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.

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, 11 months 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, 1 year 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 4 years ago, on October 14, 2017, at 21:10 | Comments closed

Which context does the circumflex accent (^) refer to in BULL?

^ refers to the last step left in the superpath, never to a step right. (In the A4 notes below, in red, I seem to disagree with what I say here.) Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on August 13, 2017, at 09:08 | 1 comment

BULL TiddlyWiki

At some point, I started condensing some paper and digital notes into a TiddlyWiki, which seemed like an appropriate tool for a personal project. Looking at the timestamp (July 26 of 2013), this choice doesn't make sense, because at that time I had already started this blog and discovered the joy of indexical knowledge management based on links between temporal blurbs (as within a blog) rather than links between named blurbs (as within a wiki). I guess it had everything to do with wanting the execution of the BULL idea to be perfect before daring to share. It's definitely time to get over that. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on August 12, 2017, at 13:08 | Comments closed

BULL progress and stagnation

At work yesterday, during lunch, I started a lengthy discussion that stretched out long beyond the boundaries of regular lunch hours. The discussion topic was my surprise that IT practices—particularly programming methodologies—hadn't changed much, if at all, between my leaving the industry in 2007 and re-entering the industry in 2015. My surprise wasn't a rethorical technique; my unpreparedness for this lack of change has lost me a long-running bet with Wiebe around 2007, when we stopped being colleagues for about 8 years. The content of that bet was as follows: I predicted that in 10 years time—now—computer science would have sufficiently evolved so that software would behave intelligently. In fact, I didn't believe that AI would have emerged by now, but I did expect software architecture to have changed in such a fundamental way that computers would at least have behaved intelligent, even if they weren't self-taught and self-learning. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 4 years ago, on August 12, 2017, at 13:08 | Comments closed