Welcome to Pauline's

Hobbies

reading-SF

Reading all the SciFi books I can lay my hands on. My favourite writers are Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, Harry Harrison, Terry Pratchet and many many more.

Perry Rhodan fan

In Holland this is a SF pulp magazine, which exists for ages. I collect the magazines, of which i have about 2000 pieces. Don't underestimate the series, they have about 2400 parts written! The serie is translated from German by a team of dedicated people. BTW, you easily notice when a new translator enters the team: s/he does not know all the terms created in the 10+ years!

Internet Access Foundation

In my work at the Internet Access Foundation we saw the amount of traffic to our news-server rise and rise... Since we pay for used traffic, it seemed wise to limit the amount of news we were getting. We decided to cut all alt.* groups since that amounts to 70% of our internet traffic. At the same time we installed nntpcache so interactive users could enjoy reading alt.* groups at our backbone provider and the other groups at our local newsserver, while presenting them with one 'virtual' newsserver. There was only one big problem, we still have a lot of UUCP connected users, who now no longer had access to the alt.* groups. For these users I wrote a small Perl utility that transfers news from one NNTP machine to another by means of the XHDR/IHAVE protocol. It only transfers the articles the local machine did not receive, greatly aiding our goal of diminising site-traffic.

Nagging Peter

Last, but not least. This is one of my all time favorities!