Last week Starbucks opened a branch here in Utrecht, which didn't go unnoticed. I'm not one of those people who are completely nuts about coffee, but I am quite fond of it. :lick: I went by Central Station, but the line was much too long. I like coffee, but I'm not going to stand in line like it's Michael Jackson tickets.

Meanwhile, Greg debunks the idea that chains actually have a consistent product and asks why would people flock to Starbucks when they could be having better coffee at a local outlet? The obvious answer is: preconception. Much could probably be attributed to MacDonalds, who have forever maintained that they serve you the same food no matter where you are. Starbucks doesn't really have to do anything to push that idea, it's already been implanted.

But the deeper reason is that this country doesn't really have a coffee culture. Yet. When I moved here I was pleased to find out that koffie is part of the fabric of this society. It isn't a "new" thing like it is in, say, Poland, where tea has always been the dominant beverage. But the Dutch koffie predates the cawfee of today. In countries like Poland and Norway, without a strong existing coffee culture, the yuppie caffè latte gimmick has been a big hit in recent years. (Although in Norway, to "our" credit, most of the coffee places are local entrepreneurs, not foreign chains, and provide considerably better ambiance than sitting in a Starbucks.)  Not so here. With an existing "coffee infrastructure", Holland has not been quite the fertile ground, and the coffee revolution that has placed a coffee place on every corner hasn't happened. Coffee is still, by and large, the traditional sit down experience, and an unremarkable, humble one at that.

You won't find a lot of cafés that serve a caffè latte, or even a solid espresso. Around these parts coffee is still, much of the time, "just coffee". Not the fast food inspired, to-go in a paper cup with a selection of 30 different drinks.

Complaining about rain seems to be some kind of ingrained human reflex. But if (almost) everyone is doing it then surely not everyone has a case? Before I moved to the Netherlands I heard people say it rained here all the time. That doesn't agree at all with my observations. But what's a lot? Compared to what?

I know, facts!

The World Weather Information Service has climate information on 1000+ cities around the world. I decided to do a little data mining. All conclusions to follow are based on that data. Just for kicks, I should mention there are very serious methodological problems with this exercise. First of all, they say countries don't necessarily use the same definitions for what's a rainy day or measure precipitation the same way. So you're not really supposed to compare cities. Secondly, when placing cities on a world scale, sampling is everything. And nothing is known about the criteria by which cities are included in the list. We're not gonna let petty details like that stop us, though.

I should also mention that "rain" as used here also includes snow where applicable.

Is it rainy here or what!

So is it rainy here? Let's compare it to the control point: Trondheim. And let's throw in some other data points too, for good measure.

• Cities with a reputation for rain: Bergen, London, Seattle, some town on the Spanish north coast (found A Coruna on the list).
• Cities known to be dry: Los Angeles, Zaragoza (turns out to be the driest city in Europe)
• Other cities: Berlin, Dublin, Milan, Paris, Stockholm

The first number is the total annual precipitation. The second is the number of rainy days.

city            mm/y   days
Bergen          2250   235
A Coruna        1008   171
Seattle          945   122
Milan            943    86
Trondheim        892   216
Amsterdam        780   185
Dublin           733   129
Paris            650   112
London           611   145
Berlin           571   106
Stockholm        539   173
Zaragoza         317    79
Los Angeles      305    27

Bergen's reputation is well justified, it turns out to be the rainiest city in Europe. Rainy London, on the other hand, is a complete myth.

No, not like that, use *all* the facts!

But what do random cities tell us about the big picture? Not much. Let's see how countries place on the overall ranking. Here we see the span they occupy in the list, from the rainiest city on the left to the driest on the right. (Spain refers to mainland Spain.)

The Netherlands place smack in the middle. So to say it's a rainy country is an obvious exaggeration, it's pretty much average. The very narrow span is probably due to the small and uniform geography. Norway, on the other hand, is definitely rainy, occupying the space in the rainy portion of the list. Bergen is most rainy, Oslo is least. As for London, it's actually the lower end of the UK span, further diffusing its rainy reputation.

If you like staying dry the very best place to be is Luxor in Egypt, where precipitation is a minuscule 3mm annually. At the other end is Quibdo in Colombia, with an incredible 8m of rainfall and 305 days of rain.

But you didn't...

I know, but this isn't supposed to be comprehensive. If you want to do further work on this data you can get the list I generated:

• climate_raindata.gz

• no error on transmission failure
• no failure on invalid recipient
• no assurance of delivery to temporarily disconnected recipient

All of which amounts to the result that when you do send a text you have no idea if the number is correct, if the message went through, and in the event the person's phone is turned off if he'll ever see it.

Now, I really don't care if the flaws are in the protocol, the phones or the services we pay for; what I do know is that it all makes for an appalling technology whose reliability imitates Microsoft's infamous msn messenger where messages constantly go missing without notice. I hear all the time about messages I never saw and apparently when my phone is off for a few days there is zero chance of getting messages sent in that interval.

Compare it to email, which doesn't have any of these flaws, and it seems incredible that we are actually paying to use this.

And that's to say nothing of the horrendous user interface for typing messages on a phone to begin with.

This entry belongs in a comprehensive tome I have been writing in my head for a decade, detailing just how much cell phones suck. But the field is so vast that it overwhelms my ability to articulate it.

The beauty of the camping vacation is the enduring feeling of being on site. Air travel is very insular that way, I feel like I'm in the same place right up until I get off the plane, but when you're on the road it's a whole different feeling and more authentic in a sense. It's tiresome if you have to go far to get there, but once you cross the border into where you're going there is a real sense of expectation that gradually bears out. And you can stop anywhere you want along the way.

Locations of interest:

• Wien (classical concert)
• Verona (late night outdoor opera)
  Camping right near Lago di Garda - a summer camping hotspot
• La Spezia (all day visit to the pictoresque villages in Cinque Terre national park)
• Genova (city walk and a visit to Europe's largest aquarium/oceanography museum)
• San Remo (walk along the promenade and swimming at the beach)
• Monaco (city walk, swimming at the beach)
• Nice (walk along the promenade, swimming)
• Cannes (walk along the promenade)
• Ramatuelle by St. Tropez
  Camping at the unbeatable Les Tournels
• St. Tropez (city walk)
• Marseille (city walk)
  Camping in Aix-en-Provence - a nice town in itself
• Les Baux-de-Provence (a splendid ancient castle)
• Orange (the best preserved Roman theater in Europe)
• Geneve (CERN museum, city walk)
• Lausanne (city walk)
• Bern (Einestein museum)
• Zurich (natural earth museum and a robotics museum)
• Munich (Deutches museum - world's largest museum of science and technology)

And that's a way to spend three weeks.

As a follow up to the network perimeter test I have expanded the code a bit. It now shows also the interface names to help explain what's what, and it also tries to match the gateway to the ip addresses found. The strategy, however, has changed somewhat. At first the goal was to find all the networks and proceed from there. I decided this was not really the best approach, given that a misconfigured network connection could possibly contain, say, a gateway not on any network. It therefore seems more sensible to display the information read from route and ifconfig as is than try to infer too much from it.

Here for instance the loopback ip is on a network that is not known, but still a working ip nonetheless.

The probing strategy also includes nmap (if available) probes to have some redundancy in the process (say for instance outbound icmp is blocked by the firewall). And the code has been made more portable, so on platforms other than linux (where linux networking tools aren't present) there is a graceful degradation of features.

Naturally, much networking happens over wireless these days, so there's also a wifi command that displays the status of all the wireless interfaces. This is again nothing more than is revealed by iwconfig, but in a considerably more human readable form I would argue.

Then there is wifiscan, which not surprisingly scans for access points. The output is a considerably more space efficient and usable counterpart to what iwlist prints.

One thing to keep in mind about these detection commands is that many of the system tools being used offer less (or none) information to unprivileged users, so running these commands as root may produce fuller output.

• networktest-0.2.tar.gz