Last weekend we went to the number two tourist destination in Holland (the no 1 of course the Red Light District in Amsterdam): the Keukenhof flower gardens. I had never been there. The concept is a big park with as many types of tulips as you can imagine plus a few more. As it turns out I'm probably not the only Dutchman never to have attended the country's top attraction, since the park was filled with Japanese, Americans, and our friendly neighbours: Germans and Belgians. It actually turned out to be nicer than I expected. Of course the park is a big stereotype of The Netherlands with wooden shoes, a towbridge and a real (gasp!) windmill, vaguely reminding you of a Schiphol parking garage. I'm not a tulip fan, but the gardens, designed by Zocher and son, combined with the colours of the zillions of flowers were both stylish and cheerful. Although I can think of many better places to go as a tourist, if you've got a lot of time or are addicted to tulips, it's a nice place to go. Just make sure to get there really early.

Ever since I stopped doing webpages, I've been missing having my own Rhino (the one I used in the past was not mine), but since I wasn't doing any JavaScript, it didn't make sense to spend U$S 50 on a book I wouldn't use. Now, with the interactive web inteface for Debbugs being accepted as a Google Summer of Code project, I finally decided to buy one for me. I ordered it yesterday from Amazon. I hope it gets here soon.

Today I received a letter from the tax office urging me to pay an amount which they claimed was past due. Looking in my records, I found that I had payed this back in January. To make a bureaucratic story short, it turns out that I was a "too fast payer" (their words): I paid it right the day when I got the invoice, which was too fast for their system to process it. The amount was automatically refunded to me by the system, that just could not understand why I transfered money to them, even though it did manage to send me an invoice the day before. Now I have to file an official appeal to get a whopping 11 euros in costs of late payment refunded. Another life lesson learned: delaying saves trouble.

In the last two weeks I've discovered (or was told about) some programs quite useful for an outdoor technician (amateur photographer):

• gpscorrelate which adds GPS tags on exif fields correlating gps tracks and photgraph shooting time. Finally, I am able to geoposition my trekking pictures automagically!. Next step: some way to create google maps paths with POIs.
• hugin for image blending. The following image was obtained in Gredos composed from four pictures.
  

Via BBLUG I've heard about

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

Anyone going?

Debian Etch is on the verge of being released. Nearly two years in preparation, this calls for a toast. We'll meet at Friday the 13th, 21:00h at Mick O'Connell's Irish Pub in Utrecht. Everyone welcome. Travel coordination at debian-events-nl@lists.debian.org. More parties to come at ReleasePartyEtch?

We had a good brunch today. Friends Heather, Damien, Niko, Karine, Sarven, Brigitte and John all came over for some quiche, roasted potatoes, green salad, bread, cheese, wine, beer, asparagus, coffee and papaya. All in all a good time. We'd hoped to walk over to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac with anyone who wanted to see it. The previous owner was packing the last of his stuff today, and we were supposed to pick up the keys this evening. But we hadn't heard from him by 7PM, so we packed everyone off to home and put the baby to bed. Then he called at 8PM, so I drove over to the new house and had a chat with him while picking up the keys. He had a couple of leftover Bor ale Cuivr es, so we drank them while he showed me around the house. I helped him take the last of his cleaning supplies out to his car, and then I went back inside, to our house. Wow. I just walked around for a little while, turning on and off the lights and looking through the windows and trying to imagine what our life there is going to be like. We're not going to move in for another 2 months, so it seems a little remote. The house felt nice, though. It's on a quiet street in a great neighborhood, and I could tell it was a good place to live. I'm excited to get started with it. tags: house 4690 rue Pontiac homeowner keys

Hey IBM Now that OS/2 has reached its end-of-life, it's time to release as much code as you can out of it under a liberal Open Source license. There are millions of lines of code in OS/2, and I doubt that much of the Microsoft code written in the 80s is still there. IBM talks a mean game about Linux and Open Source (see http://www.ibm.com/linux ), and to a large part they've been pretty true to their word. But having a huge codebase available that could very clearly benefit the Open Source world, and that's not being developed further, is a bad idea. Clear the rights, release the software. Abandonware is a terrible thing to waste. tags: os/2 ibm open source

Spring has arrived in many parts of North America. But in Edmonton, North America’s largest and most northernly city, spring has sort-of-come-but-not-really as it recedes fairly quickly. There will be a day of explosive warmth (you know, a balmy 45-55 F) and of course locals strip down to near nakedness, wearing shorts and, the more flamboyant will don an 80’s inspired cut-off tee. Hot. This sartorial statement says WE are SO ready for the long winter to leave … for good. Despite the collective sentiment, which is probably shared by 99.999999% of Edmonton’s inhabitants, the winter cold, snow, and breeze are indifferent to our deepest pleas and they come right back, making us sport at least a few layers of winter clothes. Within this dance between winter breeze and spring warmth, I have spent most of my time staring at my computer doing everything possible to transform half-baked ideas, hunches, sentiments, and theories into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for my book. I am working on it full-force and am enjoying it more than I have in a year though from time to time I get fed-up, lost, sick of it, and my writing soul descends back, deep into one of Dante’s infernal rings, where I fester with my frustration, convinced that I should have become an organic flower farmer/acupuncturist that I almost became (well not really, but I have always fancied that combination as an ideal and fulfilling career path). Slowly I usually make my way back up, brush off the cobwebs of despair, and proceed anew. Within this highly secluded life of monastic-like repetition, thankfully, I have been enjoying some new things this spring. Once a week I head over to an University of Alberta off-site library facility to pour over archive material for a new project, which I am not going to talk about here (it is super-duper-top-secret) but it has been interesting working at an archive, especially one that is housed in an old Ikea. Since I am one of those right-brained people, I like to listen to music while I work, and lately I have also become pretty obsessed with house & electronic music, mainly thanks to a local DJ, David Stone whose weekly radio show on CJSR, BPM, is simply the bomb. He claims to bring the latest and greatest of electronic dance music from around the world and I think he is totally right. If you like this type of music, do catch his weekly show on Sat nights at 6 PM (MST). I sometimes get a little sad when I listen to some good music or see some stellar performance because it reminds me that what I may one day have to offer to the wider world an academic book and article here and there simply cannot bring the type of joy that musical performance and other creative expressions can bring. While you can listen to songs and over again, a book, if it is really superb, may attract a second or third reading. An academic book or article may at times light an inner light of joy, but let’s face it, it is usually a pretty cerebral light oh’ joy, leaving untouched those part of the brain, soul, heart, where more visceral, mysterious, yet fully self-enveloping feelings of joy reign high (but I am trying my hardest to stick a funny section or two in every chapter to leave a trace of laughter because if I can’t manage that with an ethnography on hackers, I will have failed miserably). Every track David Stone plays is something I want to listen to over and over again and thanks to mplayer stream dump function, I can. And funny enough, is that in the last month software believe it or not has brought me much joy as of late. I have been using free software since 1997 and I used to get A LOT more annoyed no make that a downright frustrated with programs (or lack of programs) than I do now. In fact, now, I am simply stunned whenever I upgrade to a version of a program. For example, Word Press 2.0 is like so much nicer in terms of usability and functionality than 1.5. The same goes for Open Office, the Gimp, and even Firefox, which has some bugs, but is so much better than its predecessors. I once described free software using the well-worn clich as “the gift that keeps on giving. And I think that this is becoming more and more true. And like wine, with the passing of time, these gifts usually get better and better. And like a unexpected present that arrives on your doorstep, these software packages induce some joy, because it is actually pretty neat to see these programs develop and grow into something stronger and more useful; so thanks to those who spend their time hacking away at making and improving this software and thanks to those (you know who you are) who helped with my recent WP upgrade!

TurboGears RemoteForm tip In case your RemoteForm misteriously behaves like a normal HTTP form, refreshing the page on submit, and the only hint that there's something wrong is this bit in the Iceweasel's error console:

Errore: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure
code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"
nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)"  location: "JS frame ::
javascript: eval(__firebugTemp__); :: anonymous :: line 1"  data: no]

the problem can just be a missing action= attribute to the form. I found out after:

1. reading the TurboGears remoteform wiki: "For some reason, the RemoteForm is acting like a regular html form, serving up a new page instead of performing the replacements we're looking for. I'll update this page as soon as I figure out why this is happening."
2. finding this page on Google and meditating for a while while staring at it. I don't speak German, but often enough I manage to solve problems after meditating over Google results in all sorts of languages unknown or unreadable to me. I will call this practice Webomancy.

A while back, I entered a competition to win one of a few prizes. The results came in, and it looks like I was a runner up, netting me a Mac Mini.

First, a rant about Mac OS X. It appears that there is no way to:

• Use a non-mac keyboard without using an external keyboard definition file
• Set the MTU for wireless connections
• Set the 'switch windows' to something other than the awful ctrl+F4
• Set the end and home keys to go to the start and end of the input line, respectively

They also asked me to " become one of our evangelists and tell your developer friends and colleagues about Zimki".
Well, I'm not so sure about evangelism, but I'll certainly blog about their platform, as it's fairly interesting.
So, what exactly is Zimki?
Well, it's basically a server side Javascript parser, based on SeaMonkey. The thought of using Javascript as a server side language is, initially, enough to make you run a thousand miles. After you get over your initial shock of this and examine it a little more closely, it does make at least a moderate amount of sense. It's entirely OO, so you should be able to pull in common functionality, perfect for the quick deployment of Webapps that Zimki is designed for.
Of course, this does rely on having the core libraries available. The only ones which seem to exist at the moment are:

• trimpath.js - a JavaScript templating language
• wiky.js - a Wiki markup language
• feed.js - an RSS / Atom feed generator

So, I can make a wiki which uses a template, and outputs it as an RSS feed. The rest I have to code myself - or do I?
This brings me nicely on to the next issue: documentation. There is a thorough lack of it. Thus, more classes may exist, but who knows. This is my MAJOR bugbear about Zimki. Give developers docs, and a nice coding environment, and they're happy. Zimki doesn't have either. Oh wait? I haven't mentioned the coding environment?
All editing seems to be done via a text box with some AJAX magic on the save button. But the save button doesn't work in Linux. Oh, and you can't indent your code. And you can't use a local editor.

This may sound all doom-and-gloom for Zimki, but it isn't. The editor could do with some attention, but it's not a show stopper. Zimki does manage to throw together HA concepts, backups and database (ish. The database object idea which Zimki uses is something I really don't like, but that's personal preference). The cost model they use is rather... odd. A charge is made for each call to the Zimki framework. I'm not a beancounter though, so I can't tell you how cheap/expensive this system is. If you know JavaScript well, and want to develop a complete webapp in it, this is certainly a good tool.

Now hopefully they'll get some documentation together and so people can actually USE the thing. If you're bored, why not play with my app that I wrote.

I always assumed the diff algorithm to be quite standard and used anywhere there is a diff function, well it seems it is not, and it also seems that human readability is very dependent on the tool you use: Here is what diff -u, git diff and tla diff give:

@@ -42,10 +42,9 @@
 include $(DEPTH)/config/autoconf.mk
-include $(topsrcdir)/config/rules.mk
+EXTRA_COMPONENTS = nsKillAll.js
-libs::
-       $(INSTALL) $(srcdir)/nsKillAll.js $(DIST)/bin/components
+include $(topsrcdir)/config/rules.mk
 clean::
        rm -f $(DIST)/bin/components/nsKillAll.js

This is the least human readable output. In comparison, svn diff, svk diff and bzr diff do output:

@@ -42,11 +42,10 @@
 include $(DEPTH)/config/autoconf.mk
+EXTRA_COMPONENTS = nsKillAll.js
+
 include $(topsrcdir)/config/rules.mk
-libs::
-       $(INSTALL) $(srcdir)/nsKillAll.js $(DIST)/bin/components
-
 clean::
        rm -f $(DIST)/bin/components/nsKillAll.js

Mercurial outputs:

@@ -42,10 +42,9 @@
 include $(DEPTH)/config/autoconf.mk
+EXTRA_COMPONENTS = nsKillAll.js
+
 include $(topsrcdir)/config/rules.mk
-
-libs::
-       $(INSTALL) $(srcdir)/nsKillAll.js $(DIST)/bin/components
 clean::
        rm -f $(DIST)/bin/components/nsKillAll.js

which is pretty similar. I got too fed up with tla and baz to try more (and didn’t even go up to committing a file in baz, so there’s no diff result for it)

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.
Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.
Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.
No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.
Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)
Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

• ETech 2007 registration
  

Today are provincial elections in The Netherlands, one of the least visible governments in this country, so it's hard to decide what would be a good choice. Add to that that the chosen members will in turn choose the (national) Senate. I have never been fond of package deals. I do not necessarily vote for the same party on the provincial level as I do nationally, because these two layers deal with distinctly different classes of decisions. After casting my vote I returned home with a little doubt of whether I'd made the right choice, until I realised which 9 parties I didn't vote for. The fact that my vote did not go to the parties that I don't trust our province or senate with is far more useful than the relatively small difference between the candidates I considered.

A reminder on why we do Free Software Some months ago I needed to find out if proper forward-only cursors were implemented in the ODBC driver for MySQL. I didn't go very far with the documentation, but I've been diving in its source code and within 30 minutes I knew everything there was to know about the subject. Now, after years I haven't touched proprietary software at all, I've been asked to port dballe to use the Oracle ODBC driver. I had a similar problem: find out how to use scrollable cursors with Oracle's ODBC driver. The release notes (a file called ODBCRelnotesUS.htm that I probably can't put online without their consent) say that they're implemented since ages, but SQLSetStmtAttr always tells me that the driver does not support it. Maybe I have to enable it somewhere? Maybe it's a bug? I could have found out with one hour browsing this driver's source code, but that wasn't available. Instead, I had to spend a whole day of trial and error, google searching with all sort of keyword combinations, looking at strings output on the .so libraries, and in the end I still don't know. That porting project is now stuck indefinitely, and my customers had to pay for a full day of fruitless work. So, here's the reminder: If you base on 3rd party proprietary software, you can't provide a serious service.

After ten (10) years, I'm leaving the ICQ network. I don't think I know anyone still on ICQ that I cannot reach by either Jabber or, less preferred, MSN Messenger. Reason for parting the network is the truckloads of spam that are shipped my way there daily, in fonts I can't even decypher, for services I do not want, and IM clients do not allow for easily clicking it away. It's a pity to lose my faithful UIN. 101662, thanks for the service. Uh-oh! Rrribbit

To CEO's, Wellink and members of the parliament: I cannot agree [nl] more [en]: please stop this discussion [nl] about hedge funds or other shareholders actually exercising their rights. If you sell your company on the stock market you get a lot of cash. But you also sell control to random interested parties, that's what being publicly traded means. You'll have to live with that situation, it's called the market. Thank you for your attention.

I've returned from FOSDEM in Brussels. Joost drove Jeroen, Christiaan and myself to Eindhoven where we took the train to Utrecht. FOSDEM has been a success again. The event has grown even bigger, still the FOSDEM team managed to create a good event nonetheless, thanks! Meeting up with the Debian crew again, both the usual suspects and new faces, was one of the highlights. The Debian booth has been popular, with the T-shirts in good demand; on Sunday morning I could only offer people the choice between S and XXL sizes. The Debian room had a diverse selection of interesting talks. Holger introduced Debian-Community.org, which I see as a useful initiative to provide recognition aswell as visibility for what already happens. To the Anonymous who returned me my lost backpack: thanks! I'm now off to sign all those keys.