log4p

In the Netherlands ‘Flair’ is a magazine read by teenage girls, containing tips for teenage girls. In Sun’s dictionary it will be:

A self-supporting web programming kernel that’s all written in JavaScript

Couldn’t find much about it, but they seem to deem it the successor of the current AJAX model…. I’m curious… since it’s still Javascript…

Will probably take a couple of months to get some traction!

source: techworld

Finalist managed to reach the second place in the ‘Development Tools’ content using Ruby on Rails. More about this on our corporate website here (Dutch).

I think this is an excellent achievement and like to congratulate Remco and Michiel on it!

I’d really like to use tools which feel as competitive as Rails on a daily bases, and maybe compete in the contest as well… maybe next year

Today Google managed to lose all my bookmarks and most of the RSS feeds I configured on my personalized homepage. Since there is now way to backup your homepage this means they’re just lost now. I’m not the only one suffering from this problem; one of my colleagues preceded me in losing everything he’d put in there and many news sites report about more users have identical problems.

This seems to be one of the major problems with most web 2.0 sites around; you don’t control your data yourself and most site don’t have hooks for restoring a backup you made; twitter had similar problems a couple of days ago.

One of the articles mentions Google is working to restore the lost data; hopefully they’ll manage to do so.. otherwise I’ll have to start looking for a different solution for reading RSS feeds and managing bookmarks.

While using Compass in the complex environment of our current project we ran into some rather nasty problems; some of the related to bugs in the Compass codebase. Currently we’ve got it all setup and running, and apart from some performance issues (simple queries taking 16 seconds!) it all seems fine.

But since word got out we had troubles the people from JTeam/Interface21 decided to come over and have a meeting/discussion to get to know eachother and to share knowledge.

Bram Smeets (known from Spring and DWR) and Uri Boness (Lucene/Compass expert) turned up. After I introduced them to the applications I (partially) architected for the VPRO we had a nice conversation on the problems we faced using Compass.

As to be expected the typical answers where that they’d seldom seen such a complex and large setup; and they’d probably not use Lucene’s JDBC directory (due to performance). No real answers, but I didn’t expect them; so… no problem. I actually really liked talking to experts on the various frameworks I use; especially since it is a good way to see how I’ve evolved (man, have I evolved ) on various topics since last year.

Some tips they gave are worth a try:

• store less information in lucene, keep indexes small and let the database handle it
• experiment with and benchmark various setups (database vs. filestore for example)
• have a look at partitioning to see if it is useful to enhance performance

Always worth a try!

The most annoying ‘feature’ of my OSX system used to be the speed of the cursor when moved using the arrow keys. Not anymore… OSX seems to have a global configuration (yes, all you macheadz probably did this the first time you started your macbook) to control the key repeat rate and repeat delay:

The responsiveness is much better now!

Finally a post about the season Spring instead of the framework. Apart from the occasional stroke of pollinosis I’m really enjoying the first rays of sun (and the first SAS BBQ of the year last weekend). And since my son learned how to walk and enjoy playing at playgrounds I’ve got even more reasons to go out.
Therefor I decided to change the dark autumn/winter feeling of my blog into a nice summery one by replacing the picture in the header with a nice closeup I took of my son enjoying the weather.

As always I’m a bit behind in actually using all this greate web 2.0 stuff. Most of my colleagues at the VPRO have been using Twitter for a while now, but I was still a bit skeptical.

Erwin has a nice (Dutch) post trying to explain the point of twitter; but for techs: the way it is used resembles the way you used tou use IRC .

From now on I’ll twittering about my whereabouts, mostly in Dutch. You can find me at this address: http://www.twitter.com/p3t0r or view my twitters in the sidebar.

Or try to view one of my ‘tweets’ on twittervision

Today our new car radio arrived. With the upcoming arrival of our new car in mind we decided to make another step in abandoning the use of CDs. Previously we’ve setup a solution for the living room using a uPNP capable network storage device in combination with a uPNP player. The only reason to keep going through those clumsy CD boxes was to select some of them to listen in the car.

Now we’ve found a solution in installing a USB capable radio for the car, so we can just plug in a SD/MMC memory card or USB stick containing MP3 or OGG files:

As you can see, the device (VDO Dayton CD 1737 X) is also bluetooth aware… which in this case means it can act as a handsfree headset for our cellphones!

So, as soon as I’ve installed the device there won’t be a reason the unlock the CD cupboard anymore. Hooray!

What a busy week I it was!

This week:

• I started dieting, I’ve got to loose some weight
• I managed to get my part in the project back on track after Arne was taken of the project
• I prepared (and presented) a presentation on the how/what/why of the CTO board for quarterly company meeting
• I tried to figure out the advantages of the seaside framework
• I bought matching hinges for the door I found, now I’ll only have to make it fit in the closet where I want is
• I did some research into cars
• We bought a car
• I cleaned out the front garden, and removed the algae living on the pavement
• I got one of my shoes repared
• Ow, and I managed to read my book and watch the new southpark episode.
• I upgraded our wordpress instances to the latest version
• I worked on my article

And I probably forgot some stuff in this list….

So that is why I didn’t manage to write a new blogpost… maybe I’ll find some time next week, for now: Happy Easter!