Jilles.net

French Onion Soup

2011-08-06T00:00:00+02:00

After having gone on a rampage for various different recipes (small selection here), I found the following recipe on Smitten Kitchen and thought I'd try that and share the results. So, to be clear, the recipe is based on Smitten Kitchen's.

The soup is absolutely awesome though. And even better, the whole kitchen will smell delicious while you are cooking it. To get started, grab the following:

1 1/2 pounds (680 grams) thinly sliced yellow onions
3 tablespoons (42 grams) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon (15 ml) olive oil
1 teaspoon (5 grams) table salt, plus additional to taste
1/4 teaspoon (1 gram) granulated sugar (helps the onions to brown)
3 tablespoons (24 grams) all-purpose flour
2 quarts (1.9 liters) beef or other brown stock
1/2 cup (120 ml) dry white wine or dry white vermouth
Freshly ground black pepper

To start, grab your onions and chop them up in strips of 4-8mm each. Not too big, not too thin. It is hard to make too many onions, so if you go a little over, no worries.

Next, take the oil and butter and heat those up on "moderately low heat". Once that is done, toss in all the onions. Stir them around to get them all oiled up. Then close the lid, and just have it sit there. This should soften up your onions (by keeping the moist inside).

Once done, turn up the heat to medium. Now we need to caramelize the onions. This will make that awesome taste to the soup, so it's important to get right. Basically, all you need to do is add the salt and sugar and stir the onions every other minute or so for the next 30-40 minutes.

For me it looked like this halfway through:

Once the onions are all caramelized, sprinkle the flower over the onions. Before stirring, it should look roughly like follows:

I think using a little less than the ingredient lists calls for is okay, some experimentation is needed here. Stir the flower through for 3 minutes. Now it is time to turn this into a real soup: add the white wine, wait a little bit, then bit by bit add the stock to the mix. Add the pepper to taste, and a bit of salt -- don't over do the latter. Now bring the whole thing to a simmer, and it should look like this:

Put the lid back, but keep a small opening. Now this needs to simmer for another 30-40 minutes. Check in once in a while, if you have a film on top of the soup, skim it off. And that is it really! However, in my mind, French Onion Soup is not done without the toast with cheese. I usually use the toaster to make some bread crispy. I always put them up against each other vertically, to avoid them getting moist prematurely:

At the same time, cut some remaining fresh onion up in really small pieces (maybe one or two tea spoons). Get some cheese (being dutch, I used Gouda, but most cheeses will work) and combine the onion and cheese.

After your 30-40 minute simmer is done, poor the soup in your ramekins/cups, add the toast on top, and then the cheese/onion, like so:

This should go into a preheated oven, put to broil. Temperature isn't that important (200-270 Celsius), as long as the cheese becomes brown! Should not take too long, so just stay around and check in every minute or so. After that, done!

Oh, and since you undoubtedly got left over white wine, don't forget to serve that too!

Jilles 'uses this'

2011-07-26T00:00:00+02:00

Inspired by the articles over at Usesthis.com I thought I would do my own write up in similar vain.

Hardware

Over the last 8 years all of my hardware has moved into Apple land. When I was still programming professionally I did so exclusively on Debian/Linux systems and that is just what I am most comfortable with. The Mac offers that experience with the notable exception of 'apt-get' package management.

Main personal desktop is a 27" iMac (2008 model I believe). This is what I use to browse the web with, do Skype calls with family and friends back in the Netherlands, dabble with software development and new technologies in my spare time and store all my photos and music.
A 2009 model Mac mini which is always on and provides all the media in my apartment. Since I live abroad I don't watch any of the local broadcasters I rely on this to provide some entertainment. In addition this also brings some non-networked disks onto my TimeCapsule powered network.
I gave my old (1st edition) MacBook Air to my girlfriend, but will still pick it up if I need to write somewhere else in my apartment, away from the iMac (like right now). Actively looking for an excuse to buy one of the new MacBook Airs. I literally think this is the best laptop produced till date.
For years I was a heavy Blackberry user, they truly made the best email capable phones in existence at the time. But how far the mighty can fall? The second the iPhone debuted, I bought one and upgrade to every new iPhone within weeks after it comes out.
iPad: the primary use case here is shared internet experiences with my girlfriend. For example, shopping online for that new furniture addition or looking up information together. Sometimes a bit of travel.
Amazon Kindle: bought this primarily for travel. I love physical books, but I can't afford to bring two big books on a 2-3 day business trip for example. Jury is still out.
For work: I have been working for eBay for the last 8 years or so and always been using the standard windows machines provided. But 6 months ago I finally switched that to a MacBook Pro. I have notably more issues with that transition than any other transition to Apple products (Microsoft Outlook on Mac is seriously unproductive for example) but I'm managing just fine

Software

For work I mostly use a weird combination of "standard business software" such as Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Skype together with rather geeky stuff. As an example, a lot of times I will automate data gathering with bash scripting or look up how our users are using our sites by writing a Pig script and run it against our Hadoop cluster(s). This turns into the fun combination of me always having a iTerm2 console open, even though I do not program for a living anymore.

Personally I use Gmail for mail, but mostly try to stay away from the web client (not sure why, but I guess it is due to the latency difference with simple Mail.app client). As mentioned, I use Skype a lot for international video calls.

My browser of choice these days is Chrome, as it is fast and syncs nicely across all my machines which is great. For a list of places on the web where you can find me, look here. Daily (non-business) sites I frequent are Google Reader and HackerNews. Once in a while Google+, Facebook. Interestingly for me Twitter has become iPhone only: I check it daily but find the UEX on the iPhone just better than their main site.

After seeing internal statistics from some of our large websites and all the hacks that make the news every week I moved to use 1Password with large random generated passwords uniquely for each site. I also enabled two-factor authentication for my Google account the day it came out.

For image processing I am currently using iPhoto but experimenting here and there with Aperture after purchasing a DSLR. Not entirely sure yet on this. I do prune my pictures quite well for each event I have in iPhoto to keep the size of my total library down (see backups further down).

I spend quite a bit of time iTerm2, using things like screen, git, vim, etc. I am quite bought into the Unix mantra there. For someone who likes to keep his programming chops a little bit up to date Github really offers me a nice place to put my small projects and at the same time a way to contribute in small measures to the various open source projects out there.

For media consumption I use Plex on the Mac mini, which is absolutely great. Comes with a whole bunch of plugins to stream content like The Daily Show and I have build up a nice library of ripped DVDs. The Mac mini is hooked up to a large (European standard) television, but it will also stream the content to the iPad or iPhone in a pinch if needed.

For my weblog (that you are reading now) I had great fun geeking out with Jekyll, creating a fully automated build system using Rake and hooking it all up with a self created low-key template. These are no great feats of engineering, but good fun for a geek in any case. As an example, using wget and some scripting the build system will fail when this blog has any internal links that 404. You will find my code on my Github page. (Also see the colophon.)

Storage

I have a tick for trying to preserve most of the things that I made or had a hand in creating. This means that I have a digital photo collection that goes back to when my ancient Nokia phone had a 320x200 pixel camera. In addition any software, documentation, research papers, fun websites, assembler code for microprocessors, etc, I have written goes into my "Lifetime Archive". Not sure why, nostalgia is partly an answer but it definitely also has it's uses.

I now have also started this process for my offline life. Having moved internationally twice now, paper (and especially "accessible" paper) is just hard. So I have started to scan most important documents and store those into my "Dead tree archive" which is a collection of PDFs that combine the graphical scan with OCRd text.

As for SaaS providers like Gmail, Github, Google Docs, etc. all get pulled down locally by a cronjob every day or week and disappear in my Lifetime archive. This primarily got instigated after Delicious threatened to close down. (I consequently moved to Pinboard).

The total of all of the above, including pictures, is roughly 100GB.

Having only scarcely recovered my CD-ROM backups from 2001 (needed to combine 6 different disks to recombine the whole archive) I now store all this on my iMac and backup religiously:

Local backups go onto the TimeCapsule, easily accessible from my Mac
A subset of the data gets stored onto Dropbox, but only those files that don't require the highest privacy
Then there is Crashplan that is my primary off site backup
Lastly, I also backup the same data using Arc onto Amazon S3. I'm sure Crashplan does the same but at these cost levels I don't care and I insulate myself also from Crashplan suddenly disappearing. (Arc is just software, and I'm betting Amazon AWS is going to be around for another 10 years). Hats off to Arq for doing a lof of testing.

Perhaps it is a bit overdone, but I am now reasonably certain I can get to the binary/text files in the future. A bigger concern now becomes document compatibility. For example, I have a load of Electronics engineering reports I wrote in WordPerfect 5.1 that are starting to look quite garbled.

Conclusion

I often suggest Apple should start making a subscription hardware service: I wire a pre-determined amount dollars to their bank account. In return they send me within one week of their product launch, whatever they are launching in a set of predetermined categories (think: laptop, desktop, iPhone and iPad). Would that not be awesome?

I am pretty happy with my setup this far. If you have any questions or would love to contribute, fire away in the comments below!

Stamped (not mashed) potatos recipe

2011-07-23T00:00:00+02:00

The other day I made a delicious potato dish, and having my camera ready, I thought I'd share it with you! To go short, rather than baking potato disks, or mashing them up completely, this dish nicely holds the middle. This produces a really nice crunchy dish!

Ingredients:

Potatoes (have them decently sized)
Salt, pepper
Herbs (Rosemary, or ...)
Oil

For starters, boil the potatoes in their skins. That's important: in their skins. This is what is going to make them so crunchy and good. You should add some salt to taste. The best way to do that is to wait for the water to boil, then add the salt. This works better as the water immediately dissolves it. Start the oven or broiler. I put mine on 200-220 degrees C. Oil up a baking plate. Once done, take out the boiled potatoes, put them on the plate and crunch them with your potato stamper, like so:

Stamp them till they are maybe 1 to 2 cm in height, not more. Make sure they are jagged on top. Here, another example:

After you have done the lot, sprinkle some oil on top:

And add more salt on top of the potatoes, and your herbs. In the pictures you'll see me experimenting with red onions: you are advised to skip that as it doesn't work very well in the broiler.

After all this torture, the potatoes still have one last step: the oven. I usually put my oven on "broil" at around 200-220 degrees. Since the potatoes are already "done" (through the boiling) it all really doesn't matter too much. What you are looking for is to harden up the outsides, the jagged tops, the skins of the potatoes. This will make it really crunchy, while the inside is still nicely soft like a boiled potato.

Just check the oven every few minutes till you are happy with the result. Here was mine:

See all those brown bits?! Those are the best! Buon appetito!

A new version of my blog

2011-07-11T00:00:00+02:00

In various different forms my blog has survived from way back in 2003 till now. In the first couple of months, the blog would only run on my own computer (I didn't have hosting back then). Now, I've redone the block in Jekyll so that it is completely statically generated (and pushed into GIT for convenience).

I've only deleted two articles that basically were going absolutely nowhere. Besides that I believe most of the content came across in tact. Let me know if you see problems anywhere.

As for the comments, I have backed them up and uploaded them to Disqus. However, I have not finished the integration back into the blog yet. So check back later.

Update: As of June 21st, the comments are back. Fire away!

With that, I intent to write more again as well. It's been a long time since I have written anything sensible on any topic. The last real articles were written on the difference between Dutch and Danish culture (Part I and Part II). Currently living in Italy for over a year now so that is a logical start. In any case, we will see. For now, enjoy the new site and let me know if there is anything wrong.

If you would like to know more about how this blog is setup now, please see the colophon.

~Jilles

Denmark versus Netherlands, part II

2009-04-11T00:00:00+02:00

Welcome to the second installment of my "Denmark vs. Netherlands" post. In this, I'm exploring some cultural and statistical differences between the two countries. Completely random stuff, I promise. Look here for part I.

English

I keep telling people back home that the level of English spoken here is even better than in Holland where to my (unbiased!) opinion it's already fairly good. I thought to look up some numbers (see here, PDF).

Roughly 88% of the people in Denmark speak at least one other language than their mother-tongue. That same figure in Holland is 91%. Which languages do they speak? See the following graph. The top 3 languages in both countries is English, German and French:

Remember that I stated I thought people in Denmark speak better English than in the Netherlands? Seems I was wrong... Or was I?

See? It's just my -ahem- unbiased cultural filter showing through ;-).

Alcohol consumption

The other thing I keep telling my colleagues in Denmark is that they drink much more wine than the average person in Holland. Obviously that was completely unsubstantiated and on top that a handful of people I work with closest are complete wine-aficionados so I might be quite biased. So I thought I'd look it up (PDF). Wine consumption is roughly the same across both countries (percentage-wise of total consumption). However, where as the average cheese-head (Dutchie) consumes 9.74L of pure alcohol per year a Dane washes down 11.93L. That's quite a few schnapps more. To be exact, 22.4% more schnapps!

General stats

Interested in more statistics? I got you covered (here and here). While a Dane consumes 3.443 calories on average, a Dutchie chews down only 3.282. There are on average 412 persons per doctor in Holland versus ~350 in Denmark. Life expectancy in Denmark is 76 or 77 years where as Dutchies life till 78 (I'm chalking this one up to less alcohol consumption of course). While electricity usage is roughly the same across both countries, water usage per capita is 4.5 times higher in the Netherlands. Weird. Water in Denmark is much, much harder than in the Netherlands. Up till a point where distilled water is sold in shops to fill your iron for example. (Sorry, could not find an online reference for this.)

Food

One thing that tricked me up in eateries and supermarkets in Denmark is the usage of Frikadeller. Here is a picture of a few by "Thomas Rock star".

But, in the Netherlands a Frikandel is something completely different (and, I'm sorry to say, much more tasty!):

(Picture by sjeemz)

Danes, whenever you get to the Netherlands, have a taste of one of those. They're called Frikandel Speciaal and include mayonnaise, curry and unions. These things make me wonder about the etymology of the word "Frikandel"... How can two societies only 700km apart use the same word for a completely different form of food? In any case, according to this article, the Dutchies are alone with their usage of the word as in the rest of the world (Denmark included) it means "minced meat balls". (To be fair, the Frikandel was only introduced in the Netherlands 50 years ago.)

Easter (Påske)

As we're just going through Easter right now I start to notice a couple of differences. Easter in Denmark is a "bigger thing" than in the Netherlands. For example the Danes are getting two additional public holidays versus the Netherlands: both the (Maudy) Thursday and (Good) Friday before Easter the complete country comes to a grinding halt (as well as the actual Easter days of course). As with Christmas, the Danes brew a special beer during Easter called "Påskebryg". I'm surprised Heineken hasn't done this in the Netherlands yet!

Another tradition is to write a poem on an intricately cut piece of paper and send it to someone else without giving your identity away (the so called "gÃ¦kkebrev"). The recipient get's three tries to guess the sender. If he or she fails to do so, it'll cost him/her a chocolate Easter egg. The tradition seems to have grown from Valentine's and it is not entirely clear to me if it is only done during Easter or with Valentine's as well.

Cultural Assessment

While I was reading the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell I stumbled across a chapter that went into Geert Hofstede's framework for assessing cultural differences. I advice you to at least read the Wikipedia article on Geert's definitions but to go short there are only 2 big differences between Denmark and the Netherlands:

Specifically, the Power Distance Index is much lower in Denmark indicating that Danes attach less import to status, will more readily speak up to their boss, etc. Or alternatively, the Dutch would attach more value to their status. The other metric that is substantially different is the Uncertainty Avoidance Index: "reflects the extent to which members of a society attempt to cope with anxiety by minimizing uncertainty. Cultures that scored high in uncertainty avoidance prefer rules (e.g. about religion and food) and structured circumstances, and employees tend to remain longer with their present employer".

I must say that in my personal experience in Denmark I can attest to the Power Distance index. The Uncertainty Avoidance Index I can not relate to, to be honest.

That is it for now. I hope this series of articles helps creating insight into the cultural differences one could expect between Denmark and the Netherlands. The next article will be about learning the Danish language, which I have slowly begun. For now I am starting three different approaches:

Pimsleur's audio books (via iTunes): trying this out in the car. I must say it really helps with the basics but when it gets a bit more difficult I miss seeing the words written down
Small group lessons (yet to start)
Myngle, founded by two ex-eBay colleagues of mine (Egbert and Marina), is a language learning marketplace that delivers language classes through (eBay-owned) Skype. How can I resist?! :-) (Danish teacher)

Synergy tips for Mac users

2009-02-23T00:00:00+01:00

Just installed the Synergy application. (Quick into here.) If you have more than one computer you can use this to keep using one keyboard/mouse pair for all your computers on the network. You just move your cursor off the screen and onto the next computer without lifting your hands! Really neat. Also, clipboards are shared so that you can copy text from one computer and paste it onto the other one.

My primary computer is a Mac Book Air, and as such it has "hot corners": the upper right corner for example shows my desktop. With synergy they are a bit hard to reach since you quickly move to the other PC. If you want to make it easy on yourself, just do the following in your configuration file:

    air:
            right(10,90) = pc

Which defines the pc as being to the right of my laptop, but only starting from 10% of the screen until 90% of the screen, neatly disabling Synergy in the corners.

My Book Slide

2009-02-16T00:00:00+01:00

Inspired by Jurgen from Noop.nl, here is my book slide. I'll limit myself to the books that I just got though. You can find my virtual bookshelf over at Shelfari. This round of books are a bit sciency more so that others but that is predominantly the case due to George R R Martin still not having finished his next book.

The Island at the Center of the World "An epic story of dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America"

Inspired by a holiday I took last summer to New York and Miami I started interesting myself for the dutch influence and history on the island of Manhattan. Lots of facts have been pushed out of our collective memories nowadays. I'm hoping this book will let me in on some of the more arcane facts that surely must be out there.

Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman! "Adventures of a curious character"

After watching a series of guest lectures and having general interest and admiration on the LHC in Switzerland this seemed like a natural follow up. Feynman is both funny and really smart and was actually able to teach me a few things through his recorded lectures. Things like the LHC and books like Godel, Escher, Bach/Song of Ice and Fire/Lord of the Rings really strike a personal cord with me as I admire the epic scales these things take place at. Respect for those that dare to stick out their necks and create something!

The Unfinished Game "Pascal, Fermat and the Seventeenth Century Letter that made the World Modern"

A book on probability, a topic that recently found more and more interesting (read Critical Mass, Tipping Point and Black Swans couple of months ago). Especially the notion of "betting" on positive outliers (writing a book) vs. negative ones (stock market crash) seems an undervalued notion in our societies.

Outliers "The story of success"

Kind of the same reason why I included Outliers. Not sure what to expect really, but written by Malcolm Gladwell I can not imagine it is going to be a hard read.

Denmark compared to the Netherlands

2008-12-20T00:00:00+01:00

What follows is a first (necessarily) relative comparison between the Dutch culture and the Danish one on those aspects that stood out to me. Mind you, I wrote this after being in Aarhus, Denmark for the relatively short period of 2 months. Also, I chose to publish this before finishing all the topics I have in mind, I'll be looking to publish those later.

I hope someone might find this interesting.

I have been very fortunate with the chance my employer gave me by offering me a job in a foreign country that fitted precisely what I wanted to do next in my career. So there I was, finding myself moving to Aarhus, Denmark. I need to add that before this I had not been an expat before, having lived my life in the Netherlands. I hadn't even visited Denmark before.

I knew well in advance that that this was happening and unconsciously I was starting to build up expectations. I figured there would be a lot of similarities: North-western country in Europe, socialist government, small, rainy. Some obvious differences I knew about as well. The Danish did not ratify the Euro as their currency, keeping their Danish Kroner.

Taxes

The first, and most obvious thing for Dutch (and perhaps other) expats moving to Denmark will be the taxes. The VAT in Denmark is 25% versus 19% in the Netherlands. Both DK and NL have what I call a bracketed income tax scheme: on the first X euro/DKK you earn, you pay Y% taxes. Both countries then define three or four brackets. In NL the highest percentage comes in at 52%, whereas in DK this goes up to 62%. A quick example: assume someone is earning 100 euro/DKK extra and is being taxed in the highest bracket. In the Netherlands that gives you 48 euro extra to spend, which gets further taxed (VAT) so you are able to purchase net goods for 40,30 euro. In comparison for DK you get to keep 38 DKK after income tax, and reducing it by the VAT you end up with 30,40 DKK. That is a whopping 25% less spending power. That is, unless...

... you buy a car in Denmark. This is probably the most talked about feature of the Danish tax system abroad. New cars get marked up by the government tax system for 180%. Yes, that is hundred-and-eighty percent. Again, for comparison, in the Netherlands this is 42,3%. After hearing this it occurred to me that for some reason the Danish still get by as there are not an exceptionally large amount of really old cars on the road. I can not do a full comparison here since I do not know the first thing about what road-taxes and insurance premiums are doing in DK. But it is astonishing none-the-less.

Now the Danish get payed more for a months work but up to this day it does not add up. There are other aspects where the difference in the economy becomes clear. For example, in the proverbial supermarket around the corner you will find much less fresh vegetables and such--I am assuming here that that becomes too expensive. In short, I do find life more expensive in Denmark.

The upshot of this is that the health care is cheap, roads are fairly good (comparable to the Dutch roads), etc. The one thing that stood out for me were the two public TV stations: they are commercial free. Now when I say commercial free, I do not just mean movies do not get interrupted for commercials but in between movies there are no commercials. An absolute unexpected and pleasurable experience!

Family live, Work/Life balance

It becomes apparent quite quickly that what the Danish find important is different from what the Dutch find important. The amount of time the Danish spend indoors with their family and friends is much more. The Danes invite family and friends over for dinner. It is not that there are no restaurants, nor that there are not any people eating there but the difference is noticeable. You will find a similar story in bars for that matter. I have not spend enough time yet in Denmark to judge how easy it is to make friends outside work but the Danes will be the first to tell you that that is not easy: they are not really (as) open to this. The bonds that they entertain with their friends are presumed to be much stronger/long lasting...

In terms of Work/Life balance I find it hard to make absolute statements since I don't think my personal W/L balance is quite typical for the Dutch. Even so, the Danes work 36 or 37 hours a week, start working days quite early (there is quite a portion of people with office jobs that start before 8am) but leave the office early as well. It is not an exception for danish offices to be empty at 16:00 or for stores to close around that same time. On Saturdays stores are not open the full day either. I am quite sure that it is an objective statement that the Danes make less hours per week than the Dutch. Please don't mistake this for "the Dutch work harder than the Danes", etc.

Traffic

Traffic in Aarhus is light any which way you look at it. Of course there are cars as it is a city but I have not been in nor seen a traffic jam in Denmark. For someone that did an hour of traffic-jams per day this is a true blessing. Trying to determine the cause for that is way to complex but factors like car prices, bike-adoption, city planning, etc, come to mind. The Danes are a bit more rude in traffic than the Dutch, if someone would be pressing for my opinion.

In terms of how the infrastructure is setup there are some differences though. I have definitely been caught a couple of times into the "trap" (as I keep feeling it is) of roads that go from one lane to two for all of 75 meters. This was quite confusing and I still do not understand the rationale behind this. I had a much more positive experience with traffic lights: they do signal orange before jumping to green which is handy and for bonus points extra sets of lights are mounted on the other side of the crossing which yields better views. Taking left turns on most crossings with traffic lights is invariably a pain as there is always oncoming traffic which is different from (most of) the Netherlands where oncoming traffic is stopped by the lights before you turn left.

(Update: See here for part II in this series)

My social network is changing

2008-11-16T00:00:00+01:00

Looking at this picture, I realized I was seeing a visualization of something I've been telling people around me: that it seems everyone in my social circle is having a baby. What you are looking at is one page of friends on a local social network in the Netherlands called Hyves.

There are 6 babies depicted, out of the 12 possible (if you do not count some of the adults as babies). In, as a should I add, a "random" screen shot. It kind of underlines, for me, what has happened in the last 12 months: I can count at least 25+ couples/individuals that have been pregnant. All of which luckily delivered without any (lasting) incidents!

Now I should not be surprised by this of course, statistics will have it that there are just not many 18 year olds that become pregnant, but still: it happens so fast!

I guess these are the beginnings of a mid-life crisis?

PanoLab iPhone application

2008-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

Moving to a different country gives you more spare time, with which I can play. Just installed PanoLab on my iPhone, and I must say it works great. See the two examples below.

This is the Den Bla Avis building (the company that created http://www.dba.dk) from their parking lot in the marina of Aarhus, Denmark:

These are three pictures stitched together on the iPhone itself (and cropped in iPhoto on the MacBook Air).

The PanoLab application works great, stitching the photos together is really user friendly. My only gripe with it is when exporting the results you need to crop to a certain size--I just want to export the whole picture.

How do people end up here?

2008-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

I make no presumptions on my blog: I hardly dedicate time and effort to it and just want some place to put some of my thinking on the intertubes. That said, I do know a thing or two about websites so I can't help myself applying some of the practices I learned on my weblog.

Here is a breakdown of which keywords people use to end up on my site:

kaprun austria: When I got back from my ski trip, I posted a video and some pictures. EDIT 2011: this article has been removed
php website architecture (and variations thereof like "website architecture with PHP"): I've posted a few articles on this topic, ranging from a presentation of the high level architecture at Martkplaats.nl, an article about the use of Memcache at large deployments. Most people land at the category page actually.
database versioning: I've written exactly one article about how to version databases in large applications (like very popular websites). It's a topic that has a lot of my interest (other topics are version control systems and relevance in search engines).
Westendorf map: Each year I'm going down to Westendorf, Austria, for a ski holiday with a really nice group of people. Years ago I found this "interactive" map of Westendorf that was based on an aerial photo that was usefully annotated. I copied the zip-file that was offered. Years later the original was gone, so I decided to upload it on my website for others to use. The funny thing is, that another popular search for that page is the actual URL of the page.
CVS branching strategy: As stated above, version control systems are a pet peeve of mine. I wrote an article asking the question "What branching strategy do you use?".
economic disaster: Recently I wrote a quick article pointing to two blog entries on the Fractals of Change weblog that is describing the current economic disaster in clear words.

Do not listen to your customers

2008-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

I felt we should just talk to as many customers as possible, and do whatever
they say. But that is a bad idea. It confuses the tactic, which is listening,
with the strategy, which is learning.

(reference)

Exactly! This is quite hard to do, though. What happens when there are multiple people involved in the listening? People will fall into three categories:

Not listening: don't listen to your customers at all, instead driving your own strategy
Only listening: start executing on exactly what your customers are asking for
Listening & thinking: listen to your customer, but define your own business strategy and stick with that

This of course, needs the quote by Henry Ford about people asking for a faster horse. It is while you listen to your customers you validate and refine your strategy.

Draw up your own plan, validate it and stick with it: don't breed a faster horse!

Economic disaster? Seriously?

2008-11-08T00:00:00+01:00

Recently found a weblog ("Fractals of Change") that occasionally talks about the finance world. There are some really great gems. For example, take this article explaining "the physics of money":

The faster we spend, the more money there is available in the economy. Money we put in our mattresses might as well not exist as far as the economy is concerned even though it may be very important to us.

Another article outlines the positive aspects of the current financial crisis:

This correction from excess has been violent and in many ways harmful but it HAS cured many of the excesses; the goal shouldn't be to reestablish them. We don't want housing prices to boom out of reach again; we don't want oil prices to go up or credit to be extended promiscuously; we don't want a banking economy based on the third derivative of valueless debt.

Some of the other blog posts over there are interesting reads as well!

Plaxo.remove()

2008-11-02T00:00:00+01:00

Just removed my Plaxo account. Used it for a while, and found it useful now and again. But since for over a year or so they started turning into this social network, and I have plenty of those. I keep getting invites from others that do use it, people commenting on pictures that I upload on Flickr (comments that are posted on Plaxo), etc.

You no longer have any information on Plaxo's servers and you have been permanently signed out of Plaxo Online.

If you like to connect me, look at this page to see where/how.

On User Experience

2008-10-27T00:00:00+01:00

User Experience. It took a while for me to understand the importance of User Experience (UEX) to product's. Personally, that is pretty weird since a) my brother is a professional user experience designer and b) I worked my entire career for product companies (vs. a services organization).

It started to dawn on me when I got to see Luke Wroblewski at work. He took both a scientific approach to his work as well as tons of intuition. To me, it was a revelation to see him at work.

Later, I started getting annoyed by all kinds of UEX "bugs" in everyday life. Let me give you an example. Look at the picture of this beamer. It's not a cheap one (nor a really expensive one either). Look closely... What is wrong here?

The standby indicator is a couple of centimeters removed from the actual on/off button. Clearly whoever designed this, hasn't used it, didn't prototype or whatever. Usually beamers are used in low-light environments, and it is therefore almost impossible to find the on/off button. If the designer had just used an illuminated on/off button, the beamer would have worked better! It is these little things that start to add up. (People would start to comment "it just works", the word spreads and booom! You're Apple ;-))

Why do not more companies try to compete by using User Experience as their unique selling point?

Update: See this thread I started on StackOverflow for recommendations on UEX for Web apps.

Update 2: Thanks to LukeW for referencing both this blog post, as well as telling how it is (he was the person for me opening up the importance of user experience). Go read that post, it contains more insights than my ramblings!

A Sneak Peak at Marktplaats

2008-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

On April 12th I presented at PFCongrez, a yearly gathering of PHPFreakz. During the day three other presentations were given. The first one was by Peter-Paul Koch (ppk for short) who presented about unobtrusive JavaScript. The presentation was given with a lot of energy, enjoyable!

After that, I presented a sneak peak at Marktplaats during which I gave some insight into what it takes to run one of the biggest sites of the Netherlands. It goes into some of the high level production setup, highlights some of the challenges of operating hundreds of database deployments and goes into some of the aspects Marktplaats runs into while using PHP.

The slides are embedded below, or up for download here. Or join the after party discussion.

| View | Upload your own

The other presentations during the day that can be found online:

Peter Paul Koch, Unobtrusive JavaScript
Stefan Koopmanschap, Symfony

Next to that, I am trying to gauge any interest in our tool to manage database schema's: DBC. It keeps database schema's in synch with your application, and allows developers to branch off the database schema much as a version control system allows you to do with your code. If you are interested in this tool, please contact me at "jilles &at& marktplaats . nl". We are looking to see if there is enough interest to open source the tool.

Godel, Escher, Bach

2008-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

I have lost my copy of "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, so I bought a new one which I intent to reread. When I first read it in 2003, I had this amazing feeling afterwards but could not quite attribute it to certain elements and topics in the book. The book as a whole has a lot of qualities, but this time I'm going to keep a little log on what resonates with me. I will try to write those down here for future reference.

Skiing

2008-02-24T00:00:00+01:00

I am an absolute ski-fanatic. Below you will find a list of places I've been skiing.

Westendorf, Austria, primarily the Talkaiser, Fleiding, Gampenkogel
Konigsleiten, Austria, did almost the entire region (Gerlosplatte, Konigsleitespitze, Gerlos, Isskogel, Ubergangsjoch)
Verbier, Swiss, did most of the Les Ruinetta, Attelas
Hoch Fugen, Austria, did most of Hoch Fugen itself, and the #13 descent, except the #6 descent.
Kaprun, Austria, did most of the mountain, except for the black #5 descents (which were closed at the time) and haven't been at the Maiskogel.
Les Deux Alpes, France, did pretty much the entire region including all the blacks. Did not go to La Grafe.

Search engine basics

2007-12-24T00:00:00+01:00

Over at Marktplaats.nl we have developed one of The Netherlands' biggest search engines (we're doing so many searches per day, and making it easy for buyers to find the things they are looking for is considered "core business"). A post by Tim Bray actually summarizes nicely the basics of a search engine.

The post is already 4 years old (posted in late 2003) but is still quite relevant. It focuses primarily on filtering to a relevant result set, although it doesn't ignore sorting there is so much more one can do in that area nowadays.

For those that are absolutely new to this area, or find them selves playing with this type of technology but want to read up on it I especially recommend the following articles:

And, before you think about breaking the market and build an intelligent search engine, please read this.

Excellent write up, even 4 years later. Thanks Tim!

Another post, more related to ~~relevance and the order your results will appear~~ the relevance you can attach to users click behavior. In short, users are generally inclined to click on items at the top more frequently, so basing your relevance metrics on this you need to "un bias" your data.

Secondly, as users get further down the result set -in the aggregate- they are going to switch to a different mode of selecting the items they are going to click on: they will actually start reading the excerpts and decide, based on the information present on the result set, on which items to click. In other words, here you should actually not try to "un bias" your data!

Vendors vs Application providers

2007-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Vogels (the CTO of Amazon) published a paper in which they describe their high available, eventually consistent data storage called Dynamo that will scale incrementally. It was an excellent read, and if you're in the business of providing a high traffic, high available application (web or otherwise) I suggest you take a look!

That post did re-iterate with me a point I came across before: why is it that a company like Amazon is building these types of infrastructure components? There are other examples like it, providing excellent world class technology within eBay. Or more publicly why did LiveJournal.com develop memcached or Mogile? Why did Google write GFS? And the list goes on. This, by the way, is not just pertained to storage solutions. Within eBay I see some really cool technology that could be spinned off into separate products in different area's, but I am not in a position to disclose those.

I do see that having such a technology could be a competitive advantage (for a while) but at this scale I'm not sure that that really holds. For example both Amazon and Google currently have a highly scalable data store (Dynamo vs GFS). (They are a bit different with Dynamo storing data smaller than 1MB)

Those technologies are really cool, and scratch an itch that is absolutely there for these companies but bottom line eBay, Google, LiveJournal should be adding features and improving the user experience above writing infrastructure components. Now, in order to either a) write those features or b) bring down operational cost (or availability up) you might need these technologies but that does not translate 1:1 into actually writing them. Ideally, an Application provider such as Amazon should be able to come up with a cool feature, buy the technology needed to back that feature up and develop the feature using the technology bought.

Now, why is it then that no 3rd party vendor stepped into this space and provided similar technology? Why is it that no one from these companies started off on their own and started a company providing a technology like Dynamo? Why doesn't a big database or storage vendor step into this space? Clearly there are some big companies out there that need this technology (Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, and there are certainly more). So, really, why has nobody stepped into this space? Or, in reverse, which companies provide these types of products?

Technology is hard

2007-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Kyle Wilson wrote recently a really nice piece on why software development is so hard, which for me didn't include new insights (I'm already convinced) but did a really nice job on quantifying the problem space. Something which I had not seen before so clearly articulated. If you're in this line of business, it's a must read.

The thing that makes this article so interesting is that for some reason Kyle has access to information about five large software development projects: Chandler (the OSS Exchange replacement), Myst Online, Fracture (a new game), the software that controls a F-22 fighter jet and the FBI's Virtual Case File.

After describing some of the pitfalls the Chandler team fell in, he goes on trying to outline why Lines of Code (LOC) is a useless metric for determining the complexity of a software program. More importantly, he throws in some statistics of the aforementioned projects that really hits this home.

Short list of conclusions:

LOC is useless as a means to describe either the complexity of the program or the amount of effort that went into producing it
Project teams need an economic framework (in the broadest sense of the word) in order to be successful. Otherwise there is no forcing function for decisions (like design choices, feature sets and release dates).
In theory the complexity of a well-structured program should be O(n), where n is the number of lines of code (each line only tightly coupled with the line preceding and after it). A poorly structured program would be O(n2), with dependencies on one particular line throughout the code base.

Favorite quote, from the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference: "We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. [...] We build systems like the Wright brothers build airplanes -- build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again".

And this one: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves" -- Alan Kay (the father of Smalltalk).

iPhone and iPod Touch, why the negative responses + feature requests

2007-10-05T00:00:00+02:00

I followed the iPhone introduction closely. Partly because I just love Steve Jobs to present, due to how he engages you (even if you're watching the recordings) as well as the paradox of the casual Steve with overall slickness of the presentation and the products. But more importantly, I love Apple products. By now I own a black Mac Book, 3 iPod's and an Airport Extreme. (✓ Apple Fan boy... sorry)

Both the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch were greeted with a lot of enthusiasm and hype. In my mind, rightfully so, since they are great devices for their intent and above that superbly designed. However, as of late, I have seen more and more negative responses on the net primarily due to Apple restricting the platform both devices provide: Apple started to lock down the iPhone more and more to make sure you don't unlock the phone and don't install 3rd party software.

Now, I for one, would love an open iPhone/Touch which could be augmented by 3rd parties because either someone writes an app that proves to be useful (more bang for the buck) or everyone screws it up and you end up not installing 3rd party software (seems unlikely, given enough time). This is not the point of this post though: Apple decided the platform is theirs, not yours. Applications written for both devices will come from Apple, and Apple alone.

This last bit is what pisses off a lot of technology folks. I'd like to provide a different perspective: buy the device if you're okay with locked down platform. In the case you're not: don't buy it. Either buy something else (I wouldn't know what though) or wait for Apple to see the declining sales trend. Because, believe me, if opening up the Touch/iPhone will increase sales substantially, Apple will do so.

But beware, there is another way this could play out: you're waiting for Apple to open up the platform and sales are going through the roof. That just indicates that the mainstream audience doesn't find the openness a necessity and that makes you a niche market. Given the current success (shopping season is around the block) you could be waiting a long time.

Basically, given Apples reputation in terms of designing applications, operating systems and devices, they thought long and hard about the feature set, and if you're not okay with that please change your perspective from "Why the ***** is this not an open platform" to "Jeez, I am apparently not in the target consumer group".

Personally, I have a technology background myself, I am totally okay with the status quo: I've bought an iPod Touch the minute it came out and I'm loving it. It "just works" and that's exactly what I bought it for. No need to tinker, no need to get some vague 3rd party app installed that will help me track my Todo's, etc. I'm perfectly thrilled by the user experience as is!

There are however a few features that I either wish the Touch would have or otherwise hear some rationale about why they were not included:

Wifi integration

The Touch is able to browse the web, buy songs on iTunes (I love exploring new types of music through the store, btw!), etc. But why doesn't it see my Mac Book on the network as well? It could do all kinds of nice features like:

Synch music/photos over the network without needing a lousy cable.

Synch my bookmarks: it's quite irritating that I need to start from scratch in terms of bookmarks. (Although I find the keyboard doable after some practice, entering long URLs by hand is not my favorite past-time )

Music/Photo

I can remove movies from the Touch on the Touch but I can't remove any pictures or music. I find myself often using the Touch listening to music I really don't want to have anymore, I'd like an option to remove those and after I synch it with the host computer they should optionally be removed there as well.

The titles of photo albums are quite large, which is great for readability, but there is no way to look at the longer album titles to figure out which one you're looking for. For example, I have 6 albums called "Westendorf Wintersport 200x" and I need to determine by the photos which album I'm looking at... not great.

Syncing smart play lists: I've got this "100 songs most played" play list which I turn on when I don't want to bother with handpicking the song I listen to. The Touch does synch the play-list (I've got one on my Touch with the same name and filtering) but doesn't load in the same numbers, causing all kinds of random numbers to enter into that play list which doesn't seem necessary to me.

Browser

Once, I tried to open up a few Wikipedia articles in tabs to have some information handy during a recent holiday; only to find out that the Touch doesn't keep it in memory and as soon as you try to open up that tab tries to reload the page. It would be great if it just kept a cache for those pages that are open in tabs (can't be that hard, right?) so that you can still use them even if you don't have wifi. Now that I think about it, it would be great to store YouTube video's in the Movies section as well, given that you've already downloaded it.

One non-feature request: the safari browser integration is superb; the best browser experience I've seen on a mobile device!

(Please note, that none of these issues with the possible exception of the Safari bookmark synch, would be solved by opening up the platform)

PHP vs Ruby on Rails

2007-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

Terry Chay over at "The Woodwork" has a length but nicely written blog post about a PHP vs Ruby on Rails discussion. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, read the article: it has some juicy humor sprinkled into it as well; it's a bit flame bait too...

Favorite quote (quoting another quote):

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
 -Mahatma Gandhi

OSCON 2005:

Unless you're Ruby.
 -Danny O'Brien, On Evil

And:

I can't speak for Alex, but what I'm saying is look at the top 100 websites on
the internet: about 40% of them are written in PHP and 0% of them are written
in Rails. (Yes, I can (and am) using this statistic to grind you Ruby fuckers
into the dust.)

Memcached usage across large web properties

2007-05-29T00:00:00+02:00

Lately a discussion on the memcached-mailing list has started where for example the guys behind facebook.com and bloglines.com are participating and sharing some of their experiences. I'm don't think this is rocket science, but I'd like to quote some of the things that are being said and provide some links to the relevant discussions.

About the general "would you want to bet your up time on memcached as an infrastructure component?"-question:

We consider memcached a critical part of our infrastructure. The benefit of
memcached in a typical setup is to reduce the amount of database hardware you
need to support an application; if you have enough database horsepower to run
unimpaired with most of your memcached servers out of service, then there's�¹s
probably no point using memcached at all, since it without a doubt adds extra
complexity to your application code.

[link]

If you shard all you data, etc. etc., is memcached still worth it?

*Question*:
And you would split (federate) your database into 100 chunks (the remaining 100
would be hot spares of the first 100 and could even be used to serve reads),
wouldn't that take care of all your database load needs and pretty much
eliminate the need for memcache? Wouldn't 50 such boxes be enough in reality?

*Answer*:
Don't forget about latency.  At Hi5 we cache entire user profiles that are
composed of data from up to a dozen databases.  Each page might need access to
many profiles.  Getting these from cache is about the only way you can achieve
sub 500ms response times, even with the best DBs.

[link]

Also, there is a lot of talk about a FUSE (File system in user space) file system based on top of memcached. Not only would that make caching available for those applications you do not control (black box) but it would have some really great advantages for your generic PHP app:

Over the last two weeks i spent a lot of time discussing a memcachefs
(fuse-based) with two fellow geeks - applications that came to mind were (a)
the smarty cache (b) php sessions; for both cases, losing files (as a whole,
not random parts inside) is ok and readdir is irrelevant, which allows cutting
a lot of corners.

[link]

OMG! What a Lost season 3 finale!

2007-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

Just watched the Lost season finale and I must say I absolutely loved it. So many variables, plots, and personalities changing around in the matter of an hours worth of television. I am one of the Lost-fans that actually liked pretty much all the episodes since the beginning -- but even those that didn't like the last season too much were blasted away by this seasons' finale.

One interview that I've spotted online with Damon Lindelof is pretty interesting if you'd like a few answers to the many questions being posed by the finale.

Only 48 more episodes to go, since the show is slated to end in 2010!

Skype Prime

2007-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

For me personally, Skype is kicking it for real. Recently they released Skype Prime which is basically a payed service number (0900 in the Netherlands) but then for everyone and their mother: it is really easy to setup -no 3rd parties involved- and as such I think Skype will see a lot of Consumer to Consumer calls which is a space where a lot of people might want to participate.

Check out my Skype Prime badge:

Online bekennen!
Beken nu uw zonden online, makkelijk via Skype: betaal voor uw zonden. Ook mogelijheid om uw zonden online door mij te laten publiceren voor extra publieke vernedering. Call now
EUR 2.50/minuut

Good posts on the 'net

2007-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

Normally, I just follow my own Bloglines account, checking those blogs that I'm subscribed to. I always try to force myself skip on as many posts I can. But every once in a while I go on a rampage in search of new good blog (-posts). Here is a round up.

Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me: lists the 10 things the author thinks software development has taught him. My favorite: "he business likes to say that all the features are as crucial. They are not. Push back and make them commit."
Here is a post on Particletree (bookmark that site!) that talks through the 4 ways of delivering JSON objects from the server to the browser client. Also this other post that talks through paging through JSON/Ajax data plus preloading the data.
A nice aggregation of articles talking about business models on the web
Update: another really nice post on Amazon's technology and what the advantage of using their systems give. (I'm not completely buying into it, but that's a post for another time -- Microsoft shoving all their apps onto Amazon and Amazon not going to budge underneath the pressure??)

All those little software secrets!

2006-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

Some forums have a really good signal to noise ratio, and the Joel on Software boards are on of those. Right now there is a really interesting discussion happening on "what little software secrets do you know that no one seems to know?". The entire discussion can be found here.

But let me highlight a few excerpts of handy material:

Just type =rand() anywhere in your [Microsoft Word document] to auto create a block of text. For more text, pass it a numeric parameter like rand(2). 200 appears to be the max value.

Or, how about when all the capitalization is wrong in your word document?

Fix capitalization in Word: Highlight the text, and press Shift+F3 until desired result. It allows you to select from All Caps, No Caps, Proper Case and Title Case. Much better then erasing the sentence and re-writing it.

Or for our web developers out there:

In Firefox, if you are working on a page and just care about the HTML source of that file, simply open the source once, and then refresh the source only (similar to a web page: with CTRL+R), instead of reloading the whole web page and then view source again.

And for our Windows developers:

When you have a message box (a.k.a alert box) hitting CTRL-C will copy the text of the message box to the clipboard.

And I was always doing CTRL-ALT-DEL, T to get to the task manager, but this tip is even faster:

Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens up the task manager.

I have something similar like the tip below. For example I can type "ci 12556" and it will show check in 12556 in Trac. Or I can type "bug 432" and it will show me bug 432 in my bug tracking system. However, I constructed that always by hand, here is an easier way to do it:

In Firefox, go to the main page for this group. In the search box, right click and choose "Add a keyword for this Search..." Name it "Joel" (or whatever you want). Keyword = "jos" (or whatever you want). Press OK.

Now in the address bar, type "jos hungarian" and it will show you all results for Hungarian in these groups.

There you go, hope there was one tip there that you found useful!

Recent purchases...

2006-09-23T00:00:00+02:00

Recently made a few purchases, without doing so much as leaving the house. I really love how that works, really convenient.

First off, I bought a new black, 2nd generation iPod Nano 8GB. I don't have a ultra large music collection, but I really like the device's design (duh!) and experience.

(Clicking on the above image will take you to an annotated version)

Second up, I am completely addicted to Lost nowadays and I just finished the 1st Season, so I bought the first part of Season 2 second hand off of Marktplaats.nl. I am anxiously not putting it in the DVD player because I know it will be a ~15 hour time drain instantly.

And last but not least my first shipment of new books came in from Amazon, including:

All except the "The Book of Atrix Wolfe" book came in, which I bought second hand on Amazon.com. You can see my entire book collection at: http://ojilles.listal.com/owned/books (RSS feeds are available there as well).

(Authors note, 2011: Don't bother with The Book of Atrix Wolfe, so abstruse, I could not get through the first 20 pages)

All this should keep me quiet for a little while...

Quick post on my ski plans this season

2006-09-20T00:00:00+02:00

Herewith a small post, that I will probably revisit later, about my Ski plans for the upcoming season 2006-2007. See the below Google Map indicating the four places that I am most likely going to visit.

<p>asdflskjdf</p>

Can't wait to start skiing again! As I said, I'll probably do a another post describing the exact plans and updating the map with images and the like.

Update: (2007-06-16). The one in Val Thorens didn't pull through, as it was really close to the one in Zermatt and proved to be logistically improbable. Anyway, 3 ski trips in one season is really helping your condition on the slopes. Definitely recommended!

On innovation

2006-09-16T00:00:00+02:00

In a recent blog post, Edward de Leau talks about his notion of "Leanardo" -- the person that is primarily responsible for innovation. I tend to agree in principle that these persons are really scarce, and even if you know someone then there is still timing to wreak havoc.

Edward goes on by providing 3 innovative ideas which he intents to revisit in a few years time to see if some came to fruition. In my blogpost I try to make a shortcut and safe Edward a few years:

A site that will crawl the internet in search of structured data (XML) of products that are being sold. After the aggregation, the business model would be similar to existing classifieds sites iincluding features, monetizing eye balls and Google AdSense.

However, such an application already exists. Instead of forcing people to write XML files and put them on a server, EdgeIO allows people to make blog posts on their already existing blogs and aggregate that. Additional revenue stream is redistributing the aggregated content "EdgeSense".

A Todo list site that brokers between people without time and with time.

This one I have not seen yet in the form I think Edward is seeing this. I envision a generic Todo site like Tadalist, including its "share todo" feature, but then with price brokering system where the person who has the Todo and the person that is willing to execute the Todo can agree a price (and potentially setting up an Escrow service).

A mesh up between Google Earth and anything else with a physical location.

GlobeAssistant is a company providing technology to stream locations out of your database into a users Google Earth application. A prime example is the leading Dutch Real Estate site Funda.nl (try this link if you have Earth installed).

Video on the web

2006-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

Of course, people have been publishing video's on the net for a long time. The interesting effect of this - to me - it that this turns the net into a "Funniest Home Video's" for everyone. For years now people have been buying camcorders, but the reaching an audience with that was still pretty hard (e.g. you needed to get your video's aired on television. Not so anymore -- as already happened to writing (anyone can start a blog and gather a crowd).

Just to show the big diversity out there, here are three video's I just found on the net:

On guy performing the first level of Mario Bro's.
Snakes on a plane, rap home edition
Brianiacs ripoff, but professionally done!
20 something second Rubrik Cube's solve with only the left hand. (But really, Rubrik Cubes are for children.)
Mentos and Diet Coke. And more, and more...(Interesting enough, same search on Google Video's doesn't turn up any results)

That last one gets me a bit scared, wondering how big an incentive the net will provide for those that don't think about the stunts they perform to get some traffic for their video's.

Oh, and remember comments on weblogs? People are doing the same on YouTube. Take this lady for example (commenting on a comment, on a comment...) with a rap. Hey, if you are there, you are only so far away of couples 'fighting it out' on YouTube of course.

Map of Westendorf, Austria

2006-08-27T00:00:00+02:00

For the past 6 or 7 years I have gone to Westendorf, Austria with friends and family for a week long wintersport holiday. Westendorf not being the biggest city ever we quite know the place and always book well in advance. This year however we couldn't book the 9 rooms we needed in one of our usual places. Which brought up the question of "which other apartments are there for rent and how close are they to the slopes?".

I remembered finding a map/photograph of Westendorf with all the apartments, hotels, apres-ski bars painted on it. I tried to find it again, but couldn't. Booted up my really old laptop and found it there. So, in order to make sure both I and you will be able to find it again in the future, I'm hosting a copy here on the site. Go check out the map of Westendorf.

Update: Seems that this year we will be staying a week at Mesnerwirt, Westendorf. (Impression video's: outside, room, wellness, restaurant - we have eaten here a lot over the last couple of years, great atmosphere!, and the (in-)famous Kellerbar!)

Update 2: Found some footage on YouTube of places where I have been. See: * A little piece of the boarders playground at Westendorf * The 111th track, which is a long (7km?) ski way that it fairly flat but where you can reach great speeds (unlike the guy filming the movie). * The new Ki-West track * Tirolian folk dance. This was recorded by someone I don't know but last year I have been there myself as well. Highly recommended!

Software development project management

2006-08-13T00:00:00+02:00

Just ran across the site off Basil Vandegriend, who wrote an article back in May about project management for software development projects. In that article he shows an application that shows the relation between the four factors that play a role in project management: time, resources, scope and quality with which you can visually show their relation.

Jilles' books online

2006-06-07T00:00:00+02:00

I had this really old laptop which holds my "books database" and thought to back it up. I was using some proprietary windows application to hold them all. And instead of backing them up I brought them online using Listall.com. The setup was a breeze (even didn't require me to confirm my email address). The only problem I had with Listall is that it is pretty US and UK centric, not finding my dutch books at all (which constitutes less that 5% of my collection, so that is not that big a problem).

You can find my book collection, alongside my ratings, etc, at: http://ojilles.listal.com/owned/books. (Rss feeds available)

Moola: "Weekend millionaires for the rest of us"

2006-05-28T00:00:00+02:00

An interesting new product became available on the Internet a few months back, called "Moola". Moola is basically a free "Weekend Millionaires" for the normal people.

It works by showing a small video before you start playing one of the games. This video nets you $0,01, for free. You ante up this one cent in the game you are about to play. That game is a game against someone else who also ante's up one cent. If you win the game you end up with $0,02, and are only removed 29 wins from earning $10M. The coolest thing is that during this "ladder" you are free to exit and get payed as long as the sum is above $10. In total Moola already cashed out $615.000!<

Currently, Moola sports two games. One is a Rock-scissors-Paper game with a twist, over 6 rounds. The other game I did not play yet. The games are cool in and of themselves, but the added incentive really works.Up till here Moola already had some exposure in the blog world, for example on TechCrunch, and other blogs. However, I did not see any other blogs yet that wrote about the bonuses that Moola is giving away. After me loosing my money twice Moola decided that I needed a bit more cash to get me off and decided to sponsor my account with 10 cents, see the screen shot below.

Anyway, this is a really interesting business model in my mind. The only problem with it is that the objectives of the players (you and me) are not nicely aligned with the advertisers that provide the cash. This will ultimately hurt the ROI for the advertisers and their willingness to participate. How it ends up we will see.

Update: I still have 1 invite left. Ping me if you want it!

Update 2: Things move fast in this space. Already there is a site called http://www.playmoola.com/ which sports a strategy section for the games and loads of invites left seemingly.

Google testing out new SERP feature

2006-05-19T00:00:00+02:00

Today I did a few searches on Google, only to find out that Google either rolled out a new feature to their Search Engine Result Page or is testing it. I guess it is the latter because several colleagues and friends were not able to replicate the behavior. See the screen shot below:

Basically Google remembers which searches you have done on a person by person basis. However, only now did I also see that the number of times you have already visited the search result is now displayed next to it.

After digging some deeper I found some more features. Here is a page showing what I my popular searches were and which of the results were popular with me:

And Google provides some handy graphs too!

Some of this has implications though:

<a href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26654&topic=1593">How is my Search History stored?</a>
Personalized Search stores your search history on Google servers, which means you can view your history and get personalized search results on any computer.

Some good articles about product development and product management

2006-04-29T00:00:00+02:00

A long while ago, Joel Spolsky added a Reddit.com site just to experiment. Didn't pay too much attention to it back then. Last evening I did visit the site, and there is some good links there. So, not feeling that creative myself, I'll re-post some of the more interesting links.

Headrush is a blog supposedly about "Creating Passionate Users". Cannot attest to that myself since I didn't read mover than 15% of the content on the site. One of the best articles is "Death by risk aversion". The article talks about always targeting the outer extremes of scale instead of being mediocre. DO yourself a pleasure, follow that link and just look at the 3 graphs used in the article and you will understand what the article says.

Most of my colleagues know that I have a dog, and we (me and my girlfriend) are pretty serious in training her. During some of the training sessions we use a technique called the "clicker technique". It works like this: first you give your dog a lot of little cookies, one by one. With each cookie you don't say a thing but make a little "click" with the clicker. After a while the dog will associate the click sound with something positive (and will actually start drooling just by hearing the sound). Kathy connects this with e-mail addiction (blackberry anyone?).

Thirdly, she has a nice article (still fresh!) about information anxiety and trying to keep up with everyone else. One of the things I do personally is go really fast through all my Bloglines subscriptions and force myself to only read two full articles, done. Too bad if the blogosphere decided to write more than two interesting articles -- if they were so good someone else will re-post them tomorrow and I can go for a rebound.

A second blog, called Rand's In Respose, has a really nice article up about why web start ups are most of the time failing and what to do about it. Really, the article is too long and too good to just summarize here. So, go read it! No really, the article is good, go read it!

A second article on that blog is about the "Free Electron" in your development team:

A Free Electron can do anything when it comes to code. They can write a
complete application from scratch, learn a language in a weekend, and, most
importantly, they can dive into a tremendous pile of spaghetti code, make sense
of it, and actually getting it working. You can build an entire businesses
around a Free Electron. They're that good.

There is some gold in that article as well. Example: don't send your Free Electron off fixing those three memory leaks:

When he returned, the bugs were fixed and the entire database layer had been
rewritten. A piece of code that would taken two engineers roughly six months to
design had been totally redone in seven days. Sound like a great idea until you
realize we were working on a small update and did not have the resources or
time to test a brand spankin' new database layer. Oops.

That's it for now...Thanks for all the fish.

Database? No database?

2006-04-28T00:00:00+02:00

There are a lot of interesting discussions and posts going on lately on how certain high profile websites. Particularly, a series of posts on O'Reilly Radar. The first post is about Second Life, where they talk about MySQL (separate master-slave pairs handling the data partitions with one master-slave pair indicating where what data lives).

The second installment features Bloglines which uses MySQL (Users and passwords in one master-slave, feed information in another) but also large parts in some file storage.

A third posting talks about Flickr, who basically started out with the "one database fits all"-methodology on MySQL. And this is where I think experience really comes into play. If you were designing the Flickr database with, for example, Bloglines' experience under your belt you would not have started out that way. But Flicker too, couldn't escape the segmentation and divided their data up in what they call "shards" (separate master-slave pairs as I read it).

So, it is pretty apparent that MySQL is being used for some fairly large sites while most of these employ the strategy of segmenting the data across several master-slave combinations. Some are actually using LiveJournals' memcached too!

Weird images of Jilles

2006-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

While working on a draft article for this site I needed to collect some weird images of myself which could then be used in a collage because one of my colleagues is going to leave. I myself don't want to pick that image, and was going to offer the creators of the collage the options. While not wanting to send them megabytes of images, I thought I might do it the Web 2.0 way and put them up on Flickr. Since someone is going to find them anyway, I might as well point you guys to it.

(Authors note, 2011: link, for the betterment of the entire online population is now dead)

Welcome to my Blog v3

2006-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

Update, 2011: this is obviously an old blog post, preserved for posterity.

Welcome, dear reader to, to the best of my knowledge, the third incarnation of my weblog/personal site. The last year and a half I had all these idea's in my head with nowhere to put them. Every time I had that thought "I wish I had a weblog to post it to as it might be interesting to other people". So, here it is!

The source of my idea's is mostly twofold:

It's triggered by things that I read. Weblogs, other sites, that inspire new thought and those thoughts should end up here.
At work. My work is in the product development group of a large web-based company located in the Netherlands. There are various reasons why I love working there, one of them is that it always inspires ideas on the topics of software development, online communities, management and business development.

From past experience I know that it is really hard to really add value on the web which is why I chose the default Kubrick's theme and a base install of Wordpress: lets see if I can get content into the site first, before spending hours tweaking the site.

I hope you will enjoy the site!

Jilles

PS1: Since this is really the 3rd incarnation of the site you will find the first few articles already, all dated in 2003 and 2004.

PS2: I still had a Google AdSense account, so I added some advertising to the site. If I can make up for hosting costs, then I will count myself lucky!

What branching strategy do you use?

2004-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Yesterday I found myself writing a branching strategy. We've been using a software configuration tool (CVS) since I've been working there. But the branching strategy was somewhat ad-hoc. Whatever we felt like, we did. Now our new project nears its first release onto production servers, I thought it was time to re-think our branching strategy. When thinking about how to branch, it seems to me it is choosing between overhead and stability. The more branches you use, the more work is independent from each other, providing stability to that branch. However, the more branches you create, the more work goes into merging those branches, documenting what's on which branch, etc.

Having such a branch strategy helps at least in one way: everyone should learn this strategy by hart. Once that is done, nobody will be surprised as in: "Oh? I didn't know we created a new branch for that functionality".But coming up with good versioning tactics that "don't get in the way" too much is pretty hard. Of course, there has been some scientific research done in that field. That resulted into some pretty documents that cover everything from A to Z. (I particularly like that document that treats all of the branching tactics like another GoF pattern.) Of course, there is a lot of difference between the strategies involved for an internal product, a shrink-wrapped product or a website.

Obviously, Marktplaats.nl is in the website department here. But even then, there are a lot of differences. It has already been in some newspapers that we are opening websites in foreign countries (foreign to The Netherlands that is). Aha, that opens up entirely another can of worms. Now we deploy our website for multiple countries. Each of these countries could run a different version of our product. That might been driven by the fact that in some countries (country A) a particular feature is hard needed, but in others maybe not (country B). But then, where do you do the bug fixing? Both country A and B need that same bug fix, but what has been deployed for those countries might reside on different branches! That brings in a lot more overhead if you ask me.

Even armed with a lot of scientific articles about this topic I'm still in doubt about what strategy to choose. So I'd like to invite everyone who's in the same situation as me to contact me. What branching strategy do you use? What do you like about it? What policies do you have in place? And most of all, I'd like to get in touch with Joel Spolsky about this topic. He's advocating the usage of a SCM-tool (just like me!), but every tool has is incorrect usages. Joel, how are you using CVS to maintain your product?

Specifications? How?

2004-07-10T00:00:00+02:00

[This post is a re-post of a question I asked at Joelonsoftware.com's discussion forums]

Before I start of this post, I'd like to refer to certain other sources to prove that Specifications are important for any software development. It works the same as house construction: no company is going to build a house without a blueprint (heck, they won't even get permission to build it otherwise!).

First off, lets link to the Joel test, specifically the part about writing specs. Any questions about why you would write specifications read this article. More information can be found here on Wikipedia.

The question I have is: how would you go about to document the specifications? This PDF talks about possible options on pages 109 and 115, but how would you do this?

Everything always boils down to what you really want to do with it. Well, actually, not very much. Specification is firstly a means to communicate the exact soon-to-be implementation to those who should sign-off the project. Secondly, it should be the basis for a technical design document and later the actual implementation. Furthermore, it should provide the definitive answer for testing: should this box be red or blue? As a last needed feature is to be able to quickly see the differences between specific versions of the specification (What was changed since version x.y.z?).

So what would be a good way to document these specifications? Because I want ways to quickly show differences between versions I thought about CVS and docbook (together with a tool, Norman Walsh (diffmk), to generate a proper HTML document containing differences between two versions of the docbook's XML document). But this proves a little bit tiresome, especially when large volumes of pictures and diagrams are involved. A positive side of the usage of CVS is that multiple people can work on the specifications. That's why, in my opinion, dismisses solutions like Word and/or Excel. It is good to know that other people are struggling with the same problems.

Basically the core of this post is to ask: What ways of specification would you use in similar circumstances? Got any answers to this? Do you want to discuss about this topic with me? Write me an email, post a comment on Joel on Software or post a comment at this post.

Japanese blogs to watch

2004-06-28T00:00:00+02:00

Lately, I've renewed my interest in Japan and its language and culture. This was sparkled by the announcements from friends that they were going to Mexico (couple 1) and Washington DC (couple 2). I dug up the reader, titled "Japanese I: an introduction", I got as a present from my brother. I hope I find the time to learn a bit more Japanese and to post a few articles on the subject along the way.

But there are so much more interesting places to look for. There are two respected blogs written by Japanese. The first one is Joi Ito's weblog, who posts frequently and about a lot of interesting topics. If you are mainly interested in things he posts about Japan, than use the Japanese category archives.

The second blog to watch is Antipixel which is written and maintained by Jeremy Hedley. The first thing I noticed was the good Colophon that is present on the site (more sites should do this!). The second thing is that Jeremy writes about Japan and its culture, but he also makes wonderful pictures to match those posts! (Example 1 about Japanese bathing, Example 2: writing in stone, Example 3).

Keep an eye out for these two blogs if you like Japan.

Oh, and when I see sites like these then I've almost booked my flight!

Question: does anybody know a well known book in Western Europe that is translated into Japanese, that one could start to read at entry-level Japanese? Just something on which I could get cracking If you know any book(s), post a comment please!

SpeedDEV

2004-05-11T00:00:00+02:00

Well, today I've had a long discussion with someone from SpeedDEV. I've been in touch with them for a little while now. They make something that lets itself describe best (in my own words) as:

An Issue and Requirements tracking application with advanced functionality
for process and project management with a very high level of automation
and flexibility.

The employees are very nice to me and very helpful. Two things surprise me about this company and its product:

I have never seen a greater difference between a companies own website and the product it has developed. The product SpeeDEV is something that struck with me amazement such a good and thoroughly developed product!). Yet, if you look at their company website it looks like it was developed by a bunch of high school students.
The product itself is by far the most thoroughly developed product in the Issue/Requirements tracking market I've seen till today. (I've seen a lot of these products already. That's not to say that I've seen everything, but still says something about SpeeDEV.) For example, the entire application is web based. They advert with a process automation engine and an editor to go with that. You'd expect some half-baked solution in HTML that will barely do what you want it to do. But not SpeeDEV, oh no! It comes with an entire editor that would behave just like a desktop application (a la Visio or the like) to define the process you want. Perfect!

In time to come I'll report more often on SpeeDEV. One reason for that is that on the web there is almost nothing to be found about this product except on the company website (Google search turns up only 679 results for example). And that's pretty exceptional for a product that is in its 4.x version series.

Database versioning techniques

2003-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Today I had an interesting discussion with one of my colleagues. The problem being discussed had already troubled my mind a few months back, but was driven out of my mind by other, more pressing, problems (deadlines, etc.). The problem, as the title of this article suggests, is database versioning techniques. Vie searched the internet for a solution to this problem and what I found was a lot of misconception. So to eliminate that, I start of describing the problem first. Be careful, I smell a long article coming up.

A good developer keeps all his source code in an SCM tool (like CVS, Perforce, Arch, Bitkeeper, Subversion, but not Source Safe). There are some very good reasons to do this, which Imp not going to discuss here. Most applications handle data. There are even those amongst mankind that go as far as saying software and data are the same, which is true. (If you like that kind of conceptual difference, read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. It seems to happen in human cell replication all the time.) A large portion of this data handling software manipulates data in a convenient way: enter the database! Your software is coupled to this database. And as your software evolves (new features!) your database does too (new and/or altered tables!). So both evolve (hold that idea please).

Now, to keep the software part under version control there are three different things at work:

a) the plain text source code b) a build script (arguably a meta-program, see G.E.B.) c) the output of a) and b) combined, the actual program

Now since both a) and b) are under source control, c) is always achievable. (Well, in practice you need to version you build tools, which are used by the build script, too. But if you go down this road you'd have to version your entire build machine.)

Now consider the case for that database. The following aspects are at work here:

a SQL scripts
a build script that loads 1) into a particular database.

Ah! (thinking) Nope, won't work. Because most systems have a live (or production) environment. Once data has been entered into the database, you can't recreate it, because that information is not in either 1) nor 2)! And this is exactly the problem. Most developers don't go this far, and only provide 1) and 2) with their installation. But once you have to keep your production environment data alive, you have to reconsider your solution. Here we go:

A SQL script
Incremental SQL scripts that alter a live environment from version x to y
A build script that will run 1) and/or 2) as needed, depending on the already existing database and its version

Already better. Now this is what you see with most applications that have encountered this problem. And this will work, if your don't have 100 production databases. Problem solved, but not for us. (By the way, above solution will introduce some nasty dependencies when you are using multiple branches to store your source code and database scripts in your SCM!). So we need a different solution.

Lets iterate some goals this solution must provide:

It should be highly scriptable, because were using this with a lot of databases
We should be able to replay the action, to be able to test the solutions' successfulness
It doesn't have to be reversible (this is plain out impossible to achieve)

After some thinking I came up with the following solution. I was intrigued by some discussions on this topic and one of the problems seems to be to have the ability to diff SQL dump files. That people are looking at this for their solution to this problem is pretty easy to see: SQL dump files can be stored in an SCM tool like any other plain text file. But my quick searches on Google and Joel didn't turn up such a tool. Apparently this is something pretty hard to develop. So then it hit me: there are tools to diff instances of SQL dumps. With instances I mean real databases. Such tools take database A and database B and output a script that contains SQL instructions to get from A to B. Some of these tools don't only look at the database schema, but also at the data itself! That was halve the puzzle, I thought.

So, I think the following is good (final) solution for this particular problem:

With each software version make a database dump, and store it along with the source code in the SCM tool of your liking.
During a build, create a (temporary) database from this file, under a different name than your production database
Next step during the build is to fire up the diff tool and let it generate a script
Run the generated script

Whether this will work depends on the quality of the diff tool, obviously. But those tools are not unheard of. So there is a good chance that they exist, hopefully scriptable too. Then, there is still one last issue to resolve. Look at the goals, there it said that it is plain out impossible to reverse versions (this is like a one way street folks!). In order to ascertain that we don't try to downgrade our database the SQL dump file (step 1) could include a timestamp. Then we can insert an extra step between steps 2 and 3, that checks to see if the production database already has a newer timestamp. If so, don't run steps 3 and 4.

Well, maybe those timestamps don't suffice alone. Maybe we need to stick in some branch or version information too, but you get the idea.

The good part of this solution is that you can automate every step of this solution. Even better we can reproduce it, which aids testing before putting your stuff up on a production environment.

Well, I am calling it a night. Tomorrow I will devote some time at tricking a good diff tool for MySQL databases and see if I can prototype this kind of thing. (If anybody has some good ideas about this problem, solution of diff tool, drop me a line!).

(BTW: I wrote this a quick rant. I still have to see if this will actually work! But be sure to follow this blog because I will report my findings.)

Edit: Hmm, almost within 10 minutes I detected a flaw in this setup. I'll write about it at some later time.

Mutex, oh mutex, why didn't I think about you?

2003-10-16T00:00:00+02:00

Today something reminded me of something I picked up from Jeffrey Richter, who talked about Mutexes in his book (Programming Windows Applications). I just failed to apply the principle to something that lives in a different context. The mutexes which I learned about were Windows API programming. The problem I faced was in shell scripting under Linux.

One thing with updating a live environment (read: a production server) is that you need to be in control of that environment to install a new version. We actually have this part pretty well covered, so that is positive. But as always, there are things to improve upon.

For our application we use a series of cronjobs that do all the maintenance-like tasks belonging to our application. In order to update the live environment we disable all the cronjobs. However, there is still this chance that one of those cronjobs already started and is still busy doing its job, while we try to update the environment. Not good. So that is why I wrote some shell scripts (we are on Linux) that parses the crontab file and uses a listing of programs that are currently running in the system ("ps" anyone?) and compares the two. If one of the cronjobs is found running on the system, we wait for it to finish and repeat the procedure, until all cronjobs have finished. This worked pretty well, and since I don't write Bash scripts and Awk scripts everyday I picked up some new skills.

But then a colleague of mine told about how he fixed the same problem in a different project. That was when it finally hit me: instead of going through the trouble of parsing some text file, parsing output of other programs, comparing and waiting; all pretty error prone I should have thought about mutexes!

A mutex gets its name from MUTually EXclusive (other one or the other-type of thing). In windows there are API's to create these things and you can use them between multiple threads or processes. One of those threads gets the handle to a mutex and the others are able to wait upon that mutex to be returned to the operating system, who on it's turn decides which one of the waiting threads get the handle to that mutex next. This is used go protect a resource (like accessing a shared variable or the like).

My situation with the cronjobs was pretty similar: either the cronjobs got control of the production system or our installation script. Seems pretty mutually exclusive to me, in after sight at least.

So what to do about this? Linux doesn't support mutexes (at least I haven't heard of these things) in a shell (sure they are implemented in C/Java/etc.). So we have to settle for something that simulates it's behavior, something that was the defacto practice 10, maybe 15 years ago: usage of the file system to communicate between threads and/or processes (so called semaphores).

Every cronjob will create a file in a specific directory. This should be the very first this the cronjob does. The last thing it does is removing this particular file. Then, when our install script is going to run it just needs to keep monitoring this directory, until all files are gone! If you'd like true mutex behavior, you'd have to let the install script write a file of it's own and prohibit all the cronjobs from running while this file is present. This, however, is not needed in our situation because we first turn off the cronjobs all together.

One last thing that this solution doesn't provide is something the windows API variant did provide: atomicity! But, I leave that as an exercise to the reader (if they are not thoroughly bored by now)!

Actively developed websites

2003-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

I write this sitting on the bench, half watching television with my girlfriend. Thinking of something to write, my thoughts stumbled over how you can notice a good development team behind a product. One sign of is the roll-out of new features. For example, take Funda, a site where most houses end up when they go up for sale (in the Netherlands that is).

Because we are looking for a house, I visit this site regularly. What I notice is that new features are implemented all the time. That feels nice for a user, you get the idea you're not looking at some boring old system that somehow forgot to brake down. Also, the UI design is pretty good (in particular, I like the "Add this house to your favorites" feature pretty well). It feels like they have this plan, containing all new features that they have planned out, waiting to go live!

But, as with every actively developed product, someone is writing it. That someone is probably not alone (believe me, I know what it takes to run a large scale website) and a development team costs money. And this is where competition VBO could cut in. For example (I'm going out on a limb here, guesswork!), to pay for the development they charge for having 360 degree pictures and visitor statistics for your house. That last feature is pretty easy to implement, possibly needs an extra database server in that database cluster, but that's all it takes. Charging people more that 10 euros' for the stats feature alone, seems like a real cash cow to me.

But overall, I think Funda is doing a very good job, at least feature- and UI-wise. (Might be I give it another close look, see if I can come up with a follow-up.)

It is funny how you change your thoughts about a field (commercial websites) when you move into it yourself.

PS: One small thing about this site is how many pictures of the houses they post on their site. If some local company has 8 or 9 pictures on their site (for a particular house), Funda might only publish 3 or 4 pictures. And with houses, just as with Classifieds, you can never have enough pictures!.

Update: And they are hiring, which tells something about how good they are doing! (maybe)

To which project do I want to contribute?

2003-07-13T00:00:00+02:00

Developing: I'd like to contribute!

I have made small contributions to open source projects. Some on the Popfile translation front, others by contributing to Antill: idea's and/or actual code. But I'd like to do more (after all I've been using open source software so much!). One of the things I always dread is to "get into the project". You have to read so much: how is the architecture, get all the dependencies, read the policies regarding commit access, testing, etc. So I'm trying to select a project on which I want to focus for the next few months, trying to come up with some useful patches in my free time. A couple of candidates:

All these projects touch my professional work as well, and that is A Good Thing^{(tm)^.} I'd like to walk through these projects one by one. (This it actually not to inform you of something I'm going to do, just my "internal" decision making process, exposed to the rest of the world. Read it or disregard it as you see fit :-o).

What would I like to find in a project on which I'm going to work in my (so scarce) free time?

Multiplatform: I'd like to do something that I could use/develop on Linux as well as on windows (the latter having less priority of course).

Perspective: It should be a project that has a lifetime in front of it (not something that is going to be replaced in a few years, e.g. CVS<).

Language: Preferably a compiled language (C/C++/Java/etc.) instead of an interpreted language (PHP/Perl/etc) because that's what I work with professionally. I'd like to keep my skills sharp over the entire line.

Documentation: A project with a good organization has the advantage (e.g. RFC's/bug reports etc. are input to a starting contributor). A HACKING.txt file or some other documentation to orientate starting developers is an advantage!

Easy Compile-Run-Debug cycle: I'd like to contribute to the Linux kernel but compiling the kernel, installing it, rebooting it: that's too long a cycle for yours truly.

Coolness factor: this property of a project is undefined but working on some projects is just cooler than working on other projects (e.g. Linux kernel is way cool, writing man pages is definitely not :-?).

Need for developers: some projects are developed into their 2.x versions. Clearly they don't need the developers as much as a 0.1beta project. If you want to contribute something the latter has more need of you.

Alright, here is my decision matrix^{(tm)^.}

Actual decision matrix hasn't survived the last three blog software upgrades and thanks to Wayback I was able to salvage a picture:

Disclaimer: my opinion, would like comments, this is my opinion, these values may or may not be based on the truth

Well if you'd take this table, I'd go working on Subversion! I'd like that very much. But, this table itself is not definitive. So if you, the reader, know any topics on which the above projects should be judged, before choosing a project, please tell me and I'll include them in the above table. The same goes if you know of any projects that might be cool for me to join. Mail me! or place a comment here, or backtrack, whatever you like.

First I've got some other stuff to finish, and in the meantime I can read documentation and stuff, to get into this new project!

On Subversion

2003-07-12T00:00:00+02:00

I've been playing around with SCM systems (Software Configuration Management) earlier (played around with CVS, VSS and BitKeeper. Of these three CVS has in my opinion the best thing going for it (large, very large, adoption easily extendable, etc.). At that time (a few years back now) I already noticed Subersion, abbreviated to SVN. At that moment they had all the plans ready (architecture, etc.) and I think they were in their 0.1's (version). Now I'm running a decently sized project on CVS I'm keeping my eyes open for alternatives, and SVN is one of the best candidates (BitKeeper looses it because of the licenses).

One of the best features of SVN (in my opinion) is the branching strategy they've taken. Although I already had experience with CVS, other team-members didn't have that when we switched to CVS. Explaining all the stuff and the command line options is simple enough. But the one thing I've noticed that is the hardest to pick up for new users is branching. Of course, you'll draw some pretty tree-like pictures and start explaining the stuff; everyone says he/she gets it. But when it is put to practice I see enough things going wrong regarding branches.

One of the biggest obstacles, IMHO, is the fact that branches are on another dimension in CVS. People forget to switch between branches and trunk because it's not obvious on which one they are working. This is not the case in SVN, here a branch is just a full copy of the trunk, originating from a certain revision. You can do stuff like this with SVN:

\Project1
    \trunk
        \src
        \doc
    \branches
        \feature1
            \src
            \doc
        \jilles-playing-ground
            \src
            \doc

This is a huge improvement over CVS and it will be so much easier to explain this to people new to SCM/CVS/SVN. Perfect. Another improvement is very obvious: every change to the repository results in a new revision of the entire repository. This way directories and such can also be versioned.

Why am I still using CVS? Well, I'm still missing some features from SVN, but those will come in time. There is a nice cvs2svn script that I will check out sometime. But paraphrasing Joel Spolsky: a good tactic to convert people to your product is to make it easy to switch back. That's why I'd like to see a svn2cvs script. Having such a script enables people to easy switch back to CVS once they decide that they like that better (unlikely) or they decide that SVN doesn't have the features they want yet (more likely that the previous reason).

One other disadvantage of SVN: the tags. Under CVS a branch and a tag are two different beasts. Under SVN (as far as I see it/read it in the docs) they are both the same. Besides the directories "trunk" and "branches" you can create a directory "tags" and essentially create branches. So far so good, thanks to SVN's shallow copying technique this is fast and doesn't consume much disk space. My take on a tag is: "constant snapshot of the tree at a certain moment". Note the word constant. Once I declare version 1.4 of my product and build, package and ship it I do not want the option/feature of changing the 1.4 tag in the repository and thereby creating a difference between the 1.4 version in the tree and the 1.4 version that is installed at the customer.

Of course, an administrator should be able to move that tag around in case of an erroneous tag command but this should not be made easy. But in subversion a tag is tag only because of the way the developer looks at it. I'd like a command in SVN that would enable me to "freeze" a branch: such that once I create a tag (read: branch) I can freeze it and thereby disallowing all developers from committing to that branch, ensuring that version X in the tree is the same version X that I'll ship.

(Of course, I know that if you create a "tag" and some developer commits changes to it, you can easily back out of those changes, but that would just be mending your wounds instead of preventing the wound ever from taking place.)

All in all though, I like SVN (much better than CVS). I'm just biding my time till they reach a version more close to their 1.0 release

A storm of swords

2003-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

I am currently reading A storm of swords by George R.R. Martin. That book is book #3 in a series called A song of ice and fire. I was pointed to this series by some people on Usenet. After reading almost all the material written by J.R.R. Tolkien I wanted something else, but similar.

The first book was a true page-turner. Once you got into the characters the story was absolutely breath-taking. The second book, A clash of kings , introduced 3 dragons (oh yeah, it was if possible even more a page-turner as book #1). While there are much more plots, sub-plots and other interesting things going on in the series, the dragons capture my attention more than anything else. It is like the history of G.R.R. Martins world becomes alive again: dragons flying through the air! Ah well... I'll see what A storm of swords brings me on this topic.

PS: Martin is different from Tolkien in at least two aspects:

A song of ice and fire entails 3k+ pages where The lord of the rings entails only half of that. Now I know that A song of ice and fire is not finished yet, and I also know that there is much more Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit (Middle Earth's books contain 3k+ pages too).
Another difference between Tolkien and Martin is that all important characters survive throughout the story in The lord of the rings, whereas in A song of ice and fire main characters will die on you. That was something that shocked me, being used to Tolkien as I was. I think I like Martin's approach in this respect. But then again Martin started out on doing 7 book series, whereas Tolkien wrote 1 book (and the publisher turned it into 3, but that's another story).

PS 2: I'm trying not to read too much at once so that I won't rush through the story... first time I'm regulating how much I read.

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

2003-03-24T00:00:00+01:00

I've got an edition of Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) by Douglas Hofstadter, a gift from my parents. Two words about this book: oh my!. I'm currently also reading A storm of swords by Martin but I don't think I'll be able to read in that book as long as I haven't finished GEB. I mean, if a book like this can make a 23 yr old person fond of Zero 7, Yonderboy and Norah Jones yearn to hear Musical Offering by J.S. Bach. Damn.

Well, I'm only 50 pages into the book and it really gets my interest. I was especially surprised that Hofstadter was able to make the same strange loops one can find in Escher's drawings, Bach's music and Godel's math in the dialogues between Achilles and Tortoise!

I don't get the clue of the last two paragraphs of the dialog between Achilles and Tortoise for the second chapter. The part of accepting rules A, B but not Z is not that hard to get but what I don't get is the "adopting pun"-part:

"And would you mind, as a personal favor, considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be renamed TAUGHT.

'As you please," replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands."Provided that YOU, for YOUR part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be renamed a KILL-EASE!"

(from G.E.B. by Hofstadter)

That is the part I don't get. Are they setting up for the same conversation this time about a comment the Mock-Turtle will make in the future, instead of two sides of a triangle? Someone comment, track-back or mail me please!

Jilles.net

French Onion Soup

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Stamped (not mashed) potatos recipe

A new version of my blog

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Do not listen to your customers

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Plaxo.remove()

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Godel, Escher, Bach

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Search engine basics

Vendors vs Application providers

Technology is hard

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Recent purchases...

Quick post on my ski plans this season

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Video on the web

Map of Westendorf, Austria

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Jilles' books online

Moola: "Weekend millionaires for the rest of us"

Google testing out new SERP feature

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Database? No database?

Weird images of Jilles

Welcome to my Blog v3

What branching strategy do you use?

Specifications? How?

Japanese blogs to watch

SpeedDEV

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Mutex, oh mutex, why didn't I think about you?

Actively developed websites

To which project do I want to contribute?

On Subversion

A storm of swords

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

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