C Hees . info

An error occurred while loading http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/:
Connection to host yourdomain.com is broken.

I just spent 2 hours trying to fix this weird problem with Wordpress. I had just moved a Wordpress blog from my local server to a real hosting company. After some editing everything seemed to work except the admin part. I didn’t get any real errors, just an empty page and a broken connection so it was tricky to trace where it came from. It also didn’t help that I don’t have access to any logs of the webhost. Eventually it turned out to be some PHP setting from the host that caused the script to fail.

So for anybody else who gets random broken connections try adding this to your .htaccess file:

php_value memory_limit 32M

I ran into this article from Paul Graham a while ago. He’s from a venture capital company called Y Combinator (which seems pretty cool btw) and when I read his articles I got all dreamy and motivated and got in my “let’s do something great!”-mindset. Usually this ends in me getting excited about something and then getting distracted again with something else that’s also very cool of course. But anyway… one of the things from that article that I liked was:

When we first met the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not a great bet to succeed, because they didn’t seem especially committed. One of the two founders was still in grad school. It was the usual story: he’d drop out if it looked like the startup was taking off. Since then he has not only dropped out of grad school, but appeared full length in Newsweek with the word “Billionaire” printed across his chest. He just cannot fail now. Everyone he knows has seen that picture. Girls who dissed him in high school have seen it. His mom probably has it on the fridge. It would be unthinkably humiliating to fail now. At this point he is committed to fight to the death.

Perhaps I just need to make my plans/dreams more public so there will be more pressure to actually make them come true.

Oh and then I ran into this robot company which seems really cool and makes me wonder why I left Artificial Intelligence andandand! Wait, I’m getting distracted again.

In my work I use a lot of CSS and one of the things I always hate about CSS is trying to get things positioned exactly where you want them. Yesterday I came across this website that clearly explains the differences between a couple of layout properties. It’s nice to have a clear overview like that and it even had something that was new for me. In the 4th example on that page it shows that you can “nest” position:absolute inside position:relative. It’s a very useful feature of CSS but in my opinion it’s just one of those stupid things. Why didn’t they just make a position:absolutefromparent property or something like that? In that case it would be a lot easier to find that this functionality even exists just by looking at a list of position properties for example.

Welcome to my personal blog. My name is Christiaan Hees and this is where I’ll post my stuff =)

I’m using Wordpress for this site, but I’ve found out that it’s actually really hard to find a good theme/skin. They have a whole theme gallery, but lots of themes are really terrible (or at least in my opinion). I eventually stuck with this one but I’m not convinced yet that I really like it. I’ll probably change it again when I find something better.