A visit to Nauders
End of january / beginning of februari I was able to enjoy 4 days in Nauders, Austria.
btw, I was in Edinburgh
Little more then a month ago I took a short holiday and traveled together with Bas to Edinburgh for a weekend. To keep it short: we had a great time and the Scottish are great. Cheers!
View on Edinburgh from the top of Arthurs seat
Weekend in Brussel; Belga Queen
I´m in Brussel now, writing this entry on my eee-pc in our hotel room. Went sightseeing today, lots of walking. Brussel is a really nice town, lots of stuff happening on the streets (without being very crowded), which makes it a very lively town. Nice atmosphere. Must say I am a bit disappointed by the famous beer offering. Basically you can get most of it in the Netherlands as well. But I don't know the special places.
Another reason to blog, the restaurant we visited today: Belga Queen. Really nice, definitely a recommendation. Cool building, splendid food.
Had some tasting menu. Four course menu, each course with a matching beer (at least that was the idea). Very good meat, some baby deer (hertenkalf) rib, very good stuff.
Anyway tomorrow a bit more sight seeing and then back to the Netherlands. Powered up for work on monday.
Developments at work
I was quite busy lately, in December we (OSSO) moved office to the "Media centrale" in Groningen and at the same time I had enough developments in my personal life to keep me well occupied.
Besides the move of office we also expanded our services quite a bit. Software development became a bigger part of our daily work and now we do not only offer it as support to applications running on our infrastructure but also use our infrastructure to supplement our software development efforts. This means we are doing bigger and cooler projects.
I hear you think, software development,... is it open source? Yes it is, we supply our software efforts under an open source license to our customers. However since its very customer specific at the moment we do not release anything online. But our customers definitely have the open source software license advantages.
If we build a more generic code base and have enough time/resources to actively support it as an open source project its very likely we will release some code/projects online.
All this software development doesn't mean we stopped doing other stuff we like. We are continuously improving our own network infrastructure, doing VOIP related work, setting up high availibility setups, etc. Since we are a team of 5 now, we can handle all these different things together quite well if I may say so.
Moved house
Was a while since I posted on my blog. Last saturday I moved from a room (12 m^2) to an appartment (58 m^2). Which is a real upgrade for me. Which easily compensates for the loss of my 100mbit internet connection (4mbit down/1mbit up now). Only two blocks to the south so the moving wasn't too bothersome either (although living on fourth floor without elevator was).
I've also been quite busy at the work front. You would expect easy times because of the holiday season but that doesn't seem to happen this year. Although I have little time, I do have a post about mysql replication in the pipeline (master-master replication).
Final mark
This morning we gave the presentation of our paper. Quite succesful and the audience was also positive. The defence after the presentation went good as well, ofcourse they had some remarks but I guess they have some obligation to comment you on something. The final mark is a 7 as well, with which we are both satisfied. Kim Chee: Thanks for your hard work and congratulations with getting your bachelor degree very soon! I got to finish up some old subjects first before I'll be in that position.
Edit: Kim Chee blogged more details about the framework with a diagram.
Finished my paper
Last week we finished our paper on the management framework and monday we got our mark: 7! Only thing left now is our presentation which can influence that mark with one point. We started on the project 5 months ago, the result is not as much as we hoped for and there is still a lot to improve in the management framework before it will be useful in production. Still I'm quite happy with the result and we learned a lot from it. Happy the project is finished as well for I will soon be able to focus fully on my normal work.
Random update
Decided:
- Install a wordpress plugin make the comment spam less annoying (before I go on holiday).
Bought (21 euro):
- The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (the tv serie).
- Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle
- Dogma
- The Big Lebowski
Work & School:
- Busy
- Internship almost finished
Opinion:
- I think that the dapper-commercial repository is quite cool. Ofcourse I prefer opensource happiness, but its a good thing that non-free stuff Just Works on Ubuntu as well.


