like George Clooney IS George Clooney.
11. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment.
12. The gym is packed at 3 PM... on a work day.
13. Can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food.
14. You watch the weather from a Seattle TV station because it's more accurate. (see 17).
15. You pass an elementary school and the children are all busy with their cell phones or pagers while waiting for their personal rides home.
16. You're sure you're the only one on the road with a REAL driver's license.
17. You don't even listen when the forecast announces "chance of showers."
18. The more expensive the car, the worse the driver.
19. Can taste the difference between Starbucks, Second Cup, and Tim Horton's coffees.
20. Feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash.
21. You're not suprised to see geese throughout the whole year.
22. You can't remember... is pot still illegal?
23. If there's a day of snowfall, you consider not going to school or work.
24. You realize there are far more Rainbow flags in the city than Canadian flags.
25. When you take the bus, you can distinguish 4 different languages being spoken in the conversations around you.
26. You secretly have a fear of pig farms.
27. You go an opera and half the audience is dressed to the nine's and the other half are in jeans and t-shirts.
28. You know how to set up your own Crystal Meth lab because you saw it on the news.
29. You go a friend's house party and Bif Naked shows up because they went to highschool together.
30. Can name 10 Starbucks locations in less than a minute

I am excited aboout going to Vancouver... it may just be my place

Apple renamed Rendevous to Bonjour.

I do not understand marketing people. Rendevous has a much classy sound than Bonjour and covers what the protocol does. Bonjour just doesn't work for me.

What would have worked is "Ça Va". Has a friendly sound and the conversation between the "Ça Va" nodes actually has resemblance to the protocol that aplies to the exchange of pleasantries between French pessants

Ça Va?

Oui Ça Va, et toi Ça Va?

Oui Ça Va.

Saint Émilion Gran Cru 1996. Bought a couple of years ago kept carefully opened two days ago. Turned out to be over its top but still went pretty well with the French Fries yesterday