English

I just made my first submission to JPG Magazine. Immensely difficult and a slim chance of winning anything, but you can still vote for me!

Tim Bray:

Lots of props for the guys from Fleck for their brilliant gimmick for their launch at Techcrunch. Wearing white suits and having people leave their details on you is sheer genius.

I just came across a couple of password protected unviewable PDFs.

Web 2.0 startups and social sharing being what they may, I have very mixed feelings about slideshare.

Yesterday I cancelled my order at the online Apple store. It was going to take them another two weeks to even begin shipping my Shuffle to me. Retailers everywhere had them in stock, so I bought it at BCC for €5 cheaper than at the Apple store.

Eclipse’s fifth birthday party yesterday was a big hit. Eclipse’s contribution to software development was celebrated by a merry group of beer drinking programmers.

Eclipse is turning five and next Tuesday November 7th there’s a slew of parties worldwide to celebrate the occasion.

The company I’m working for currently —TOPdesk— is organizing a Coding Battle Novemer 27th.

See Joi Ito on the adoption of Creative Commons licenses by the Foreign Ministry of Bulgaria. Join this with a very forward and open attitude towards ICT and policy and these guys will be kicking our asses.

After sustaining numerous subsequent shutdowns yesterday, I got a bit fed up with the problem. This morning at work my Macbook also went down a couple of times, which it had never done before.

I just got a random telemarketeer call from an Apple employee in English asking me if I wanted to extend my Apple Care support. It wasn’t completely clear if they were calling to extend the Apple Care on my iBook (likely) or the 90 day free phone support on my Macbook.

The ever great combination of a randomly crashing Macbook and Textmate has caused me to lose all of my writing of yesterday. It wasn’t that much, nor was it that brilliant, but it was something I would have liked to hang on to.

I will be in Hamburg this weekend.

Tonight is the second night in a row that my Macbook suffered a random shutdown. This is a pretty common experience as testified by the site Macbook Random Shutdown or by the experiences of Reiner and Erwin.

The piece of shit software called Sidenote seems to have thrown away my single most important note with pretty much all my relevant information in it.

I need Keynote to jump through some hoops and the Apple online documentation is worse than worthless. It runs through the most obvious features, but I need something different.

Thomas Madsen Mygdal’s presentation at Shift shows how framing issues is very important in how they are perceived. Language shapes our thought.

I forwarded this sheet from Stephen Walli’s presentation on the Gartner OSS Summit to a friend. We were having the discussion that selling people software based on cost reduction is bogus because in most cases that amount of cost reduction is never going to be realized and is not really that relevant.

I had briefly tested Windows Vista a couple of weeks ago and I came to pretty much the same conclusions as Ken Mingis from the Computerworld piece “Hands on: A Mac fan takes on Vista”.

Yesterday my graduation project culminated in the launch of the TOPdesk Community site during the TOPdesk Symposium event.

Jeff Veen’s presentation (via) fromr d.Construct is excellent. It must be an absolute pleasure to hear him speak.

This afternoon I got a chance to test drive a Vista build thanks to Cris who followed a link from my delicious and installed it on his 2G RAM Macbook.

Flickr and Delicious have lately been integrating pieces of each other, what with them having the same parent company and all.

Apple finally responds to the problems of Macbooks shutting down [via]. Why did this have to take so long?

In which I reply to myself on the forum.

Mark Shuttleworth writes out his vision on the relation between Debian and Ubuntu and the tensions it creates, and in doing so extolls everything which is good about Debian and which makes it the single Linux distribution period.

The Flash based online presentation creator Empressr looks nice and interesting. Upon first use this feeling is replaced with sheer frustration.

Barcamp London seems to have been a complete blast understandably. I’ve been reading the reports but from Jeremy’s blog I found these two nuggets:

This latest Screening Room on IronPython shows some great stuff about how IronPython can be used to leverage all of Microsoft’s technologies on Windows.

First impressions of Firefox 2.0b2?

Who is the bitch now? Who is?

I’m spending a lot of time hacking Drupal and the PHP it is built out of. My impression of PHP is worsening by the day. Drupal itself is a mixed bag. It does a lot of stuff for you, which is good but the documentation is lacking if you want to do anything non-standard or slightly complex.

Desiging websites without tables is still too difficult and both counter-intuitive and counter-productive to be a realistic alternative for the vast majority of people.

This video of Seth Godin is well worth your time. The man has a funny story and he is a great presenter with fantastic presence.

Rob Enderle reads a lot into the WWDC Keynote slams Steve Jobs made on both Microsoft and Dell.

I had been toying around with various PHP based systems for a while now but now I have finally settled on Drupal and I am liking it a lot. I have widely varying needs of scale, management and complexity and Drupal certainly fits the bill for two sites I am currently building.

I always thought our Blackboard at DUT was a piece of crap. News that they are patenting learning CMS has cemented my opinion.

Seeing what happens when you sell your democratic process to an incompetent company (Diebold), a group of concerned hackers in the Netherlands have started action. Quite recently the last municipality in Netherlands, that of Amsterdam, long time being the bastion of paper ballots switched to electronic voting.

Apple has to think long and hard about openness when it becomes a lot less hassle for me to videochat with my friends using Skype for Mac with Video Preview than it is with iChat.

I gave the presentation for the TOPdesk consultants today. Keynote did not crash my Macbook once and the presentation was well received, it is in Dutch and you can find it here.

Switching to full screen presenter mode in Keynote sometimes completely crashes (as in hard reset) my Macbook.

Data Loss: Yesterday after I came became from LJS after resume all of my applications had frozen. They wouldn’t work anymore even after killing.

I got my Macbook back just two hours ago. They assure me they could not find anything but the trackpad button feels more responsive than when I handed it in. I don’t think I’m imagining things, though.

I had been kicking around some stuff about wikis when on Rudolf van der Berg posted an article on Frankwatching about wiki practice within companies. The article is arguably a bit sloppy and neglects to even mention Mediawiki but the resulting discussion is more than worthwhile and shows that the topic is very much alive.

I have finally buckled under the pressure and I am doing an attempt at learning PHP. I’m perusing the manual at PHP.net and what I am reading is highly appalling.

You might have noticed that my wiki is back up again. I saw it in my referer logs. Debian self-healing is pretty nice.

Usability joke: On my Linux desktop the acceleration of my mouse pointer varies depending on system load.

So I managed to reach the store today and got pretty much what I expected.

My trusty Nomad backpack is aging. The zippers are breaking and the thing has worn out on most places. Besides it is very inconvenient carrying a laptop in a large bag of only one compartment. Packing it and finding stuff in any of the two compartments is somewhat of a pain (and getting more and more so).