My two Foggy Forest pictures are in the top five of most viewed items on this website. Thanks to a website called Jigsaw Planet, you can now play both of them as an online jigsaw puzzle. You can upload any image on that website and have it cut into puzzle pieces, which is exactly what I did. To play either puzzle, click on one of the images below.
The end of my four-year PhD contract is approaching rapidly. I hope to submit my thesis to the printer at the end of August and defend it in the second half of October. As these dates are getting closer, I thought it’d be nice to maintain some sort of progress indicator on my website. So, as of today, “thesis stats” are visible at the top of the menu bar. Yesterday was the first time I compiled all available stuff into one PDF file. Spread across 126 pages are some front matter, a table of contents, three science chapters, a list of references, and a list of my own publications. Still missing are the figures in these three chapters, two additional science chapters, an introduction, a Dutch summary, and some minor other things. It looks like the final product will be around 200 pages. I wonder who’s gonna read all of that…
Some maintenance will be performed on the server hosting my website next week. The server will get a new IP address, which may cause it to be unreachable for up to 24 hours on or around Thursday April 23.
Since moving my weblog to a new location, it’s already attracted a few dozen spam comments. Fortunately, the Akismet plugin caught them all. The general goal of comment spammers is to place links on other websites to generate traffic to their own website, with which they hope to earn money. Most of them don’t care too much about the contents of the comment. The latest batch of comments contains one that says only, “vzoexdhd…”. Well, that’s easy enough to mark off as spam.
Other spammers are a bit smarter and compose something that may pass as a genuine comment on a quick glance, like this one:
Hi there, I read this post titled “Rain, more rain, and a BBQ” about a week ago, might have been last Sunday, and thought it was a good point. I’ve been trying for the last few days to find your site again but ended up finding it in Google using the keywords “floor restoration.”. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to post last week but I will be returning regularly. Bookmarked the page.
Of course it’s complete bogus, but on sites with high traffic and lots of comments, this could get through. In my case, it’s clear that googling on “floor restoration” will not get you to my website. (Except that after I post this, it may.) It’s also suspicious that this “visitor” read a blog entry from June 14, 2007 just last week. Finally, the comment is so generic that it could apply to almost any post on any weblog—another clear sign that it’s fake.
As long as Akismet does its job, comment spam isn’t bothering me too much. In fact, most of the messages are quite nice. All eight readable messages currently in my spam queue mention how much they like my site or how much they agree with my writing. It’s utter nonsense, but at least it’s friendly nonsense.
As announced a few weeks ago, I decided to move my domain and website to a new provider. Now I have everything in a single package, rather than spread out over three different locations. I also have much more control now over the looks of my site and I have more freedom in adding various gizmos.
I will keep ruudvisser.wordpress.com active for a while to redirect visitors, but this will not last indefinitely. As of now, you are strongly encouraged to visit my site directly at RuudVisser.com. New posts and other stuff will only appear here, anyway. If you want to keep track of my postings, be sure to add my new RSS feed to your news reader.
Apart from the obvious design changes, there are two other new features. The sidebar contains a widget from Last.fm, which shows in near-real-time what music I’m listening to. It contains samples for some tracks (look for a little play button) and if you click on ‘view profile’, you can learn more about my music tastes than you want to know.
The second new feature is the complete integration of my photo albums at Picasa into this site, thanks to a plug-in called kPicasa-Gallery. So, go ahead and have a look through my 2934 pictures (and counting…).
There may still be some bugs in the layout. If you find something weird, I’d appreciate it if you could leave a comment or send me an email.
Oh, and on the topic of comments: I probably have to re-approve everyone, so be patient if you leave a comment and it doesn’t appear right away. After your first time, as long as you continue to enter the same email address (used purely for identification), further comments should appear right away.
Some changes are upcoming for my website. I am going to move my domain (RuudVisser.com) to another provider and I will also have the actual contents hosted there. Right now, my domain does nothing more than redirect incoming traffic to my blog (http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/). The site contents are hosted at Wordpress, except for my astrochemistry pages, which sit on the Leiden Observatory web server.
Within a week or two, I will have everything (domain, blog and science stuff) in one place. This will have the added benefit that I get full control over my Wordpress installation, allowing for more flexibility in design and nifty features.
When the domain is transferred to the new provider, I’ll need some time to set up my Wordpress installation and move the blog over. During that time (hopefully no more than a day), RuudVisser.com won’t really get you anywhere. The current version of my blog will remain functional at http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/ throughout the move.
The current plan is to do the move in about two weeks, around the 22nd of October. If it happens much sooner or later, I’ll put a note here.
I’m trying out a new format for my baseball posts, inspired by the Cynics Corner Star Trek reviews. It’ll probably take a few posts before I’m comfortable with it, or I may decide to go back to the old way. We’ll see, time will tell, and such.
In a moment of vanity, I just googled myself. I’m pleased to see my website still appears as the top result for “Ruud Visser” on google.com and google.nl, ahead of the curtain specialist at ruudvisser.net.
The 10th .com result is titled “Everything about Ruud Visser” and the description goes like this:
Do you want to know more about “Ruud Visser”? Find all the information you need about “Ruud Visser” on Exalead Wikipedia.
I’m all for learning more about people with my name, especially if they appear this high on a Google search. The Exalead page contains links to two articles on the French Wikipedia. The first one immediately caught my attention:
Atoms in Molecules
En chimie guil, la proximité immédiate de deux atomes non liés … Why Kinked is More Stable than Straight Jordi Poater, Ruud Visser, Miquel Sola, F. Matthias …
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_in_Molecules
Loyal readers will recognize “Why Kinked is More Stable than Straight” as the (partial) title of a scientific paper based on work that I did in Girona, Spain in 2005. The Wikipedia article cites that paper as one of the criticisms against the theory of Atoms in Molecules. One click away, the English Wikipedia article on AIM does the same thing.
The citations in the English article was put in by user V8rik on June 9th of last year, and user Grimlock copied it to the French version on July 22nd.
It’s been said that you aren’t somebody in today’s world until you have an article on Wikipedia. I’m not quite there yet, but this is a good start.
There seem to be some problems with my Wordpress blogging software. Whatever link I click, I always get back to the same post. Before I wrote this, it was the post with my foggy forest pictures. Right now, it’s this notice. The good thing is, it’s not just at my weblog. I tried a couple random blogs also hosted at Wordpress.com, and they have similar issues.
[Update (November 6th, 2007): Thanks to a quick response by the Wordpress.com support people, everything seems to be back to normal.]
After using Blogger for the past two years, I moved my weblog over to Wordpress. I’ve really come to like this service through my visits to the weblogs of my Ohio friends (a.k.a. the Goble Families). Wordpress is a lot faster, comments are integrated better, and RSS feeds are easier. On the downside, I seem to have less control over the looks and layout, which makes it a bit harder to integrate with the rest of my homepage. I think I can find a way, though.
I imported all posts and entries from Blogger and I am slowly categorizing all of them. As I write this, there are 297 posts to go, so this will be an ongoing project.
If you got my weblog in an RSS reader, please update your feed to this URL:
http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/feed/
You can also get a feed of the comments posted to my weblog:
http://ruudvisser.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
Finally, if you have a link to my weblog on your own weblog or homepage, I would appreciate it if you could make sure it points to RuudVisser.com. That address is most likely to stay in the years to come, so it is the one I would like everyone to use to find me.
