August 2011

By Guus , 17 August 2011

My father rocks

Long-time readers know that the server of this website is running in the Netherlands. When we left for the States my parents offered to give the server a place on the attic in Middenmeer.

The server has been running continuously for well over seven years, and doing a great job. But it's starting to show its age -- a scare about a hard disk maybe going bad, and increasingly noisy fans -- so we decided to buy a new one.

The new server arrived without operating system. My father installed and configured OpenBSD earlier this week, so it is now ready for me to install the LAMP stack and some other utilities, and start transferring our websites to the new server. OpenBSD is not for the faint of heart, and it's pretty cool to see it up and running so quickly.

Even enabling the network stack was no problem ("oh, I just did echo dhcp > /etc/hostname.xl0"). Thank you!

Topic
guusbosmannl
By Guus , 16 August 2011

Lunch with Petra

Today I went for lunch with Petra; it was great to see her and catch up. We went to Redbowl, an Asian fusion place in Cary, where we had saté with peanut sauce. A shared favorite.

After lunch we did something very Dutch and unusual: we walked across the road to a coffee place. The coffee was excellent, an espresso with freshly roasted beans.

Topic
dailylife
By Guus , 14 August 2011

De schipbreuk van de Batavia, 1629

This book is a reprint of the original manuscript of the commander of the ship Batavia, which perished on the cliffs before Australia in 1629. It is a project by the Linschoten-Vereeniging, a society that aims to republish original Dutch-language manuscripts related to (ocean) travel.

It was an interesting book to read. The bloody story of the Batavia was mostly new for me. The book consists of two parts: a thorough introduction and summary of the affair, as well as the transcription of the commander of the ship, Francisco Pelsaert. The latter is kept in the original 17th century Dutch, which took a while to get used to but is ultimately quite readable. The summary in the beginning is very helpful, since the manuscript and other documents are not placed chronologically.

The story of the Batavia is quite sad, and the manuscript is explicit in the bloodiness of the whole business.

Harm and Marijke gave me this book when I visited the Netherlands in 2010.

By Guus , 13 August 2011

Flowers

For the first time in weeks it's cooler now, only 79 degrees.

A good day to stay at home and do some house keeping.

Topic
dailylife
By Guus , 7 August 2011

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

I'm making it a point to catch up on my American reading from time to time. One of the most well-known American books is the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and enjoyed reading it a lot. The edition I read includes several of his other writings as well, such as a selection of Silence Dogood letters.

A large part of the book is very recognizable, and you can relate to the things Franklin goes through. And then all of a sudden he writes about the financial negotiations with his potential in-laws that break down, and he doesn't move forward with the marriage because they can't agree on a dowry.

Franklin has had an amazingly productive life -- he started the first public library, university and hospital in Philadelphia -- and it's great to read things from his own perspective. I especially enjoyed the description of the journey from London to Philadelphia, a trip that lasted more than two months.

By admin , 5 August 2011

Friday morning happiness

I went by the mailbox this morning to pick up two books that I ordered. Looking forward to some fun reading.

- Documenting Software Architectures, Views and Beyond. I saw this in someone's reading list on LinkedIn, and got intrigued.
- Statistical Machine Translation, by Philipp Koehn. Ever since I read a book on MapReduce I wanted to dive deeper into modern machine translation techniques. Really looking forward to reading this one.

Topic
books
By admin , 4 August 2011

U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands stepping down

This morning the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Fay Hartog Levin announced that she will be stepping down in September.

The Ambassador cites family reasons for her resignation, and says that she will serve the interest closer to her home in Chicago. Hartog-Levin is the 65th United States Ambassador to the Netherlands; she presented her credentials to Queen Beatrix in August 2009. Her parents were Dutch Jews who fled from the Netherlands to Suriname in 1942 and emigrated to the United States in 1948, shortly before she was born.

From her announcement:

I thank the President for granting me the opportunity of a lifetime, and Secretary Clinton for her
inspiring leadership. Special thanks to Prime Ministers Rutte and Balkenende, Deputy Prime
Minister Verhagen and Foreign Minister Rosenthal with whom I have had the good fortune to
work as well as with the many other officials throughout the Dutch government who are
committed to maintaining and strengthening the bonds between our two nations.

Topic
dutchusa
By admin , 3 August 2011

Interesting publication: ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

I came across an interesting publication this morning, the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. ThoughtWorks, a software development company, is often ahead of the curve, technology-wise, and it's interesting to read their "Technology Radar".

The Tech Radar is a short PDF with recommendations on which technologies to Adopt, Try, Assess or Hold. It gives an opinionated overview of new and emerging technologies in software development. Last week they released the 5th edition.

Their July 2011 edition recommends to "Adopt" GIT, the version-control software, and to "Hold" older and less flexible tools such as ClearCase, something that I think makes a lot of sense. Quality software is not created by artificially constraining developers while doing basic things like check-ins. Folks in my team have been pushing to move to GIT as well, something that I'd like to experiment with.

Interesting is the Radar's emphasis on solutions for the "software last mile" problem: how do you get code in production in a reliable way. I'm very familiar with these "DevOps" practices, because if you don't have a solid process and tools to transfer code from development, to test, to staging, to production, you really don't have quality production system.

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Topic
dailylife