... when a shareholders meeting really is a gathering of friends.

... when an afternoon walk along the shore becomes a runaway photoshoot.

... and when some unskilled Photoshopping results in a picture which could not be shot.

I'm rsyncing my home folder with a backup hard disk so my laptop is a bit sluggish ATM - a good time to write up a bit on what we have been up to lately. For some reason or another, it seems like we disappeared from the public horizon after the November GetTogether, and while part of this is caused by the usual end-of-the-year blitz and some conference fun here and there, and it does seem as if quite a few associates are subject to the same phenomena, we have been quite busy lately.

On the business level, it looks as if we'll be breaking almost even this second year of our existence, which is good and a bit unexpected after a particularly grim start of the year. Our marketing efforts (or lack thereof) still suck in quite some exotic way, but it seems like Cocoon is slowly gathering interest in our little corner of the world, and part of that buzz is reflecting in the number of phone calls we receive asking for consultancy and handholding. No biggies so far, but fun projects to be involved with. Marc is currently on-site with a new Dutch customer who is seriously investigating Cocoon as the platform of choice for its front-end development. Neat product, cool people with a clue, and a real-world challenge for Woody and Flow (yeah, JavaScript flow).

Some more of this short-run consulting jobs are planned for the upcoming months: an old-time 'emergency support' customer has been asking us to come up with a quote for a review/redesign of an existing application to make it scalable and performant enough to go public with it on a much larger scale than currently is the case. Some wicked stuff glued together, educating us about the challenges business developers have to cope with. An existing mainframe application which has been web-enabled using VisualAge Generator, producing a bunch of Windows DLLs and associated JNI wrappers for a set of generated JavaBeans and JSPs to go with that, which we now need to integrate in a Cocoon-proper setup. Another fun challenge for Woody.

Bruno has started design and development for Daisy, our CMS framework annex SuperWiki application to be opensourced "when it's ready", similar to xReporter. We've been exploring all sorts of existing frameworks and applications, and forthcoming APIs, but still we decided to go on our own with it (not without learning a lot during this exploration however). That decision wasn't terribly difficult, since none of the frameworks we explored were aiming in the direction we were interested in, nor did they offered a generic-enough design to retrofit our thoughts and vision onto what they already offered. Daisy will have a similar setup as xReporter, i.e. an Avalon-app (this time running inside Merlin as a container), connecting to a relational database (MySQL being our development database), using the now-fancy Maven build environment, and XMLBeans for all XML manipulation related code. Protocol between that server and the Cocoon-based client will be XML over HTTP. No hierarchy in the repository model, but lots of metadata-related stuff to compensate for that on a functional level. The publishing side of things will have some tree-hierarchical navigation model, which is hard to live without in a web environment.

This CMS thing will confront us with an entirely new world of challenges and opportunities, so 2004 promises already to be an interesting year. What xReporter lacked in sexiness (in terms of application domain, not in terms of design and implementation), might be compensated by Daisy bringing us into the fuzzy world of content management.

Some other thing we are planning is a public course on real-life web application development with Cocoon, with Woody and Flow as its cornerstones. No Actions or XSPs, but Avalon-components, Javascript flow and Woody forms to go with that. I'm pretty sure Marc's rants of lately might hint at the shape this course will be taking: Cocoon is ready to confront the masses that are now stuck in the world of Struts. To be announced when we're ready, presumably somewhere in spring 2004, most likely back in Ghent, and with a nice reduction for friends, associates and foes.

rsync is done - I'm heading home to enjoy family stuff.

Just found AudioScrobbler through Ben Hammersley. AudioScrobbler plugs into your favourite music jukebox and gathers data about the songs you've recently listened to. For those crazy enough, here's my (virgin) RSS music feed. Must add this to my homepage somehow.

Update: Bruno warns me that the RSS feed can contain parsing errors - it uses undefined character entity references (like á). NNW doesn't care (luckily enough) - and apparently the AudioScrobbler peeps are looking into proper UTF-8 submission handling, so this should be a temporarily issue. Here's my personal AudioScrobbler page.

Today, I subscribed for a 60 hour course in digital photography at the school I graduated from 11 years ago. So no more meetings and gettogethers on the next 15 thursday evenings starting from February. Looking forward to it already! :-)

Things you have to do when having a flu: drop the kids off at school, and on your way home, buy a heap of magazines such as Wired, FastCompany, MacFormat and some others. Put breakfast stuff in the dishwasher, toss your shoes in a corner, and get back to bed with your glossies.

I'm off enjoying my feverish shivers - cu.

For those with too much time on their hands, I've updated my spiffy blogroll of friends and foes - situated on the left on my homepage. This is the stuff I read on an at least weekly basis, adding to the incoming infoglut. So if you find my views warped or narrow-minded, don't blame me, blame them. After all, it's the stuff I read which shapes and reflects who I am.

Seems like the switching war stories aren't over yet, and now Marc is contemplating the acquisition of some new hardware as well. The poor guy is still dreaming up on the so-called qualities of an portable Intel/Linux combo, presumably for a perceived need for multiple GHz CPU cycles, while I'm slowly trying to subvert him into becoming a Switcher.

Not only does my TiBook "just works", it also brings back fun into my computing life. There's many more little apps which I now simply use, and which don't interfere with my productivity (aka the responsiveness of the work apps), such as iTunes and iCal, various chat clients, and my favourite feed reader app (NNW). I now happily spend time in Photoshop as well (hence the pictures I now habitually post next to each entry), and am found messing around with some iHub-type apps which I never cared about with my Intel machines, like controlling iTunes with my mobile phone (using SallingClicker), having a webcam shooting goofy pics of my mobile showing the currently playing track, and enjoying to see a huge pile of cables being plugged in into my newly acquired Firewire hub. There's simply more of the available apps and stuff that I (enjoy to) use.

Oh yeah, the system has its weaknesses, certain apps do crash (Mail and Safari did on several occasions, Photoshop once in a while, Finder hates losing connections to mounted drives and networks), but overall there's a increased amount of perceived pleasure and productivity when working on my TiBook. And since that's my main window on the world for at least 10 hours a day, I'm really considering this to be the prime benefit of my new laptop: I actually enjoy using it.

With kids growing older, the chances grow that you end up fighting over who gets to unwrap a Sinterklaas present with your 6 year old son. GeoMag/SuperMag rocks. :-)

... there was a guy who had a quarrel with some other guy because of someone not being allowed to come to a tribe gathering since the sponsors didn't allow him to. When the first guy went public with this, together with some other guys, the second guy was rather annoyed by all this, and decided to seek revenge.

Weeks passed, and the first guy got a phone call inviting him to the same gathering. "How funny", the first guy thought, "seems like the second guy forgot". That wasn't true. Some time later, the first guy was contacted and told by someone else (only a messenger) that he wasn't being invited anymore, because he had issues with the second guy in the past.

"Fair enough", thought the first guy, and asked whether a third guy could replace him. That wasn't possible however, we heard from the second guy (via-via, of course, since he communicates mostly through his lieutenants, except for today), since that third guy had been presenting last year as well. The subject was different, though, and besides, the third guy spoke at that previous gathering to fill in for someone else who didn't show up, and the new Subject had become increasingly more popular over the course of a year, to the extent that the first guy (with help from the third guy, and many other guys) had been able to gather more than 100 other guys for the second year in a row to talk about the Subject in a separate gathering. Nevertheless, the third guy wasn't allowed to speak.

Somewhere during this timeline, an unnumbered guy sent a mail to the first guy, explaining he had been invited by a lieutenant to talk about the Subject, but that he knew about the issues between the first and the second guy, and he felt a bit inhibited to show up, also due to the fact he would have to make the trip on his own expenses. So he didn't agree to show up after all, and the Subject had no chance anymore of being presented.

A fourth guy got annoyed by this, because he felt this being a disservice to the audience who would not be informed about the Subject. So he contacted the second guy, and pleaded to bring forward the Subject during the gathering. "No way", he was told, "all slots are filled, you are too late".

Yesterday night, the first, third and fourth guy went for a very nice dinner with a fifth guy, who had been invited to the gathering to speak about his own subject. It was a dinner amongst friends, so thoughts could be shared freely and without inhibition. It was then the fifth guy told the other guys that the second guy and his lieutenants had been requiring him very late in the preparation process to not speak once, but twice during the gathering, something they also did with some other gal. So apparently, not all the slots were filled, and from what we understood, the lieutenants had been lying to the fourth guy when they stated so.

Parallel to all this, there was a sixth guy, who also had been banned at some time, but somehow still managed to participate with the gathering, even got to speak as well, even though it also was his second year in a row. So there were many different weights and measures involved in all this, and some decent amount of double-talk between guys and lieutenants.

"Oh well", said the first, third, fourth and fifth guy, and they got on with their lives. The second guy however, without any shame, today sent a mail to the third guy, to meet up and talk as friends again.

If the third guy agrees to meet with the second guy, he will compromise his own values about honesty and straight talking. If he decides not to meet however, the second guy will proclaim the third guy wasn't willing to accept the extended hand.

I wish I was a girl.

Update: I received already many reactions from some guys and other people. This is my own story, and while I already tweaked the story to lower the amount of criticism towards a minor actor in this play, I can only talk about my story. Other people, and surely the actors involved, might have perceived things differently. This is not a disclaimer. It's just a statement of fact. I'm still convinced, and that won't change anytime soon, that the second guy has been abusing his so-called power for his own silly personal revenge game. Many people prefer to ignore this unethical behaviour. I cannot and will not. And this, dear reader, is the last thing I have to say about all this: bleh.

There's a discussion going on about whether Geronimo should effectively be the name of the ASF's J2EE/EJB server project, since it risks to offend people who are sensitive about political correctness. Most funny link mentioned so far is a primer on PC. Personally, I'm convinced that the apparent issue with PC in the US is based on the tendency to take oneself (and so-called social movements) too serious, and try to explicitize everything. I'm pretty sure that this wouldn't be an issue if people would just see things as-is: we're all different, and as long as we spend attention to this, this will be a problem. Once you try to look beyond the apparent differences and see what people are really about, there's no need for PC anymore: we're all made of stars.

Somehow related, I saw a concert of the Fundamentals this weekend, which are four mentally handicapped people playing a rock set with four professional musicians. Different from the 'pity-treatment' such people usually are treated to, they were expected to act and interact in a normal environment. It was great to see PC evaporate during the concert.