Een toch wel redelijk geslaagde impressie van drie fijne dagen aan zee.

I'm heading towards a short winter holiday break next week. See you all on the other side, and my best wishes for you, your family & friends, and your professional whereabouts for the year to come! Et pour les Flamands, la même chose!

Wow. I dwell around photographer portfolio websites ever so often, and many of them don't elicit much emotions from me. But Gary Parker, even while he does the usual topics as well, definitely has this edge making his pictures stand out against the crop. Here's his view on Intel's CEO Craig Barrett. Also check out his gallery of Little People. Awesome work.

Een gepast verjaardagsgeschenk voor Marc: Disney's verfilming van The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. 42, what else?

As much as this world is becoming a loosely-knitted fabric of transnational communication and borderless exchange of goods and services, many small companies (like mine) primarily make their money on the local market. Money they use to pay local employees, adding diversity to the employment mix which ideally might reduce the chances for other Renault scenarios to happen. Add open source to this, and it becomes obvious that the government, through fair distribution of research funds, can help to support small local companies who create open source applications, which can then be used for free by that same government. It's good to see that my main pet peeve and goal for 2005 has already been touched by Simon on two occasions. Now if only the IWT and other research-funding government organizations would stop spending the vast majority of their money on fake research institutes, blue-sky academic research or big companies with entire departments triple-funded with Belgian or EU money, I would be a very happy man. It's painful to see so much money is spent on biotech research (the business park we are located in hosts at least four large buildings with people playing with worms and mice, several of them built with taxpayer's money), while the software industry over here is still very much in the hands of the usual corporate suspects and some large consulting/integrator/bodyshopping companies. Very non-innovative indeed.

Update: funny to see this linked on Slashdot while typing my post. Participants: Research and Academic Institutions: INRIA, France (Project Coordinator) - University of Paris 7, France - Tel-Aviv University, Israel - University of Geneva, Switzerland - University of Zürich, Switzerland - CSP Torino, Italy. Private Companies: Edge-IT, France, a Mandrakesoft subsidiary (Project Manager) - NUXEO, France - NEXEDI, France - SOT, Finland. Now, can someone explain me how 2.2 mio EUR is going to be split amongst no less than 10 project participants in 5 countries? How much is going to be spent on travel and project management? How many of the academic researchers will have two or three projects they've received funding for, and how much time they'll actually are going to spend on this single one?

Matthew links to a nice primer on continuations on IBM DeveloperWorks. A nice article!

I lost my phone this weekend so I went shopping for another one on Monday morning. Since most of the full-featured mobile phones these days hardly resemble a productivity tool, with lots of funny colors, odd keypad layouts and even leather insets, I decided to go for a not-so-bleeding-edge model, i.e. the Nokia Series 40 6230.

I learnt about the importance of the Nokia Series concept only afterwards: the Series 40 is a platform where J2ME has been crippled down below its barest essentials, especially with regards to the Mobile Media goodies. The KVM runtime on the 6230 has no access to the built-in camera, which means I cannot mobile-picture-blog with this device, which unfortunately was one of the peeves I was lusting for. I'm still hoping some Midlet mail application exists somewhere which enables me to shoot a picture and mail it to Flickr, but so far no luck.

This said, the 6230 is a nice phone, if you can manage it from a PC. For MacOSX, Nokia apparenly chooses to ignore the Herd of the Geek Switchers and offers no support, but I've found a decent and not very expensive phone manager at MacMedia. Using this, I managed to import the few phone numbers I still had in my Address Book (so if you'd like your number to be on my phone, you'll have to call me), changed the wallpaper into the picture I won the picture-of-the-month contest with at my photography club, and I'm greeted now with Conversation Piece (*) by master Bowie every time someone calls me. Fun!

(*) released on the B-side of 'The Prettiest Star' in 1970 (Mercury MF 1135); it was reissued in 1990 on the Rykodisc version of Space Oddity. A demo version of the song can be heard on the bootleg The Beckenham Oddity (Leisure Records 005). Re-recorded for Toy in 2000, but not released until 2002 on the 2CD version of Heathen (with the long and slightly incorrect subtitle Written 1969 - Recorded 1970 - Re-recorded 2002). (from: http://www.illustrated-db-discography.nl/) (I can't provide you with an iTunes preview fragment since for some reason they even manage to not have the full Bowie collection on stock).

... van die madammekes, met enkellange gebreide jurken, een McLaren paraplu-buggytje voor zich uit duwend, waanzin-mompelend voor zich uit starend, boos op de wereld aangezien hun echtgenoot sinds diene kleine in bed niet meer naar hen omkijkt (het is ook van voor de geboorte van die kleine geleden dat ze nog eens naar zichzelf omkeken), die madammekes dus van een jaar of vijf-zesendertig (maar ze zien er al zo uit sinds ze twintig zijn), die hun buggy gebruiken als een soort stootwapen, een wig om tussen hen en de andere weggebruiker te drijven, een verpersoonlijking van hun diep ingewortelde penisnijd. Van rechts wordt plots een buggy onder je wielen geschoven, met een verkleumd, snotterend kind in, zich bewust van het feit dat zijn enige recht tot bestaan is mama's stormram te mogen bemannen: ballast. Snuivend duikt ze van achter een dubbel geparkeerde camion op, schijnbaar onbewust van haar onzichtbaarheid, en hop daar gaat de buggy, en hop nu kan ze oversteken.

En dan straks gezellig zelfhulpgroepen, als mijn kind tussen de banden van een vrachtwagen terecht komt. Eindelijk een reden tot bestaan, eindelijk vriendinnen die me begrijpen. Was het nu onvoorzichtigheid of kindermoord? Ik weet het niet, ik moet vanavond naar mijn therapeut. Die begrijpt me tenminste.

• PhoneDirector for OS X and Nokia 6230
  (categories: 6230)
• The home of Mail4ME at Enhydra.org
  (categories: java midlet)

Caveat: I qualify hardly as an attendee, since I was only there Monday afternoon, Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. Yesterday, after a couple of drinks with the JBoss folks (and finally shaking hands with Marc Fleury who gave me some not-too-serious nudges and blows when he was told I'm an ASF Member), Werner, Andy, Bruno & I went for dinner at some nondescript Chinese place near the Antwerp cathedral. It was good catching up with Werner again, who sort-of disappeared into the real world when he joined his new job. Andy was still his usual self - definitely one of these persons who manage to hide all the good content they have to offer under the disguise of an abrasive style. It's good to know though that Andy and I are actually brothers and that our mum lives in Antwerp.

The conference was great, if only because you get to meet all your ex-colleagues who are still connected to Java: it was good to see Patrice & Peter back after quite some time. For some reason or another, it seems like all the companies I worked for have turned into splinter bombs over time, spreading seeds of entrepreneurship all across the place. It's nice knowing you're not the only one with the uphill struggle of keeping your own company alive. And it is obviously also that time of the year where folks are wondering about the professional part of their life, to the effect that you get all sorts of things suddenly being dropped into your mailbox.

The organization was quite excellent this year: badges being sent in time, no registration queues, plenty of food baggies, a noteblock in our conference bag, music in the exhibition hall, a bookshop, (non-free) wireless access, XBoxes to have fun with, etc etc... kudos to the staff!

Content-wise, there was the obvious sponsor pollution: I counted 29 or so sponsor-related slots amongst the 52 talks of the 2 conference days. This meant some folks weren't really qualified to speak about a topic, yet were allowed to because a slot was allocated for them in return of their sponsor pennies - a funny interpretation of handpicking a conference if I may say so ;-) It's a bit funny also to make a public fool of yourself the one year by complaining about JBoss not being allowed to present, and then the other year see that same company return as a sponsor and consequentially fill up quite some slots (with, thankfully, at least some decent speakers). I know I'm extremely picky but my patience with conferences has grown thin over the years, after finding out (on the other side of the virtual wall between speakers & attendees) that some folks actually make a living just traveling around, not spending time with actual users, in-breeding the monoculture of tech conferences. And blogging has made this phenomena even more widespread, hosting a continuous (Hani-warning!) circlejerk-fest for the technorati of this world. Ahum. Sorry about that.

This (minor) digression aside, I had quite a lot of fun during the past week though, and I'm looking forward to next year's edition. Doing the same thing for a 120+ crowd every year, I can appreciate what the Bejug, Navajo and Janssen family have been gone through for the past few weeks: nice work!

Yesterday was good fun. Best encounter was Tom Baeyens of jBpm/JBoss fame. Happy to see Werner back as well. And there's a JBoss drink tonight so we'll sure catch up again. See you in Antwerp!

• LinkDropper
  (categories: belgianopensource)

• SimpleGameNet
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• NetworkTools
  (categories: belgianopensource)

Seems like not many people are blogging about Javapolis (yet), so here goes...

I drove from Ghent to Antwerp yesterday afternoon, in order to avoid traffic jams, and because I was only expected to host my Java/Open Source BOF at 6PM. I was actually quite amazed how many people were already attending the University days. I just followed the largest crowd which eventually led me to the JDK5.0 Tiger presentation from Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter. I'm not qualified to make any judgment on programming languages, but it felt kinda cumbersome to see yet more type-related stuff added to a programming language in these loosely-typed days. Joshua is a great presenter BTW, his sheer enthusiasm helped a lot to keep me interested in the bone-dry topic of his talk. He has this way of waving his arms, and I'm pretty sure the middle part of his body is actually elastomere or something similar:

Most folks left at 5PM (when the theater needed to be vacated for proper movies again), so I was a bit anxious to find out if the BOFs would be any good. I attended the first BOF of that evening about JavaBlackBelt.com, which was interesting though I'm not entirely sure whether simple questionnaires are the ideal way to screen Java competencies, especially when I remember how easy it was to earn my "Master in XML" certificate at Brainbench.

The BOFs were a "low-profile" thing for the conference, so I was worried when quiet a few people started packing their bags after the first BOF. The cloakroom was closing as well. To my surprise however there were about 10 people at the entrance who apparently had been waiting to join "my" BOF, so in the end it was a pretty crowded thing - with at least 30 people attending. I did present a bit about myself, our company and our open source achievements, and after that we chatted for about an hour about various open source things. Two recurring threads come to mind: transparency and enthusiasm.

We and apparently quite a few others in the room try to transpose the open source community development model into the corporate context of our customers: by installing Subversion, commit mail scripts, mailing list software, unit testing, Gump integration building, etc etc. These are all techniques that help open source developers to collaborate through asynchronous points of synchronization, and which make the development processes of the project totally transparent. When you install this same level of transparency in a corporate context, people often do not like it - even when they share desks or cubicles. That's a bit sad to see happen, since you would expect that paid employees working on a single goal would find it logical that everybody knows what they're up to. Apparently not.

The other meme was enthusiasm. Some folks asked me how we "sell" open source to our customers - whether we use ROI calculations or similar stuff. I'm convinced that open source in a business context is still a matter where enthusiasm, gut feeling and emotional weighting are an integral part of the decision process. It's all about that cluetrain, remember?

I really enjoyed the BOF - it went very well for a totally unprepared thing, and even the silent folks were nodding all along. And I met Simone Bordet of mx4j and HP afterwards, which was cool. I'm looking forward to meet other folks on Javapolis tomorrow and thursday.

PS I: if you were at the BOF and happen to read this, please drop me a note. Thanks!
PS II: part 2 of my interview is online.

Veel te weinig fotos (wegens teveel gefeest). Dankjewel allemaal!

• Bwana
  (categories: macosx)
• Steve Anderson's Weblog: Java and CMS
  (categories: cms daisy)

Woopie! I'll be participating with the open source projects track at LOTS 2005 in Bern, 17-19/Feb 2005. Topic: Daisy. It's been since my childhood that I was in Switzerland, so I'm really looking forward to it!

• eConf
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Yawda
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Netron
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Sound Object Logic - Home
  (categories: belgianopensource)

Matthew is on the lookout for a Wiki engine for an encyclopedia-like knowledge management intranet site, and solicits comments - but leaves comments disabled on his blog... :-)

Anyway: Matthew, have you checked out Daisy already? Do you know about the facetted navigation we are planning somewhere next year?

Ik moet schuld bekennen. Op woensdagavond, nu al meer dan 10 jaar, gaat mijn lief naar de yoga. Wat eerst een moment van lekker uitgeeken voor mezelf was, is na verloop van tijd mijn vaste Filmfan-avond op Canvas geworden. Alleen strooit één of andere voetbalmatch zonder publiek (?!) vanavond roet in het eten, en was ik zo onverstandig om te beginnen zappen en bij Beautiful op VT4 te blijven hangen... 't is te erg voor woorden, en een blow-by-blow analyse laat ik graag aan anderen over. Ongetwijfeld helpt het vooruitzicht van een gratis neuscorrectie, facelift, nieuwe tanden en de obligate borstvergroting de deelnemers om flink gecomplexeerd over te komen tijdens het voorafgaande interview, want anders zouden ze al dat moois alsnog mislopen. Maar den besten was toch het dochtertje dat bij het verschijnen van haar "nieuwe" mama zei: ik ga nu leuke dingen doen met mijn mama omdat ze mooi is. En nu gij!

• Open Source Consortium
  (categories: business opensource)
• OpenXource : Where Opensource and Business Cross
  (categories: business opensource)
• SourceLabs Home Page
  (categories: business opensource)
• SpikeSource: Productized Open Source Software
  (categories: business opensource)
• Open Source Risk Management
  (categories: business opensource)

Kudos to Bob for starting this. I had some mixed feelings finding something I remember talking about with Marc about 4 years ago. Ah - the difference between the EU "could do" and US "can do" mentality, maybe?

• cgi_app
  (categories: python web)

De Goede Man was in het land! Wij hebben nog drie firm believers in huis, en de baardige pakjesdrager uit Spanje had zaterdagnacht de volgende zaken bij:

• voor Sander een rode Gameboy Advance SP met spelletje Sonic Advance 3 en bescherm-/draagtasje
• voor Tim de Hot Wheels Velocity Vortex Track, een Lego Designer Titan XP robot en bijhorende blauwe fleece sweater
• voor Saar het Playmobil Zwembad en een Baby Born pop

De Sint is er dit jaar ook in geslaagd om dat te brengen wat ze écht wilden hebben. Way to go, Sint!

• What is Gaby ?
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• IdPC
  (categories: belgianopensource)

• Tom's Hardware Guide PCs & HowTo: Aopen's XC Cube
  (categories: SFF hardware)
• LockPicks.com
  (categories: weird)
• Guide to recording Podcasts on the Mac using Quicktime Broadcaster
  (categories: web2.0)

Ik moet er niet van hebben: GSMs aan een broeksriem. Het zal ongetwijfeld zijn nut hebben, voor mobiele en handvaardige beroepen als glazenwasser, boswachter of politieagent. Vaak hebben die al zo'n rijkelijk uitgedoste koppelriem rond hun lenden, met handige lusjes en zakjes voor pepper-spray, zeemvel, wisser of houthakkersmes. Dan klopt het nog zo'n beetje. Maar zoals vanmiddag, in de sandwichbar, een rijzige blondine, helaas gehuld in eerder saaie, masculine kledij, met een brede bruine riem met daaraan een hoogblauw tasje en bijhorende GSM? Nee, ik moet daar niet van hebben.

Al goed dat de mannen van RAND Corp. in 1954 nog van het bestaan van Moore's Law niet afwisten... anders was mijn living nu (veel) te klein geweest. Maareuh: dit was geen echte computer hoor! Zo zie je maar, je mag niet alles geloven wat ze je vertellen.

Vanmorgen, op weg naar 't werk, een pakje tabak gaan halen in de Texaco op de Oudenaardsesteenweg (bij het aubergine-meisje). Toen ik terug in de auto stapte, merkte ik net als iemand anders een groepje tieners op, hoop en al 15-16 jaar, die niet echt zinnens waren vóór het rinkelen van de schoolbel het Instituut Bert Carlier binnen te gaan. Er was duidelijk wat animo en verbaal geweld aan de hand, vooral tussen een neger- en een Turks meisje. Blijkbaar had de één de ander uitgejouwd middels kreten die we meer gewoon zijn van die Vlaamse bruine bende, enfin reden genoeg blijkbaar om mekaar in pure combat-stijl letterlijk en figuurlijk naar de strot te vliegen. Wat doet ne mens in dat geval?

De jongens van het groepje vonden het blijkbaar een interessant spektakel, en 't was ook wel duidelijk dat één van de meisjes duidelijk een raciale minoriteit vertegenwoordigde, plus dat zij ook begonnen was met uitdagen. De andere had gewoon overduidelijk goesting om er eens lekker op te kloppen. De mannelijke helft besloot dan ook maar te laten betijen, en enigszins meesmuilend toe te kijken. In mijne jonge (ahum) jaren heb ik ook wel eens een robbertje gevochten, maar dit ging me er net iets te hevig aan toe. Meisjes die elkaar een bloedlip schoppen in pure karate-stijl ben ik niet zo gewend om half negen 's morgens. Ik en iemand anders besloten dan ook om maar tussen te komen. Ik ben geen kleintje, maar we hadden alle moeite van de wereld om de twee te scheiden. Uiteindelijk lukte dat even, maar toen ze hun tocht naar de schoolpoort verder zetten zaten ze snel terug in elkaars haren (letterlijk dan, met medeneming van een hoop dreadlocks).

Toen werd het me te veel en schreeuwde ik tegen de jongens of ze 't leuk vonden om twee meisjes te zien vechten. Op één of andere manier appelleerde dat wel aan hun mannelijkheid, en besloten ze om er ook zelf wat aan te trachten doen. Ik kon dus terug in de auto kruipen maar besloot om ostentatief traag naast hen te blijven rijden tot aan de poort.

Aan die schoolpoort hing een bordje: "School zonder racisme". Nou moe.

This - apart from important stuff which I feel like cross-posting - will be my last bi-lingual blog for a while. I've updated my blog's homepage with different RSS and Atom feeds for those of you interested in Dutch/Flemish, English, and mixed-language feeds. The feeds doesn't show themselves as being in one language or another, but that's laziness on my behalf.
Dit is het laatste tweetalige bericht voor een tijdje - los van spul dat ik belangrijk genoeg vind om op de twee kanalen uit te zenden. Nederlandstalige, Engelstalige, en gemixte RSS en Atom feeds zijn te vinden op de homepagina.

• Smile
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• rife
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Daisy
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• xReporter
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Tiny ERP
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• The Orocos Project
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Java Business Process Management
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• JAsCo
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• Crystal Space 3D
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• drupal.org
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• CheckDoc-SQL
  (categories: belgianopensource)
• U.P.C.A.S.E.
  (categories: belgianopensource)

After some talks with quite a few people, and some months of pondering on my own, I've now started looking into my new pet peeve project for 2005: a link database of Belgian Open Source projects, i.e. software or documentation projects with an OSI-certified license, and driven by (mainly) Belgian developers. Upsofar, I've found only 10 of them, but there must be more. So if you know a Belgian Open Source project, regardless of its programming language or its size, please get in touch. I'm adding these to my del.icio.us account and have some other plans with them as well.
Na wat gebabbel met allerlei mensen (dank, Jan, Peter en Danny), en na het gebruikelijke aantal maanden procrastinatie, ben ik nu begonnen met het aanleggen van een linkdatabase van Belgische Open Source projecten. Dat moeten projecten zijn met een OSI-gecertifieerde license, van de hand van of ondersteund door voornamelijk Belgische developers (et pour les Wallons la même chose). Ik heb er tot nu toe nog maar 10 gevonden, maar er moeten er meer zijn. Als je een Belgische open source project kent dat nog niet voorkomt in deze korte lijst, laat dan iets weten! Programmeertaal doet er niet toe, het mogen zelfs pure documentatieprojecten zijn, maar de licensie moet wel duidelijk vermeld worden.

I've been interviewed by Jonathan Bennett a while ago and the first part of the transcription appears now in the Business Management section of uk.builder.com. Part II planned for next week. Needless to say, I'm quite honored.
Ik werd een poosje geleden geïnterviewed door Jonathan Bennett van uk.builder.com. Een spannende belevenis, en deel I van het resultaat staat intussen live. In de sectie "Business Management", begot.
Update: and Google Alerts learns me that the same article is also appearing in the Insights section of zdnet.co.uk.