skoop.dev

How to remember 9/11

September 9, 2006

world

In the past week already, the media have been paying a lot of attention to what happened 5 years ago this year on the 11th of september. The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the attack on the Pentagon, and the airplane that went down, supposedly on it’s way to the White House.

Here is my tip on how to remember 9/11 without following the official story, two DVD’s about what happened, each giving a completely different view.

11|9 by Jules & Gedeon Naudet and James Hanlon
What was supposed to be a documentary about the NY fire department turned into a documentary on what happened on that faithful September day. A split view, one from outside the WTC, the other from within. Shocking and real.

Loose Change by Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe, Jason Bermas [view online]
Less documentary, more conspiracy theory. And even though I think some “facts” might be farfetched, I have the feeling that this movie contains more of the truth than the official statement by the US government and whatever was said in the media. A scary thought, I know, but I really feel this way. Don’t take it 100% serious, but at least 90%.
Application-level logging with the Zend Framework

September 7, 2006

logging, meta, phparchitect, zend framework

My second article for A/R/T is online! Application-level Logging with the Zend Framework is, as the title already notes, an article about application level logging. The Zend Framework comes in mainly at the end, where I use some examples to show how the actual logging works.
Deployment

September 6, 2006

deployment, technology

One of the things where Java is way ahead of PHP at the moment is the deployment of projects. There are projects, such as Phing, that are already a good effort, and will make deploying your project easier. Yet, it’s no Maven for instance.

In a recent weblog post, Sebastian Bergmann, author of PHPUnit, asks for someone to step up to write a paper on Deployment in PHP, especially of large scale PHP applications. I would also be very interested in this. In my previous work, we’ve been struggling often with the deployment of our applications, missing the correct tools for easy deployment. It would be very good if such a paper were written.
Byebye TomTom

August 31, 2006

personal, work

In just over a month time, after working for TomTom for exactly one year, I will be leaving the company. It’s not that I don’t like it there, on the contrary, I love it there. The work is great, the people are great. However, being away from home for about 12 hours each day is no fun when you have a little son of 1.5 years old. I want to spend more time with him.

I found the perfect replacement though, in Dutch Open Projects. A relatively small company in a the town of Leusden, about 15-20 minutes from home. I’ll be working there a lot with open source projects such as Joomla, SQL-Ledger and Zimbra, integrating several systems into one for clients, working on extending the functionality, and on developing completely new systems. I will also be working on the move from PHP4 to PHP5. And there’s other stuff as well. A really interesting and inspiring place to be.

It’s a sad thing to say goodbye to TomTom. There are quite a few very talented and inspiring people there. Only recently, I got to work with one of the founders of the company, Peter-Frans Pauwels. He is awesome to work with. Refreshing insights, and an inspiring man. Then there is the technical lead of our team, Ivo Kendra, who is a brilliant coder and also an inspiration. Ever since I started at TomTom, he’s been an example to me. And recently, in the Java team, Wilfred Springer joined. He is the great, enthousiastic talker, who can explain anything and you’ll understand it. It is truely a shame that I will not be learning to do Java at TomTom anymore.

Of course, I really enjoy working with all my other colleagues, but these are the guys that really stand out to me at TomTom. I can only hope to one day be anything like them. The time away from home is a reason for me to move on though, and I do think that with Dutch Open Projects I have found a good place to move on, to develop myself even further.
Drupal at Dreamhost: fun

August 30, 2006

drupal, technology

Drupal at DreamHost is something fun, or so I’ve experienced tonight. I had prepared a full site configuration including modules, tweaked configuration and even content. I did this all on my local machine. Usually, when I do these things, it’s a matter of copying over the files and the database, change the database credentials in the settings file, and it’s working.

Not this time. After doing the above, I got all kinds of weird URL’s that were starting with system-cgi/ in the path. Not useful. After reading about many successful Drupal installations on Dreamhost, though, I thought I’d try a fresh install: TADA! That solved the whole problem! It’s a hassle, because I had to go through all the configurations again, compare them with my local version, etc etc etc, but at least it works. I’m happy 🙂

So, now Online Music World is running Drupal, adding some features to the previously available discussion forum!
On Cunts and Cock(er)s

August 23, 2006

music

Jarvis Cocker, probably best known for his role as lead-singer of the British band Pulp, can also survive on his own. He’s proved that to me by a new single he released, Running The World.

I got the track from Bleep for a wonderfully nice price of 1.40 euro and it was worth every penny. A wonderful track about the state of this world, and the fact that those running the world are, as the British can so wonderfully call it, cunts.

I can highly recommend getting this wonderful track.
The Digg system

August 8, 2006

internet, technology

Everybody knows Digg. And that is why I don’t really check the site out anymore. Even though Digg still seems to be able to keep some kind of quality to it’s content, a lot of useless junk is submitted. When the mass discovered Digg, it went downhill and wasn’t as much fun anymore.

So I was glad to find the dutch incarnation of Digg a while ago: eKudos. A small but active group of people was submitting stuff to the site, writing nice comments with each link. But lately, it’s gone downhill. Not really because “the mass” has discovered it, but because some developers have discovered a way to (automatically?) post to eKudos from WordPress and the dutch low-quality weblogging tool punt.nl. And so lately a lot of crap is being submitted to the site, making it less fun to check out the latest submissions. This may become their downfall.

I hope that the developers behind eKudos will find a way to prevent this, and to maintain the high quality of the content that it previously had. I’d hate to see eKudos go downhill.
Aptana

August 5, 2006

aptana, frontend, ide, technology

Through Vinu I found out about a great tool for javascript, HTML and CSS work. Aptana is an Eclipse-based editor for javascript, HTML and CSS making use of Eclipse’s great set of features, specifically tweaked for usage with earlier mentioned languages. Very nice also is the fact that they also have a download of an Eclipse-plugin, so that when you already work with Eclipse, there is no need for you to install the full Aptana package which also contains Eclipse basically.

Very nice. I don’t really use Eclipse a lot, being a Zend Studio user for PHP work, but a good HTML/CSS editor is very nice, and maybe this will also trigger me into javascript a bit more 😉
Another good thing about this hosting provider

August 3, 2006

technology

Nothing negative about my previous host, as they do a good job without a question, but my opinion on my new hosting provider definitely is better already. Instead of playing a closed card about any downtime, which is common among a lot of hosting providers (again, not my previous hosting provider), DreamHost decided to give a full explanation of the recent server problems and downtime. Very good! I mean, they’re cheap, but usually they don’t have these serious problems. And now they encounter serious problems, which are partially to be blamed on themselves, and they openly admit it! Very good!

I think I said it before, but if you’re not hosted there, maybe you should consider switching. And if you let me know, I can even arrange some discount for you!
Ufdi is expanding… again!

August 2, 2006

technology, weblogging

The Ufdi Network has recently been expanding with various new members, a very good sign. Still, after the recent expansion, we were still having pure linux and mac in our ranks. Now, even though this is not a bad thing of course, it was time for some counterweight.

Gideon Marken is, how he calls it, a Web Technologist. I like this term a lot. What I like even more is that he single-handedly set up an amazing site called ArtistServer, he makes very good music as Sonic Wallpaper, and is an allround good guy. He has accepted my invitation into the network and so you can tap into his vast base of knowledge as well as that of the other network members by checking the Ufdi Network on a regular basis.

Welcome to the network Gideon!