English

At last we managed to have ourselves the meeting with both of my sponsors to determine the course of action for my Masters.

Annoying thing about a lot of stuff on OS X is that they block and block a lot. And too often they stay blocked and I have to kill the application.

XMLGenerator from xml.sax.saxutils is a steaming piece of crap. It is badly documented and it does not work. It does simple XML output just fine, but as soon as things become namespace aware I get Keyerrors which I cannot debug.

This article on xMax technology gives us nice perspectives for the wireless future.

A very ill-conceived shootout between Java and C# giving fuel to stupid inflammatory discussions about both platforms.

I attended an interesting symposium in the Museum for Communication in the Hague this afternoon. It was called ‘Fill the Gap: towards an inclusive information society’ and was to be about the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis about the Information Society and how ICT affects developing countries.

Nat writes about a speedup of OOo startup times. So this means that it starts up in half a century?

I have an updated course list online for this final year of mine doing courses at our fine university.

I finally have another appointment with my Masters coordinators. Planning an appointment with three people two of which are extremely busy is not an easy feat.

Even more networking: this thime it is from the guys from Holland Open who are having a networking event.

I already knew Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path was coming to Amsterdam to give a workshop. For a student like me these kind of things have too high price cards attached, but in the recent newsletter there is also the announcement of an open cocktail drink afterwards.

Last night I have been discussing with Renier about our happy Mac situation:

It’s nice to see more dynamism in the web application sphere championed by smart people.

This Dashboard Widget is indeed one of the more important ones out there (from Havoc Pennington).

Over at the BBC they are doing really really interesting stuff (of which I hope our broadcasting corporations would take serious note).

A pretty light video at Javalobby (login required) of Knut Risvik telling about the Google infrastructure and how they use Java for a lot of their stuff. A good watch if you do not already know stuff about GFS and MapReduce, if you do there is not much news in there.

I had been eagerly anticipating the announced developer feature list for Firefox 1.5 for a while now.

I may be a newly found Mac user but my main pc is still running Linux (if I turn it on) and I still see that platform as having a future.

On Schiphol International Airport 30 minutes of wireless connectivity is €6 (courtesy of Attingo). On İstanbul Atatürk International Airport there is an open wireless network near the hotel in the airport waiting hall.

Interesting interview at OnDotNet: C#: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: An Interview with Anders Hejlsberg, Part 1 about the future of the C# language.

As soon as I find the time, I should get my feet wet in OS X/Cocoa programming. It seems to be a pretty cool and fresh way to make stuff.

Browsing with Safari is pretty snappy, but that is probably the tradeoff for a further quite unstable browser.

After a long period of undemocratic manoeuvring in European policy making surrounding the Software Patentability Directive we finally get a chance to cast a vote and to be heard.

Another article debunking the various performance myths surrounding the Java language. With something about Escape Analysis and a public service announcement: “Object pooling is now a serious performance loss for all but the most heavyweight of objects, and even then it is tricky to get right without introducing concurrency bottlenecks.”

A former teacher of mine, Ruben van Wendel de Joode, was writing a Ph.D. thesis on the organizational structure of FLOSS communities.

Having just received the new iBook logging in to the WiFi network of our university proved to be somewhat frustrating. Like most univerity networks ours is also completely sealed off with paranoid security restrictions.

To finalize the topic of my Masters Thesis, I planned a meeting with my two sponsors. These are the people that will be in the commission judging the work I have done.

I’ve got a brand new toy and I’m very busy playing with it. Getting the hang of Mac OS X’s applications, shortcuts and idiosyncracies is going to take me a while, but it is a lot of fun.

My first step on joining the microformat frenzy is by converting my contact details to a hCard format.

I just read the need for a hAtom microformat at Torres. Microformats have appealed to me for a while now but I am a new tochnology junkie.

By default Flash is turned off in my browser. The FlashBlock extension takes care of that.

Interesting news that Sun and Google are allying to further their respective technologies.

It’s nice to see someone from Creative Commons being published in the Financial Times speaking out against the ludicricity of intellectual property legislation.

I am in the process of convincing myself I can justify the purchase of an iBook. I was in a Mac store in Amsterdam this afternoon to get a feel for the 12" models and was pretty close to buying it on the spot.

So finally this feels like real work. I read one of the papers I had copied from the proceedings of the Conference of Computer Ethics by Introna called:

I wrote about the lecture by John Thackara I was going to attend. I went there and it was pretty interesting. My impressions:

Easily the most impressive AJAX application I have seen thusfar (Slashdotted). The Zimbra Collaboration Suite is unbelievably cool and I want it. Hula is promising the same and getting there, but these guys are here now and everything looks spick and span. This is really really polished.

I’m reading a lot about sociality and online possibilities lately. Reading articles, blogposts, watching and listening to presentations and just about anything I can get my hands on.

ITConversations is a great resource for information of computer happenings. They have great interviews with leading figures from all over the industry.

In our gathering about identities, ethics and philosophy some interesting points were discussed.

Attending conferences is very cool but it is disproportionally difficult for those people on the wrong side of the pond with limited financial resources (i.e. me).

After seeing Django I came upon a new Python framework that combines the existing web technology into a nice package: Turbogears.

Today I helped a friend set up a new blog for his writing aspirations. Configuring Wordpress was amazingly painless for a PHP application.

Atom 1.0 has been out for a while and the deprecation of the previous 0.3 version should have everyone updating their feeds to be 1.0 compliant.

Recently news came out on Jetty continuations and they are indeed looking pretty good.

I’m spending a lot of my time lately speaking English with people who are for a large part not able to. This is for a large part due to the fact that English has been chosen as our academic lingua franca. All Master programmes at Delft, University of Technology are taught in English.