In dust we trust

Friday June 18, 2004

AOP Workshop @ BeJUG: Adrian Colyer and Rod Johnson
Last Wednesday Adrian Colyer and Rod Johnson presented on the BeJUG AOP workshop in Brussels. Adrian and Rod first gave a great intro on AOP. Rod, author of the excellent book 'Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development', presented AOP in Spring. Afterwards Adrian focused on AspectJ and demonstrated the AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) for Eclipse.

It was really, really great, one of the best I've ever seen! Adrian managed to get the audience really involved, and for some reason AOP will be know be linked to the France - England Euro 2004 match :-) His approach on explaining the basic AOP concept was really unique and refreshing. Even the singing part wasn't that bad, right? :-) For those that don't know Spring yet, here's one more reason to give it a try. Especially if your boss doesn't like the AOP 'buzzword'. I must say I'm really looking forward to give the AspectJ-Spring 'integration' stuff a try, it sounded very, very promising!

I hope we'll see both of them back at JavaPolis 2004, as discussed at lunchtime. Perhaps for a JDO session by Rod, or some more AOP in action?

Thanx guys!
-- published on June 18, 2004 at 17:51 EDT in category techno -- Trackback Permalink Comments [2] --

Tuesday June 15, 2004

Acrobat downgrade
The Acrobat Reader on my recently installed system is now a 5.1, and it used to be a 6.0 on my old install. This downgrade has many reasons, and apparently I am not the only one getting mad about this.

One could blame the browser instead of Adobe for the really buggy browser integration, but I never had these problems with earlier Acrobat Reader versions. Furthermore, when it also fails to print some pdf's from an IE environment, don't just blame The Browser, Reloaded. What really bothered me however is Acrobat Reader 6.0 opening some pdf's as collections of empty, white pages. No browser involved here. And the pdf's look just fine with a version 5.x. That's just really, really annoying!

So, after careful consideration, I decided to downgrade to a 5.1, and I'm very happy with it ever since. To end with a positive note, it's a very good practice (I think) to provide some sort of software download archive. At least I was still able to get the 5.1 version.
-- published on June 15, 2004 at 15:18 EDT in category techno -- Trackback Permalink Comments [1] --

Monday June 14, 2004

Keyboard layout
I'm in the process of a full reinstall my portable, to end with a dual boot system, containing Windoz and Linux. For Windoz there isn't much choice what flavour to choose, so I'll stick with XP.

A minimal install, a maximum series of security updates and some driver updates later I find myself with a clean system. At that time, I typically add some users, configure some passwords, and that's it.

Shutdown. Reboot. Login. Failed! Hmm. Login. Failed!! Here we go again. As I'm using a portable with a French keyboard layout, I always have to adjust the Regional Settings keyboard layout. No big deal, I agree. But up till now, I haven't figured out how to do this for the default user in a civilized way. For the record, manually adjusting the Windoz registry is not what I call civilized.

So what am I missing here?
-- published on June 14, 2004 at 17:23 EDT in category techno -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Right-wing propaganda
I'm still receiving a lot of this German right-wing spam e-mails (average 3kb). By now, the originating e-mail adresses seem familiar to be, as they are the same that used to spam me with e-mails containing a 67kb virus-attachment. So in a way things are getting better now, as my mailbox limit isn't reached that fast anymore. Think positive! :-)

I have no doubt that my e-mail address is also used to send the spam with. Luckily, I'm living in Belgium, and most people over here aren't that fluent in German, including myself. So I guess hardly anyone would think such an e-mail really originates from me, but I can imagine it's really annoying if you're German.

It is frightening however this started some days before the European elections, that can't be a coincidence. But the result of these regional and European elections here in Belgium is even more frightening. I need some more time to reflect on that before I'm able to write about it...
-- published on June 14, 2004 at 17:08 EDT in category xroads -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Monday May 31, 2004

Elections: limited democracy?
The European elections are less than 2 weeks away now. That same day (June 13) here in Belgium we also have elections for the regional government, in my case, for the Flemish government.

The past 3 sunday evenings, there was a show on TV, called Doe de stemtest (Dutch). Every show contains 33 multiple choice questions about a theme, e.g. one of them being about 'money'. Based on your answers, you receive a personal profile, which should help you to make up your mind for the Flemish elections. I restrict this test to the Flemish elections, as most of their questions were about Belgian politics. Note that I say 'Belgian' politics, not 'Flemish' politics, as again, most of the questions/issues are situated on the federal (Belgian) political level, not the regional (Flemish) one, if I'm correct.

Anyway, take a look at my results. I'm not going to list the results of the three tests separately, but I'll give you my general political profile, according to this test:

1: VLD	14,28%
2: CD&V	13,27%
3: N-VA	12,85%
4: SP.A	12,37%
5: Spirit	12,37%
6: Vivant	12,37%
7: Vlaams Blok	11,54%
8: Groen!	10,95%

So now what?

They're all in a range of 3,5%, between 11% and 14,5%. The results of every test separately shows the same thing: the order changes somewhat, but their percentages are very, very close. So that doesn't help me to make up my mind either. Not that results of tests make any difference to me, but I'm always interested to know what political color I have... :-)

Now let's take a look at the real choices we have, as most of the political parties over here have formed alliances: VLD + Vivant (26,65%), CD&V + N-VA (26,12%), SP.A + Spirit (24,74%), Vlaams blok (11,54%) and Groen! (10,95%). You should know that nobody asked for alliances anyway, as far as I know. But since every political party needs a score of at least 5% (yet another change nobody asked for), this is the result. So we have 5 choices left. In my case, two of them are out of the question, in advance. It's funny to see that this actually corresponds with the test. One would expect to get a more left-oriented or more right-oriented profile out of a test with 99 questions. In my case, the two parties I don't even consider are the most opposite ones of the Flemish political spectrum I guess, as we have the Vlaams Blok as the most right one, and Groen! as the most left one.

We are used to have much more choice, as you can see. But these alliances restrict our choices from 8 to 5. In my case, I'm left with the 3 major formations, the 3 alliances, and all three of them are within a range of more or less 2%. And you'll have noticed that I didn't need a test on TV to come to this conclusion... :-) But the show contained some nice conclusion as well, more in general, one could see what the Flemish people most care about.

Anyway, let me end with the real problem I'm facing. Even if I had already made up my mind, and selected one of my 3 choices, I'm left with the problem that every choice I have represents 2 political parties! What if I have a problem with one of them? That question is not so unreal, if you know that N-VA is a rather radical Flemish nationalistic party, and, although Vivant has some very refreshing, rather radical left-liberal ideas, I do not agree with all of the ideas. I know, a vote for a party doesn't require to agree with all ideas. But it might be enough to strongly disagree with one idea, for never to vote for a party, don't you think?

So, is it just me, or have they all just limited our choices here? If democracy is about choice, didn't they just limit our democracy here? It surely feels that way!
-- published on May 31, 2004 at 19:30 EDT in category belgium -- Trackback Permalink Comments [2] --

Friday May 07, 2004

Voice
Had a really strange experience at work today. Having a cold is one thing, but it gets really annoying when it affects your voice. So there I was, in a meeting with 10-15 attendees, trying to participate and make my point. Really difficult and frustrating, without voice. As with everything, you only really realize what you have, when it's gone.

Oh well, Thank God it's Friday!
-- published on May 07, 2004 at 16:15 EDT in category dust -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Saturday April 24, 2004

23
Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here we go: "Er komen bij een aantal van mijn klanten jongetjes van 21, met de jeugdpuisten nog vers op het gezicht, consultant spelen in een blauw pak." ("Hoe gooi ik een adviseur eruit?" from Martijn van Oorschot & Michiel Hogerhuis)

Sometimes we do still read books in Dutch, you see. But for those not that familiar with Dutch, I'll provide a second phrase, restricted to books in English. So this book is just a bit further away than the Dutch one:

"But perhaps not as good as the early adopters might have us believe". ("Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering" from Robert L. Glass)

Not that spectacular, I agree. That's why I still read Dutch books as well :-) "If only I understood Dutch", I hear you thinking :-)

Others infected with 23/5: Vincent, Marc, Steven, Bertrand, ...
It's actually a fun game. One could do this with music also: grab the nearest music cd/album/record, listen to lyrics of track 4 and write down the 7th phrase...
-- published on April 24, 2004 at 12:15 EDT in category dust -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

OpenOffice developers say they have no plans to introduce Microsoft-competitive vulnerabilities
Came accross this article, titled OpenOffice trails MS Office in vulnerabilities. It's not new, it's written in September last year, but for some reason I only found out about it today. Oh irony... Excerpt:

Of course, there's also the price barrier to be overcome. At $0.00, OpenOffice simply can't compete. Heck, it can't even get on retail store shelves because a 40% markup on $0.00 gives the retailer a gross profit of approximately $0.00, and most don't feel that's high enough to devote valuable shelf space to OpenOffice.

:-)
-- published on April 24, 2004 at 11:39 EDT in category xroads -- Trackback Permalink Comments [1] --

Thursday April 22, 2004

On the train
This is kind of exciting: I'm on the train from Brussels to Ghent writing this post, reading & sending e-mail, surfing the net. All of this using GPRS, my portable and my SonyEricsson P900: the portable connects to the P900 using an infrared connection (could use Bluetooth as well, but I forgot my adapter at home). The P900 acts as a modem using the GPRS. So basically it's back to the plain old dialup connections :-) Speed: 9,6Kbps.

What is really funny though is the network status over here: there is a big gap between Brussels and Ghent when you want to use your mobile phone and your operator is Proximus. Just for calling people I mean. But the GPRS coverage seems to be much better. Does this make sense?

alright... Time to press the 'post & publish' button...
-- published on April 22, 2004 at 12:15 EDT in category xroads -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Tuesday April 20, 2004

Understanding the wheel
I just read a post titled 'So what if we choose to write software for geeks' [from Object Country, via Feelings and Thoughts]...

It may be true that you don't need to recreate the wheel, but you don't truly understand the wheel until you have recreated it.

Like that.

What I don't like is being forced to recreate the wheel. Yes, that does happen, despite all discussion, presentations and good arguments... *sigh* ... Sometimes it's just politics.
-- published on April 20, 2004 at 16:17 EDT in category dust -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Saturday April 17, 2004

Ireland and European software patents
This month the Irish Presidency of the EU referred back the controversial EU Directive on software patents to a committee of politicians from member states. The proposed draft text rejects all amendments made by the European Parliament last September and instead pushes for direct patentability of computer programs.
[from The Register: EU braces for software patent demo]

I really like Ireland, you know, and I'd like to keep it that way. But I'd like to know why they are doing this. Are there some (Irish) readers amongst you can explain this? I read something about this in the Belgian press somewhere, saying it had something to do with investments of big USA based companies in Ireland. I don't know exactly what the point was, but can this be true? Is stuff like that still possible?
-- published on April 17, 2004 at 13:14 EDT in category xroads -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

Bugfix
Recently I received this comment on my Cocoon 2.1.4 upgrade report, from Addison Phillips:
Actually, the browsers are right not to look at the meta tag when the http header has a value: those are the rules. What's more, META tags are notoriously wrong. In JSP it is always best to use the page directive and set the content-type that way. It's even better to use XHTML and set the encoding in the document declaration too. Just a tip.

Well, I don't know where I got that nonsense from in the first place: off course browsers look at the http header. I must have been drinking when I wrote that, I guess :-) So a good reason for a separate 'bugfix' post.

The problem with Cocoon is still a big issue though, as it is still Tomcat that fills in the (missing) http header with the default encoding. You can imagine the mess this creates when you serialize with utf-8... I just checked the bug status in the Cocoon bugzilla, and they are working on it. But it ain't that simple to fix, as I predicted. And unfortunately, I really lack the time to help fixing it. About the XHTML: I am working on that. The goal is to achieve valid XHTML, but I ended up with a blank page in some browser, or text output instead of a nice formatted page in some other browser. It's been a while and I should look into it again.
-- published on April 17, 2004 at 12:35 EDT in category techno -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --

And you are?
Which OS are You?

I just couldn't resist this one, although I was a bit scared about ending up as Windows ME or so :-) If you try it, make sure to check out all the possible results, there are some good ones...

[via Waste of Time]
-- published on April 17, 2004 at 08:24 EDT in category dust -- Trackback Permalink Comments [1] --

Tuesday March 30, 2004

Ze Frank On Friendster

Hilarious movie. MUST See. Makes fun of Friendster, Orkut and Wallop.

Monday March 29, 2004

Bad combination
A short entry, just to let you all know that I'm still around. Fighting a cold (or a little flu) combined with all the last minute things that need to be done at the end of our financial year and spiced with renovations of a building: a really, really bad combination. You can take my word for it. And those are just the most demanding issues...

But at least the future looks warm and sunny: according to the local weather forecast, Spring is here to stay, at least this week. Hurray!

Major headache. Time to go to bed, I guess, before my head explodes...

Personal message for M.: no more voice messages please, I will call you back, as soon as I find some time (and have my voice back). I promise! (and I know you're reading this).
-- published on March 29, 2004 at 14:58 EST in category dust -- Trackback Permalink Comments [0] --