Since electromagnetic radiation can pass through a vacuum, a vacuum is not empty. It only does not contain any atoms.
Vacuum is not empty
September 6th, 2010Cocoonen
August 29th, 2010Het weer zet aan tot knus binnenzitten. Draai er de Dubliners bij en het is meteen gezellig 🙂
Zomervakantie 2010
August 21st, 2010- De vrouw bij de bushalte die een ware tsunami over zich heen kreeg toen er een auto door de plas voor haar reed. Nee, dat waren wij niet.
- Het eerste eekhoorntje dat we na lang speuren tegenkwamen en dat direct verongelukte onder onze auto.
- 007 die vanaf de rand van het zwembad in het water springt: “Canadaaa!”
- Ted die al de hele vakantie tijdens het eten “dah” riep en naar de dennenboom achter me wees. Ik zei dan telkens “boom”. Op de laatste dag kwamen we erachter dat er telkens eekhoorntjes naar boven klommen.
- Ted die als je even niet oplette wegliep richting de geitjes.
- De eikel die tijdens de tussenstop in onze fietstocht uit een eik viel en via het voorhoofd van 007 tegen de kin van 006 stuiterde. 007 had het direct door: “eikel”. Veel meer hadden we daar niet over te zeggen, maar zo is wel duidelijk hoe sommige vruchten aan hun slechte naam komen.
Excessive e-mail is/was caused by a lack of synchronous communication alternatives
August 6th, 2010Did you ever have a workday that you spend almost entirely reading e-mail? Chances are you had. I have often tought that the problem was that people mailed too much. Now I have a more nuanced view on that.
I am not so sure that the communication should not take place in a lot of these cases. There was always a reason behind every mail. And the person sending the mail was using the communication means that he thought most fit. But the number of means to choose from was too small. I think the excessive amounts of e-mail were caused by a lack of synchronous alternatives.
This shows now that I am using alternative messaging systems in my own work. I use sort of an internal Twitter (Yammer) and I use our company chat. This is lowering the amount of messages in our inboxes. For quick questions I use chat. For discussions I use Yammer. These were things that used to go over e-mail!
The advantage of synchronous means like chat and discussion fora is that you can more easily choose to ‘just not respond’. As opposed to e-mail there will not be a message waiting for you in your inbox after a week. A message that is not relevant to anyone by then anymore. So while these alternatives are deminishing the amount of e-mails, they do not take a lot of time themselves either! They are taking us back to a more synchronous way of communicating as opposed to the asynchronous e-mail mechanism.
Of course there are also the old school synchronouse means of walking over to somebody and calling somebody over the phone, which is often fun. These old school means should still be promoted, I reckon. They have a lot of added value on the relational side. That is, I believe they help to build relations better than just typed information. (Excuse me for not typing my phone number and address here. I like some privacy too!)
ArchiMate
July 31st, 2010I have been modeling application landscapes in the ArchiMate language and think it is a vehicle you should consider to use when you are an IT architect. It offers a good toolbox of enterprise architecture concepts and a set of rules on how to stick them together. You can try it out with the open source Archi tool, which offers all basic functionality to work with ArchiMate. There are other more extensive and expensive ArchiMate tools, to be found on the ArchiMate site. Archi works fine for me up to this point however.
I use Archi mainly for “IT geography”, laying down my “IT archaeology” findings in an applications map. Extending the applications map with a processes map and thus linking the process and application levels of your enterprise architecture is also possible. Further down the architecture stack you can also model and relate to the technological situation.
The maps are very useful in communication. A picture really says more than a thousand words and I can get to the point quickly in discussions about which architecture pattern or mechanism to use to solve a particular architecture issue. ArchiMate also helps to get the ambiguities out of the discussion. Because the maps can be understood by both business and IT (if not then maybe they should not join the discussion at all…) and because it is a formal language, it leaves little room for interpreting the situation differently. I can be reasonably certain that everybody understands each other and that the risk of surprises in working out the described solution is small.
I still have to investigate how products made in the ArchiMate language relate to process and architecture modeling in Aris. IDS Scheer does offer a tool, ArchiMate Modeler, that combines Aris and ArchiMate, but unfortunately it is not open source.
En als we op de Paardenmarkt zijn zingen we…
July 24th, 2010Ik dacht dat ik de enige was met dit lied. Door mijn zus al bestempeld als het Paardenmarktlijflied 🙂
Printing photo’s in Ubuntu with an HP printer
July 18th, 2010To print photo’s in Ubuntu you need a how-to. Here it is.
My set up:
-Operating system: Ubuntu 10.04
-Printer: HP Photosmart Premium C309g, connected to the local network via cable
-HP printer drivers for linux, hplip-3.10.5. Get yours here. Though normally Ubuntu will have these already installed. You can check this with your package manager. Ubuntu has Synaptic to manage its packages.
Forget all the print options in your photo management programs like F-Spot and DigiKam. They don’t work very well. DigiKam does have a Kipi plugin that is a print wizard, but I have had limited success with that.
Easiest thing to do is to open the image you want to print with Gimp. Also installed per default in Ubuntu. Otherwise install it with your package manager of choice.
The biggest advantage of Gimp is that it has a preview function that actually shows the image as it will appear on paper.
- When working in DigiKam, right click the image to open the context menu and choose “Open With”-“GIMP Image Editor”. The image is opened in GIMP.
- From the GIMP image window choose “File”-“Page Settings”. In the popup window choose your printer, paper size and orientation. Paper size is important because photo paper is usually smaller than normal paper. Measure the dimensions of your photo paper with a ruler if you don’t know the size.
- From the GIMP image window choose “File”-“Print”. Go to the tab “Page Settings” and verify the page size. Also set your paper settings to use the paper from the photo tray of your printer.
- On the tab “Image Settings” you can play around with the image size. For example, reduce it so you get white borders around the image.
- Set image quality to “Best” in the tab “Image Quality”.
- On the tab “Color” set “Output Mode” to “Color”
- Click the “Preview” button. If everything looks ok, hit the print icon on top!
Menu item names are translated from Dutch, so they may differ from what it actually reads on your screen. Happy printing!
Moving to Ubuntu II
July 10th, 2010I’ve got it! Everything works just fine. Moved over all my data. Set up my tools for my web sites. Installed mail and imported old Windows mail and address book. There’s really not much more to say 🙂 Oh, yeah. It reboots in 1 minute!
Moving to Ubuntu
June 26th, 2010My desktop finally has broken down after 7 years of service. Yes, now I ordered my Ubuntu laptop! Our IT is going to be laptop only and as little Microsoft as possible. I have been annoyed by crashing programs, an operating system that is becoming slower as it gets older and software that thinks it can think for me but can’t. This has taken too long now and I am willing to take a plunge into cold water.
So it was going to be Mac or Linux. My wife was the first one to buy a new laptop and I told her she could choose anything she liked, but that Microsoft would not be supported by me. Surprisingly she chose Ubuntu and not Mac (apparently she didn’t go for sexy, makes me wonder how she ended up with me ;-)) Ubunty is off course also my favourite, because I need my laptop to operate at least 5 years and I do not count on a Mac to operate more than 2 years.
From what I have seen so far Linux has come a long way since I first started experimenting with it somewhere in 1997. Ubuntu 10.4 even looks good (!) and we can do anything we do on the Windows XP Personal desktop. I thought this in fact was not quite true, because there are some programs that are only available for Windows. One example is Aldfaer, a program to maintain your genealogical tree. But then there is Wine! Windows emulator. Aldfaer runs fine now on Ubuntu, though it still thinks it is running on Windows itself. I bet the sofware to program my Logitech Harmony remote control, which is also only available for Windows, will work just fine as well.
Considering al this the water proves to be nice and warm after all. Maybe there even is a water slide…
Complete Ubuntu laptops and desktops can be odered via www.fivemountains.nl
Backspace in Firefox Ubuntu
June 26th, 2010Going to the previous page in Firefox under Ubuntu does not work standard. In your Firefox address bar type “about:config” and filter on “backspace”. Set the value to “0” and backspace takes you to the previous page as you are used to.
