Author: Rowan Rodrik

http://www.payformystay.com/

My day job is at YTEC, where I build tailor-made software (“maatwerk software“) for clients in logistics, healthcare and printing.

I like my day job, but I would like it even more to not have (and need!) a day job, which is why I built payformystay.com, an index of job offers for people looking for temporary work abroad. We feature job offers in many countries. Whether you want to polish your Spanish by working in Costa Rica or working in Honduras, or whether you rather go grape picking in France, we may have wat you’re looking for.

WordPress for my forest vacation home in Norg

For a decade and a half, my uncle had been maintaining the website for our vacation home in the forests of Drenthe in Dreamweaver. This worked fine, except that: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 months ago, on April 07, 2022, at 12:04 | Comments closed

Rapidly firing myself in the foot with C pointers

Now that I am dedicated to becoming a somewhat decent C programmer, I need to master pointers. Last week, I leveled up in my pointer usage by debugging a particularly nasty segfault. It took the help of gdb (the GNU Project Debugger) for me to notice that my segfault was accompanied by very weird values for some increment counters, while the pointer involved was a char* pointer, not a pointer to an int. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 7 months ago, on October 25, 2021, at 16:10 | Comments closed

WW challenge 1: learning better C by working on XJot

Since the beginning of this month (October 2021), I become officially jobless, after 6 years at YTEC. That's not so much of a problem for a software developer in 2021—especially one in the Dutch IT industry, where there has been an enormous shortage of skilled developers for years. However… I don't (yet) want a new job as a software developer, because: in the programming food pyramid, I'm a mere scripter. That is, the language in which I'm most proficient are all very high-level languages: Python, PHP, XSLT, Bash, JavaScript, Ruby, C# (in order of decreasing (recency of) experience. I have never mastered a so-called systems language: C, C++, Rust. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 7 months ago, on October 24, 2021, at 21:10 | 2 comments

Exhaling on YouTube

I've created a YouTube channel separate from my private account and branded it “BigSmoke”. The channel's purpose is to breathe some fresh air into some online discussions that I follow(ed). Actually, the content is the sort of content that I used to want to put more of on BigSmoke, but which I now found to be better suited for long-form discussions than for laying down my views from some ivory tower. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on June 18, 2020, at 08:06 | Comments closed

Icinga 2 dependencies, downtimes and host/service unreachability

There are a few gotchas you have to be aware of when working with Icinga 2 dependencies and downtimes. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on May 05, 2020, at 18:05 | Comments closed

New year’s resolutions

I updated my personal homepage at the beginning of the new year. Some of the changes were long overdue, like my university student status and the number of diving licenses. But, there were other changes that arose from a more recent insight: that, if I am to reach my goals, I need a plan. A bad plan is better than no plan. And too many goals are as useless as no goals. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on February 10, 2018, at 13:02 | 9 comments

Worldwide Wilderness

A long, long time ago, when I still thought that Drupal would turn out be a good choice for a new website project, I founded www.worldwidewilderness.com. Well, actually I found www.world-wide-wilderness.com, because I didn't know that ‘worldwide’ is spelled as one word. And, then I found www.worldwide-wilderness.com, because I thought that hyphens in domain names are really cool—so cool, in fact, that I was on the Dashing Domains fanlist for years. Apart from all the hyphens, I still like the Worldwide Wilderness, so much so that I've recently been considering building an interactive map of all the remaining wilderness areas in the world under the brand. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on December 30, 2017, at 17:12 | 2 comments

Writing bootable disk images (.iso, .img, etc.) to a USB stick from Windows

Because Windows doesn't have dd, and I want to write the latest Mint LTS release to a USB task, I had to face the unpleasant task of finding a Windows tool to perform what's a basic Unix operation. The good news is that I found one, and it's open source: Win32 Disk Imager. It even has a version ≥ 1, titled: “Holy cow, we made a 1.0 Release”. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on December 17, 2017, at 19:12 | Comments closed

Web print is still shit, even for CSS2 print features

Having spent ten yours out of the loop, I had somehow expected browser makers to take some time out of their favorite hobby—moving knobs and settings around—to implement CSS printing support. I'm all for saving paper and all, but requiring me to pipe my HTML through LaTeX to produce halfway decent documents doesn't feel very 2017ish to me. In 2007, it already didn't even feel very 2007is to me. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 5 years ago, on October 14, 2017, at 21:10 | Comments closed