Technology

Since subversion is going to be actively used in our team at work, I gave a presentation/tutorial on subversion to help everyone in the team to get started with it.

A powerful and flexible tool that comes with every Windows XP setup CD is the Recovery Console.

It proved really helpful in repairing a damaged partition boot sector in one Windows installation.

Recovery Console turns out to be useful, even when safe boot mode and other startup options do not work. This is certainly the case when the partition boot sector, containing Windows boot code, has been overwritten.

Restart the computer from Microsoft Windows setup CD. At the first prompt, start the Recovery Console by pressing R.

Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services seem to be the next best thing since sliced bread.

I won't get into a comparison on the merits and the shortcomings of SOA/Web Services vs. CORBA technologies, but I will vent my frustation at how painful and unwieldy it is to manually edit WSDL contracts here.

I always thought that VMWare Server is a great piece of software. It is a fast and convenient way to run my soothsayer builds on a Windows platform without actually having to get dirty running it on my (real) hardware.

However, it has a couple of shortcomings that I can no longer live with:

• it is not free as in freedom (although it is free as in beer)
• it does not work with the latest kernels (its kernel modules do not build with the latest kernel sources)

Not to fear, my friend, for QEMU and VirtualBox are excellent alternatives to VMWare!

It's not very often that I get around to cleaning and dusting my home desk... in actual fact, it happens all too rarely.

That's why I decided to take a picture of my desk in spotless condition. Who knows, maybe this will motivate me the next time I notice that a heap of dust has piled up all around the keyboard.

What do you get when you cross a best of breed intelligent predictive text entry platform with a fast dynamic object-oriented programming language?

Why, of course, you get a python binding for soothsayer!

It is official. The AIX operating system has taken that special place in my heart that was once reserved to Windows.

That's right! AIX is now the operating system that I have most hatred and contempt for.

What kind of operating system is not capable of performing the most basic function of killing a process?

You would hope that the answer to that question would be 'None'

Take a look at the following `topas' output:

Topas Monitor for host:    henk3                EVENTS/QUEUES    FILE/TTY
Mon Jul 16 15:28:48 2007   Interval:  2         Cswitch    5099  Readch      988

What is it with rocket science that fascinates people? Surely, most people nowadays appreciate that there are many other disciplines that are just as hard as rocket science. But the expression 'It's not rocket science, after all' has stuck around.

One field of scientific endevour that is surely as hard as rocket science (if not much much harder) is robotics. Robotics combines tough hardware and software problems. Typical robotics problem are hard when taken individually. In fact, they are usually NP-hard, when talking about software problems.

That Google released a massive corpus of data based on the vast amount of web pages that their GoogleBot crawler indexes is old news.

Don't you just love the subtle reference to the "All your base are belong to us" phenomenon. Incidentally, all my X display manager sessions great me with the catchy "All your base are belong to us" motto. So do my screensavers. I know...