Na 5 mailwisselingen met de klantenservice van Bol heb ik het toch echt gehad.
En het ging nog wel om zoiets simpels als een datumprobleem.
Aangezien Bol attachments standaard niet vertrouwt, had het bijsluiten van schermafdrukken ook geen zin. Zie dit voorbeeld en let hierbij op de releasedatum:




























Bol presteert het om CD's te leveren die nog gereleased moeten worden!

What's new or better in Windows Vista ?
Tell me, or ask Microsoft or maybe even Intel.
At least the hardware must be better.
And it's all about the looks.
What about Gadgets?












And the name only!
You all know Mr. Gadget, I presume?















See also this blog post

If you like the functionality of Gadgets on your desktop,
then there is no need for Vista at all.
Just download Yahoo Widgets or if you're linked to Google Google Widgets

Java on the i-Series and running a webapplication without Websphere,
not this bloated pig, but just open source TomCat, see:
http://www.as400pro.com/servlet/sql.tipView?key=1596&category=iSJava
and the links on this page:
http://www.rjssoftware.com/files/apache/iseriestomcat-5028.exe
http://www.rjssoftware.com/files/apache/iseriestomcat.pdf

I am a bit worried about IBS 2.0, the new company policy.
And as people should know about me, I do not like trolls.

Here is the sound belonging to this troll (he is in the Efteling):
sound

Mooi toch die Nederlandse spreekwoorden en gezegdes.
Juist om de status van menig IT project of IT product aan te duiden:
Water naar de zee dragen
Dweilen met de kraan open
Parels voor de zwijnen
Trekken aan een dood paard
Uilen naar Athene brengen
Het paard achter de wagen spannen

Vul zelf maar aan ...

Live is short and time is more often waisted then meaningful used.
The webapplications appear to be really memory consuming (see my piece about garbage collection).
Here is yet another example:
SQL ERROR: Out of memory (Needed 556764 bytes)
SQL: SELECT * FROM adrev_traffic WHERE adid='40' AND date='2006-11-18' AND keywordid='0'
and the page it occurred on:

Things for me and maybe other people to think about:
my messages of the day.

See this odd (Dutch?) collection:
Later is allang begonnen
No pain, no gain
De intensieve menshouderij
Safety First
Management By Exception
Weest optimistisch
De charme van de eenvoud
Noblesse oblige: U and non-U
If IT feels nice, don't think twice
Nosce te ipsum (ken jezelf)
The more I know, the less I understand
Swear they moved that sign
Bridges come and bridges go
semper fi (always faithful)
Het enige lot is wat we zelf scheppen
How many times, is time enough?
The devil made me do IT
Oops… I did IT Again!
Who's afraid of Java
Tweaktown
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy!
's maandags word ik samen met het huisvuil buiten gezet
Sometimes IT has to get worse before IT gets better
Barbertje moet hangen (There must be a scapegoat)
Alles wat u niet zegt kan tegen u gebruikt worden
I'm a high risk factor

That's it for now. To be continued ...

De ontwikkelingen zijn nauwelijks bij te benen.
FireFox 2.0 is uit: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

En dat terwijl Internet Explorer 7.0 net van zijn beta status af is: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

Wat is concurrentie toch mooi!

And now for something completely different:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MbeT7_ARm8

You know YouTube?
If the movie is more then just junk, see this URL:
http://www.hiphopmusic.com/best_of_youtube/2006/02/how_to_download_and_save_youtu.html

One more reason to just use FireFox
After downloading a FLV player, you can easily save and see this movie although YouTube has already discarded it:
http://jos.coenen.googlepages.com/sp.flv

Question: does size matter (this file is 7 MB)?

And what about this viral movie:
http://www.eenbeternederlandbeginthier.nl/
or the most recent one:
http://www.helpjan.nl/

Déjà vu

Gisteren het nieuws gezien?
http://www.rtl.nl/(/actueel/rtlnieuws/)/components/actueel/rtlnieuws/2006/10_oktober/27/binnenland/1027_17150_baby_umc_vu.xml

Ook ons dochterje Nadia had als prematuurtje (!!!) 25 december 1993 een linkerbovenbeenbreuk.
Met morfine werd haar lijden enigszins verzacht.
Van heel haar lichaampje zijn röntgenfoto's gemaakt.

In eerste instantie werden wij als ouders in staat van beschuldiging gebracht.
Dit terwijl we alleen op bezoek mochten.
Er is een aantal dagen verscherpt op het personeel (!) gelet op bevel van prof. dr. Kollee.
Voor Nadia begon de dag met een prik in haar hiel om bloed af te nemen.
What a way to start the day!
Dat is niet bepaald zacht gewekt worden.
Puur speculatief (maar wat wil je meer) zou het beentje gebroken kunnen zijn tijdens deze bloedafname. Het kindje spartelt immers fel tegen.
Wij als ouders waren hier (natuurlijk) nooit getuige van.
Noem het empathie (inlevingsvermogen).

De heks (!) die dit op haar geweten heeft, is helaas niet betrapt.
Het ziekenhuis heeft geen aangifte gedaan ook niet bij de inspectie van de gezondheidszorg.
Wij hadden als ouders van een premature tweeling wel andere dingen aan het hoofd.

Zie http://www.vpro.nl/programma/uq/afleveringen/27979049/items/28469067/
In de jaren 40-50 waren er artsen die 'onverklaarbare' botbreuken van heel kleine kinderen toeschreven aan een te grote broosheid van hun beenderstelsel en spraken van het 'bone fragility syndrome'. Kempe c.s. hebben onderzoek gedaan naar die vreemde letsels en hun bevindingen dat deze het gevolg waren van geweld van de kant van ouders beschreven in dit beroemde artikel dat de aanzet heeft gevormd voor een intense aandacht in de samenleving en de wetenschap voor het verschijnsel kindermishandeling.

Worth reading from Nicholas G. Carr:
http://visionarymarketing.com/articles/it-doesnt-matter.html

Extract:

IT managers, according to Mr Carr, should focus on:

1. Spending less
2. Following vs innovating
3. Focus on risks

What is wisdom nowadays? Tell me!

Tip of the week:


















http://www.fascinerend.nl/webwinkel/index.php?product_id=3&cat=38&cmd=shop_product&prod_id=17&zoeken=netipot

What a long URL!!!
And is it a neti-pot or a netipot or a neti pot?
Amazing this trick with water!

But, what! This pot is made of plastic and will cost you 15,50 (and not the original 4,50).
This is an example of taking advantage of other people bad noses (or bad taste).
SHAME ON YOU www.fascinerend.nl
A real neti-pod is NOT made of plastic.

What's the problem with Vista:
there is this B(lue) S(creen) O(f) D(eath) = BSOD:













See:
http://www.thehumorarchives.com/joke/Windows_Vista_BSOD

And now for something completely different!
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=3163263343187879320

Google rules!

Garbage, eat your own garbage!

see this link: http://www.itjungle.com/fhg/fhg051204-story05.html

and this text in it:

GOOFY PTF'S

When I read through IBM's various PTFs, sometimes I have to laugh. I can just imagine the stories behind some of them. Take, for example, PTF MF32064 for Licensed Program 5722999 for V5R2M0. An application server ended abnormally during interaction between Java interrupts and garbage collection. This didn't sound too strange. Any programmer worth his salt knows that when you make a change in one program, the chances of causing problems in another program are pretty good. And with the complexity of the programs that make up OS/400, those chances increase exponentially. But what was funny to me was the rest of the problem description: "It takes an unusual situation to cause the problem: there has to be a thread which was interrupted for garbage collection during a wait or sleep, went into another wait while processing the garbage collection interrupt, and then was interrupted yet again."

You can just imagine the hell that IBM tech support and programmers must have gone through in verifying that this problem even existed and then trying to recreate it to make sure that the fixes they had made did in fact fix the problem.

IBM Supervisor: "What are you working on?"

IBM Programmer: "Writing a program that will interrupt a thread, but only during the garbage collection process. Oh, yeah, and the thread has to be in a wait state. Oh, and then I've gotta figure out how to cause another garbage collection cycle, but only after the thread goes into another interrupt."

IBM Supervisor: "How do you even know the customer's description of the problem is accurate and that the program you are writing will duplicate the problem?"

IBM Programmer: "I don't. I first have to write a program to see if the problem even exists before I can write a program to fix the problem. Assuming it exists."

IBM Supervisor: "So…I should call your wife and tell her not to wait up for you?"

Sometimes I'm really thankful that I don't work in software support. For more information on this PTF or the Java Group PTF it belongs to, go to IBM's Web site.

It is a bloody shame and nightmare: the on-line dictionaries.
See this example:
http://www.worldlingo.com/nl/products_services/computer_translation.html?from=dutch&to=french
With the following text (from this blog):
It’s important to keep performance in mind when designing your applications.

And the translation in Dutch is:
Het is belangrijk om prestaties in mening te houden wanneer het ontwerpen van uw toepassingen.

Amazing!!!

The tools Google provides lack decent dictionaries with a rich vocabulary.
A golden chance for Google as these on-line dictionaries are providing wordgarbage.

Maybe my fault, but composing this blog I can click a "check Spelling" button, that appears to be an implementation of the empty pattern: nothing happens!

Talking about garbage, garbage collection is an issue.
Untill yesterday I never heard (me lucky guy) about "stop the world".
Since yesterday the application seems to loop, but actually the garbage collector stopped my application.
See (of course) Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)

And: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/library/es-JavaVirtualMachinePerformance.html
with this sentence:
Avoid calling GC from within your code through System.gc() call. GC is a "stop the world" event, meaning that all threads of execution will be suspended except for the GC threads themselves. If you must call GC, do it during a non-critical or idle phase.

And this pdf document describing a new cleanroom implementation of the JVM and GC:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ieduasst/v1r1m0/topic/com.ibm.iea.was_v6/was/6.1/Architecture/WASv61_JavaVirtualMachine.pdf

Frightening, completely new and bugfree?

Java performance improvement and pitfalls:
The other area is architecture. Sometimes poor performance is literally "built in" to an application, making it very difficult to do any useful performance improvement by tuning. For example, suppose that you make heavy use of the object-oriented paradigm, such that you have many layers of superclasses and subclasses.
Moreover, suppose your application is one that processes bytes or characters one at a time, and each byte is processed through all these layers of classes and methods. In such a case, adequate performance may beimpossible to attain, short of an application re-design.
It’s important to keep performance in mind when designing your applications.
see: http://www.glenmccl.com/jperf/

A newbie in the blog world.
I started this blog with three steps to heaven:

Create a blog in 3 easy steps:

1. Create an account
2. Name your blog
3. Choose a template

More then surprised by the free stuff Google sells the world.
Starting with Google search, Gmail, Spreadsheets, Writely and finally (for now) this blogger.
It's amazing what you can do in a browser using AJAX technology!

Of course this is all beta stuff and sometimes the connection is lost, but still innovating technology.

Suggested link of the day: http://www.youtube.com

Uit de Automatiseringsgids

Ajax scoort
dinsdag 29 augustus 2006, Den Haag, 08:31 uur


AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) ontwikkelt zich tot de lingua franca van het hedendaags programmeren, aldus de onderzoekers van Evans Data Corporation (EDC). Vooral ontwikkelaars in opkomende markten als India en Oost Europa hebben Ajax omarmd voor het realiseren van webapplicaties. Evans Data ondervroeg ruim vierhonderd ontwikkelaars in het kader van de 2006 Emerging Markets Development Survey.

In Brazilië gebruikt meer dan een kwart van de ontwikkelaars AJAX, in de VS is dat 18 procent en in China 16 procent.

AJAX, de verzameling van technieken die de interface van webapplicaties meer op die van een lokaal draaiende toepassing kan laten lijken, is ook geland bij de grote bedrijven. Google zet AJAX volop in bij de online-diensten. Op initiatief van IBM werd recent ook het Open AJAX-consortium opgericht waarin naast IBM en Google ook BEA, Yahoo, Oracle, Eclipse, Mozilla, Novell en Red Hat deelnemen. (Peter Lievense)

IBS 2.0: http://www.notenbomer.nl/nl/pagina/146/Gemeente+Wormerland.html