Archive for September, 2007
Adding to the fun
And here I am, comfortably sitting inside, sipping my coffee and looking out to see nothing but rainy and stormy weather.
I have to admit: I am privileged enough to appreciate these circumstances. I could do worse.
Gathering research data goes rather well, currently I’m gathering and comparing definitions of what a portal is, and summing up similarities. These will be part of a chapter to eventually come up with the main subject. (Which I still will not share with you.)
On a sidenote: I’ve also upgraded to the excellent 2.3 (“Dexter”) version of WP, and I can recommend upgrading to anyone using WP to blog.
Thanks for reading, and now I’ll return to drinking my coffee. 
International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007
Arrr, perhaps tis’ not the best known celebratory day in the world, but e’ery September 19th, pirates take o’er the internet, and e’en the offline world. Gar, Where can I find a bottle o’rum?
Arrr, today Me will be known as Mad Harry Flint, my pirate-name accordin’ t’ these guys. Aye.
Yes, me mateys: it is time!
International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007 (TLAPD2007) is here! Har, har, har!
Arrr, t’ get more info, please click the (butt-ugly) banner in the top-right corner.
*sings*
"Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest
…Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
…Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! "
Scripting FTW!
When you are busy creating your thesis, it is vital to have at least one "offline" backup, and preferable more on different locations.
I’m already putting in several extra methods of making sure my data will be available, no matter what.
The first line of defense would be having a SVN-repository enabling me to have a versioning-system for all documents. This way I could easily revert to a previous version of a document, without having to make copies of the difeerent versions. This is all done by the SVN-server, running locally.
Although SVN enables me to completely recreate all files in the folder "MSC", the versioning doesn’t protect me against data-loss in the "D:\SVN\" folder. Here all SVN-information is stored and when this is lost, all is lost.
This is where my second line of defense comes in: hot-copy.py
As this script is originally written for a *nix-system, it has some hiccups when ran on a Windows machine. I’ve been debugging an hour or so to tackle the problem of reoccurring errors telling me the destination-folder for the backups isn’t write-enabled, or other fatal messages. I finally solved it, and will post the complete script if needed.
In short:
[source:python]# Global Settings
# Path to svnlook utility
svnlook = “svnlook.exe”
# Path to svnadmin utility
svnadmin = “C:/Program Files/Subversion/bin/svnadmin”[/source]
Thesisupdate: Proposal is accepted!
Posted by Maarten in Uncategorized on September 17, 2007
Triple-yay!
After my first proposal for a thesis was rejected by the university as the quality of the proposed thesis didn’t quite match the (high) university-standards, I sat down to rethink what Ordina was asking from me, and what I wanted myself.
I met with the supervisors from both Ordina and the university to discuss the matter and came up with an ingenious solution (if I might say so myself), I was not going to report on the symptoms, I was going to study the root of the problem!
What this problem is, and what the symptoms are will remain undisclosed for now: I promise to elaborate on them later on.
To those with whom I’ve discussed my proposal in the last week: yes, that subject is now accepted.
My data-collection stage will commence as of now, and I’m planning to start writing shortly.
FINALLY: we are getting somewhere
Sad news
This morning, my former boss in Hoogvliet tried to call me but could’t reach me, so he left an urgent message for me to call him back.
As he refused to say to my parents what it was about, they feared the worst: something really bad had happened to someone I knew.
I got back a short while later to find out I had a message, and so I rang my former boss only to hear what I had been fearing I would hear: something really bad had happened.
Cutting this story short: my former colleague and not-too-distant friend Joep has passed away at the age of 24.
Only just engaged to his girlfriend Paula, they had bought a house and he was planning on some good things to happen.
We can only say Joep’s passing was quick and completely unforeseen.
From here, and in this quite impersonal distant digital fashion I would like to condole his family, fiancé and his friends with the terrible loss.
In the remembrance of Joep Wesseling (1982-2007)