It took them several years, and after the dot.bomb we might have been thinking they'd never be back at it, but it seems like VC money is finally finding its way into Open Source. Not in Open Source per se, but in the pompous and rather foolishly sounding Professional Open Source (POS), which in the end seems to be the exact same thing, only you get to pay for it. The funnier thing about all this is that - suddenly - Open Source news becomes newsworthy on business channels.
JBoss, a company which won't remembered for its fine communication ethics, and certainly not for value-add in its message, received lots of love from journalists and analysts. CDN, a loosely-tied assembly of some free-lancing consultants suddenly seemed like a serious company, while as I'd love to see the share structure that holds these guys together (ditto with JBoss of course).
A bit more subtle, Gluecode has been hiring Geronimo folks, and will presumably be heading into the same POS direction but for another J2EE container. They did the same already with JetSpeed. And now TSS deems it newsworthy that some ex-BEA folks found some rich people to help them start SourceLabs, which isn't very clear about what products it is going to support at all.
Now, as some commenter on the TSS crying wall rightfully pointed out: "So, as with many things, it's all about expectations of the clients." I suspect we're talking here about clients who want to pay before feeling sure, since code which costs must obviously be more valuable than code for free.
Now, I'm all for professionalizing Open Source, and it is obviously something we are trying to do from our own little business perspective, but I feel a bit awkward about these suddenly appearing entities, VC- and PR-backed, stating they will be providing Industrial Strength Support for Professional Open Source. My point is that the ability to provide support doesn't come from having read access to the code base and throwing monetary resources at reading and understanding the code, while drafting a professional install, user and reference guide.
Being able to support Open Source comes from being part of the group that discussed and drafted a certain design, comes from reading CVS commit messages on a daily basis while adding your own commits to that, comes from a deep understanding of the dynamics which led to a certain decision, and comes with intimate knowledge of the living history of the project. While I'm enthusiastic about people stepping up and saying they are willing to retroactively learn all that, I worry about the learning time that lays ahead of them.
I can't quite say I equally worry about the VC funding such companies, but rather about the people who have put their money in the funding pool managed by them. Once again, this will be a "must invest" area, and the VC companies will stumble over each other in trying to understand what startup is the viable bet.

Amongst running other errands today, I also managed to find out how to set up wireless master/slave flash with my D70 and my SB600 flash. It's crazy that once studio-specific lighting setups now become available to carry with you in your backpack.

Funny. This leads to this leads to this. Check your sources, and your story. We're talking about a VoiceXML taglib here.

It's 14:30 CEST here - and I had two cigarettes, two softdrinks, and 1/3th of a box of chocolats so far over the past hour and a half. Chances are I'll have the remainder of that box later during the afternoon. Meanwhile, I had chats with Andrew and Jeremy, and I'm realizing now that Andrew's complaints about the UK railway system are real and verifiable. Viva Madge!
If anyone knows a working website to book a return ticket between London and Cambridge, and have the tickets sent to a Belgian address, some famous Belgian beer will be on his way. FastTicket tickets will do as well. Or does the UK wants to prohibit foreigners from travelling internally using their not-so-public-anymore railroad system?

The annually Cocoon GetTogether is at it again. Same place, almost same time, but ooohmygawd what a nice-looking program!
Oh, shhhhh: Michi, Arjé and I still have something up our sleeves for those of you curious about Cocoon and CMSes. Think RoboWars, but with three great content management frameworks instead.

I'm working on a new web home for myself, and while hacking on the CSS, I wrote a first draft of what I wanted to say on my new home page:

My self-awareness and reason for existence rotate around a couple of things:

• I'm a Belgian guy born in 1970,
• I'm happily married with someone I dearly love since 1988,
• I'm the proud dad of three healthy kids, two boys and one girl,
• I work in IT, more specifically:
• I run my own company with a friend,
• which is about Open Source Java and XML, topics I'm quite passionate about,
• but my main hobby is photography. Nothing fancy, though - I'm still learning.

• I despise so-called corporate culture although I've been indulged in it in past times,
• I'm a democrat with demonstrated left-wing tendencies,
• I used to be a practicing Catholic, but the world should really be a better place if He actually existed,
• I have a keen interest in people but am not really a people's person. Don't think of me as a loner, though. I'm just picky about the folks I really commit to, and can appear dispassionate about others. I do like people, but sometimes only in an observative mode.
• I tend to be cool in stress situations, more specifically medical urgencies. If I would be able and willing to start again, there's a good chance I would be doing something in healthcare.
• But emotionally, I can be touched very easily, by simple thoughts and things.

• There have been times when I was sure I was so right about everything,
• but now I realize that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.
• I have a serious issue with authority.
• Although I can be grunting all day long, I tend to be a joyous person.
• I do not think of myself as being a single thing better than somebody else.
• Quite the contrary: I can be in dire need of appreciation by others.
• I think a lot, about all sorts of things. Not all deep thoughts, though.
• I can be pretty silent when doing all that thinking.

• I love languages, books, and print media in general. Words, sentences, paragraphs: the transcription of thought trains and story flows - yummy.
• I'm not a maths person.
• Lots of my behaviour is based on feeling rather than fact.
• I like music a lot, but don't have a good memory for performers and lyrics.
• I like cooking. I do cook a good deal of the family meals, including but not only the weekends.
• I'm not so keen on house-cleaning. I can be messy. I'm not very structured as well.
• I've tried to do a lot of things, too many, and I have a pretty high failure rate in terms of actual endurance. This was frustrating at times, but now I've come to accept my varying and changing interests and skills. It's the thing people sometimes like me for as well: I'm a generalist rather than a specialist.
• I don't think of myself as a smart person. While I know I'm pretty clever, I'm lazy as well.
• I believe the world wouldn't be a better place if only smart people get the lead.
• I spend money rather than save it. I know I could do better.

This is one of these posts which, after you re-read them, make you think that people will feel awkward when seeing them. Oh, well.

Flickr is actually quite cool. I like it when a webapp is fun to use (that doesn't mean useful!). Let's hope this'll happen to Daisy too (or rather: we'd better make that happen ourselves).
Minor Flickr nits: they should work on their EXIF parsing (what focal length is that??). And I want to use the (EXIF) shooting time of my pictures in my photostream.
(My Flickr RSS2 URL)