Willy Dobbe - bert

Legostorms solves Rubiks cube

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:39:17 +0100

Tilted Twister solves Rubik’s cube fully automatically.
Just place the scrambled cube on Tilted Twister’s turntable. An ultrasonic sensor detects its presence and starts to read the colors of the cube faces using a light sensor. The robot turns and tilts the cube in order to read all the faces. It then calculates a solution and executes the moves by turning, tilting and twisting the cube.

Cool! I like nerd gadgets like these. If you can make it fast, it might be in time for my Birthday... today :-)

GTD (getting Things Done) with Freemind

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:47:35 +0100

I have tried multiple tools to "Get Things Done" (wiki). n teh end I just use mindmapping, since it is form me the most logical way to order items.

I started out with >MindNode, lots of eyecandey yet low on useful features. Then I went back to the Open Source FreeMind that I have been using for years. And it worked fine for me! But I still learn from pronovix!

Bert Boerland is een top 20 twitter gebruiker in Nederland

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:59:43 +0100

Kiss my ego, part II (na deel I) Ik ben een van de top twitter gebruikers in de Nederlandse twittershere. Zie de top twitteraars van Nederland 2008.

En as we toch bezig zijn, kijk eens op de stats van mij of vul uw eigen naam in om te zien hoe en waar u twittert.

Keep playing!

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 09:57:39 +0100

People dont stop playing because the get old. They get old because they stop playing!

Playing soccer with my kids, draw on blackboard en even blogging. I need to stay young!

fffound

Ergenissen 2.0

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:50:50 +0100

(tweet)

ergenissen 2.0, storen aan mensen die zich er aan storen alles twee punt nul te noemen

Kunnen we nu ophouden om alles tweepuntnul te noemen? Er is werkelijk geen sessie of congres waar niet de twee punt nul over oude zakken wordt heen gegoten, blijft oude wijn mannen (m/v). Ambtenaar twee punt nul? Pleeeeeease. Stop 2.0! Nu 2.0! Tweepuntnul 2.0!

krig je natuurlijk wel tweets als deze terug

Killer Applications must die!

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:02:53 +0100

After my plaxo must die tweet,

"killer apps must die"

Twitter Identity Management, accident waiting to happen

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:09:26 +0100

I love twitter, sometimes I can not post as much as I would like to. But I am a long term heavy user and you can follow me if you can read Dutch and think I write sensible stuff every now and then. And I wil return by following you.

One of the great ways that twitter is used is in ways the twitter staff could not predict but only could facilitate by openening up the API's. Other sites can for example twet on behalf of you. For example, that you voted on Obama, put an RSS feed of your flickr account via a webservice to twitter to share it with your followers, etc.

The problem is that all these service need your userid and password to post on behalf of you of your twitter account. And here is the source of a big problem. Maybe the website you are using does not (need) to save your userid/password combination. Maybe they do. Maybe the service is safe and others will never be able to get your password via a hack. Maybe the owner of the site will never go bad and post on behalf of others. Maybe the service will not change its' Terms and Condidtions overnight so they can put adds in your tweets. And maybe you are using strong passwords for all your accounts that are not the same, so the webservice can not your gmail? Maybe.

But I am sure we will see an ugly accident in the near future, people are almost used to the fact that you should type in your userid and password in a popup box and as long as the password is not echo-ed on the screen but hidden with "****" it is safe to use that service.

Or so they think...

Ramenlapper komt enkel op begane grond want invalide

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:13:23 +0200

Ik heb het niet op mensen die parkeren op invalide parkeer plekken. tenzij ze invalide zijn natuurlijk.

Ik was recent in het martiniziekenhuis en gelukkig stonden er talloze invalide parkeerplaatsen en helaas helemaal vol met volk waarvan aan te nemen is dat ze niet invalide zijn. Zoals deze ramenlapper, niet bestellen dus die eikel van deraamlapper.nl!

(flickr)

Lots of twitter tools

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:40:15 +0200

Over at twitter.start4all.com you can find lots and lots of relevant twitter links, API's uses, media coverage and other relevant links like this mashup of my timeline.

And you can find a list with "famous twitter people" in different countries. And guess what?

Yes, all famous people... and me

Drupal Association presentation from DrupalCon Szeged 2008

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:16:02 +0200

If you missed the Drupal Association session during last DrupalCon Szeged, see the video of Dries, Larry and me at archive.org. The presentation handles some of the basics of the Association and Larry answers many questions regarding the GPL and Drupal. Be sure to check this out and provide feedback on what you would like to know more about the association (for example in this posting).

Maastricht, DrupalTown 2009?

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:24:52 +0200

What made Szeged a very good place for the EU DrupalCon? Not the fact that it was a 2 hour train ride from the airport. Not the fact that it was in Hungary, DrupalCountry, region 4, language 2 on Google Trends. But the fact that is was a nice warm small town, you could walk almost everywhere, the fact that 1/3 of the population is younger then 25, the fact there was a nice festival happening, the fact that every 100 meters you could spot a Drupal nerd: the fact that a town could become a Drupal Town!

If you live in the Netherlands and want to make sure that the next DrupalCon EU edition will be as good, make sure you join our effort to let Maastricht become DrupalTown 2009! See our Drupal Nederland group posting "DrupalCon Maastricht 2009"

(more flickr shots)

Maastricht is located in the south of the Netherlands, close to Germany and Belgium. It is a nice old town, see the wiki entry, not too big and with a young population.

If you are from Germany, Belgium or The Netherlands, please help us out to nominate Maastricht to the Drupal Association by raising your hand in this node!

DrupalCon, planes, URL's, 10% and everything

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:50:48 +0200

This story start with a one dollar bill I found the last day during the DrupalCon Szeged 2008.

A dollar, I thought! This must be my lucky day! So I took it with me and decided it was my lucky Dollar. Little did I know.

We took the train from Szeged to Budapest at 10 a clock, 2 hours later we were at the airport and went for a small snack. We had plenty of time, yet - I am not going in details here - it was very frustrating to see the plane leave, to see the gate getting closed, with you at the wrong side of it. It became a very expensive snack, a bit more then a dollar.

We tried to get the next plane towards Amsterdam, it was fully booked. The next one was overbooked. So we got a flight to Vienna and then to Amsterdam. After checking in, going through customs again, waiting 2 hours, we found out it was cancelled. We got rerouted towards Muchen and then to Amsterdam. After 3 hours waiting the plane actually left the ground, one hour late. We missed our connection to Amsterdam and slept at an 4 star hotel nearby. Not that we enjoyed the hotel because we had to get up at 5 AM to catch the next flight. Only to find out ...

...it was cancelled. 28 hours after we left Szeged, we were at home. Most west coast Americans attending the DrupalCon were probably already in bed. It thought me however a couple of lessons. One of them I wanted to share. There was no single airline that was responsible for the chain of events or knew about it. Sabre

(the independent computer network that all airlines use) is great, they can realtime reroute any passenger over any airline towards any destination. Yet, it is not in use a trouble-ticketing system, airline B knew nothing about my history and when failing to deliver they happily transferred me to airline C. Nobody saw my complete chain of events, from A-Z.

This is a lesson I need to pickup; whenever you fail to deliver a service to a customer, try to place it in the chain of events the customer already experienced. It will not make the delivery better, but you will understand the feelings of the customer better.

Now regarding DrupalCon. Here is a small update. I really REALLY liked the conference. I talked to lots of people, attended more sessions then I planned, got active in a couple of BoF's and co-presented one with Larry and Dries. So here is a small update on stuff I found.

It is great to see that the -on the spot during DrupalCon Barcelona- made up number of 7% female is broken!

With 10% of XX chromosomes during the Con we do represent the number of females on Drupal.org versus the number of males. Sure, it should have been 50%, but as the great Rop Gonggrijp once said, if you are female and want to become a computer geek, you better start electrocuting your Barby when you were 5 years old. And not many girls do so hence the ICT sector could use some more females. With webchick being the co-maintainer of D7, the Open Source community also shows there is no glass ceiling for females.

But hold on, we might have hit 10% XX chromosomes, but can you see what is wrong with this picture?

10% female, but 99,9% white! I am not the pro-positive discriminating kind of person. But I think I saw 1 (one!) black person during the complete conference. If you want to break barriers, we really should look at this as well. 90% of all people active in Drupal are white males, 10% white females. So, lets make sure that the next DrupalCon will be more representative for the population using Drupal! After all, Open Source is there as the big equaliser; there are no secrets (only information that you dont have).

Some other thoughts on the DrupalCon. I really like the talk of Mark Boulton who will be doing the redesign of "d.org", see the video on the Association site. A right balance of humour and content can be very powerful. I loved the story Mark and Leisa Reichelt
pulled together. Leisa is however (see the video) very wrong on one part. And it is a classic mistake to make showing there is still a big gap between designers of code and UI.

Leisa claims that she was amazed to see that most experienced Drupal users typed the URL on drupal.org instead of navigating through the site with a mouse. Now, I am not claiming that the UI of Drupal.org is good, not at all. Mark and Leisa have lots of work to do to make it better navigable and we -as the community- a lot to keep it clean by having some kind of styleguide on how to address the user and a better policy on how and when to promote a story to the frontpage (if there is going to be a frontpage in the classical sense after the redesign).

However, graphical designers only look on how to navigate through a site within the site, this since they are CMS agnostic. What they do not count as usability is the browser chrome, you do not control it as a website and you do not need to emulate the browsers functions. However there is one small part of the browsers chrome that is related to usability; the address bar! It is used by the person on the site just as much as the mouse is, it infleunces the page and hence is part of usability. The fact that graphical designers -and this is not to bash Leisa in any way- do not think of it as usability only shows there is still a huge gap to be bridged between code and design monkeys. The address bar is part of usability and the fact that the functionality of a site is reflected in useful predictable URL's like /node/add shows this. We all have to learn here to help the user navigate what is best for him or her and we should be aware that most some people type faster then they can click: bofhmode]" The world's only useful point and click interface is a .44 Magnum" [/bofhmode].

BTW: someone wants a dollar? Free shiping!

DrupalConSzeged2008 piped

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:04:01 +0200

Today I had some time to arrange a ticket and an hotel for the DrupalCon Szegged 2008, pftttt! Just in time. Then I had some time to nerd around so I created a Y! pipe for All Things DrupalConSzeged2008 related (assuming that that would be the tag?). Feel free to run, edit, copy, change my pipe over at pipes, Yahoo! ID !required! You can see geolocated Flickr images, tweets, delicious links and much more in many formats (for example an RSS feed. feedback in the comments please, I'll update the pipe to reflect your thoughts.

And yes, that is the reason I do not program, even the pipe! looks bad and is not that smart build

Do not ask someone what CMS they are running

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:06:08 +0200

Do not ask someone what CMS they running. If they are using Drupal they will tell you, if not why insult them?

— bert boerland

OpenSource and clouds

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:47:26 +0200

There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.

If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.

PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.