I just realized I never posted about the “life changing event” that occurred April 1st on this blog. To quickly recap: as of April 2014 I became CEO, Sole Proprietor and Sanitary Manager of Caelum, a software product company that produces Zed. The business model that I cooked up is experimental: everything is open source, but I ask users to pay without getting anything back other than the fact that they contribute to the cause of Zed development.

About a week and a half ago, February 16th, Justyna and I got engaged! It happened in a hotel, just after sunset at the seaside, it was very romantic :) (Old picture, and I look a bit weird — but Justyna likes this picture) Because Justyna is Polish we will probably do two weddings. The civil wedding end of November (hopefully) in Schiedam (the Netherlands, where we live) and the church wedding maybe in June next year in Koszalin, Poland (where Justyna is from).

Last Saturday we went to Saturn, a huge electronics store in Rotterdam, to buy Justyna an iPod. Incidentally, this is the kind of shopping that I like, much better than acting as a clothes hanger for three hours in a row. She got an iPod nano 4GB with a “cute” pink leather “jacket”. Great. When we got home we set it up. It’s always fun to see how people who are not that much involved in IT that much see things and what they notice.

Presentation Zen has been one of my favorite blogs for a while now. And the nice thing about blogs is that if you have enough of an audience, it’s a great opportunity for a publisher to get the author to write a book. That’s what happened to Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen and his book is out now. I pre-ordered the book and according to Amazon it has shipped now. Looking forward to it!

Powered by the sun.

I’m a long-time user of JungleDisk,the software that allows you to access your Amazon S3 space as if it were a hard drive. During their beta period were free, but now they charge a small amount. They keep improving their software and truly are committed to offer a multi-platform solution. They now offer a version in which you can mount your JungleDisk using fuse right into your file system under Linux.

Anybody seeing this as often as I do when going to Gmail? For the past week now I see this every so often. Kind of annoying, especially when there’s an email you want to read. The “basic HTML view” usually works though, but it’s not the same.

Only minutes after my post about some advantages I found about Linux over Mac I already started receiving comments that OS X does, in fact, have all the features I mentioned. In Finder, if you start typing a name, it will go to that file or folder (this, apparently, even works in iTunes — I was so sure I tried that and was always frustrated that it didn’t work, but it does), and you can, indeed, set the exact path where you want to save any file.

An hour ago I had to think of a poem I once read for my English studies. The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost. I don’t know why I had to think of that. Maybe it was because it was briefly cited in Dead Poets Society, which I saw again a few nights ago. But still, I don’t know what made me think of this poem. Then I started to read in my Google Reader and I found this.

I’m not a gamer, not even close to it. But today and yesterday I have been playing Armagetron Advanced a lot. It’s a simple 3D open source game that runs on Windows, Linux and the Mac (yay!) based on the Tron movie. What I like about it that it’s live action and in essence very simple. You can play quite well by simply using two keys (one to go to the left and one to the right).

I’m here at the GTTSE ’07, the Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering summer school which I participate in to get started in the area of transformational techniques which an important part of model-driven engineering, which is what I will be doing my Ph.D. on. There’s quite a few interesting people walking around here. Yesterday I had a chat with Scott Blum of Google, who works on GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and gave an implementation on their Java to Javascript compiler and all the optimizations they are doing there.

I haven’t been blogging much the past weeks because I’ve been busy with different things. First I was in Oxford for a week. Then I spent a lot of time preparing my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, which they celebrated last Saturday (yay!). We’ve organized to give them a week trip to New York, which they were very happy with. Tomorrow I’m leaving to Texel, which is one of Holland’s islands, for a short family holiday.

It was not my intention, but you know how these things go. I’m considering switching my mobile provider and have been doing some research. Not only did I spend hours and hours comparing plans — today I also looked into flashing my phone. Those who know me a bit know I’m not the hacker type. I’m not somebody who spends days and weeks getting some exotic computer set-up to work. For me things just have to work and keep working.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up at 4.20 a.m. to go to Oxford (UK). I’ll be going there for a one-week study trip. Really looking forward to it (except for the getting up). Blog to you in a week!

After studying English for half a year (with great results by the way) I know and realize that I really enjoy it, but that it is not my future. The question then becomes whether to finish (by studying another 3–4 years) or quit and do something more “compliant” with your future. After my girlfriend applied for a Ph.D. position in the west of Holland (I currently live in the north), I started to think about this more.

We’re already over a week into the new year. It’s going to be an interesting one, at least for me and I hope for you too. First all this will be the year that I’ll start living together with my girlfriend. She is coming to Holland when she finishes her studies in Poznan, Poland. I am currently looking for a place for us to live. It’s quite exciting and I’m looking forward to it.

Me da man. Me and about 140 others that morning, but still. Me da man. Last Friday I got my Master of Science title from Trinity College Dublin. Here it is: And this is what I looked like accepting it: Awesome, isn’t it? A couple more pictures can be found here (I’ll add more later, hopefully). I and my parents flew to Dublin Thursday evening, the ceremony took place Friday morning at 11 and we flew back Saturday morning.

For my current part-time job I’m at the moment investigating plagiarism scanners. Students submit their papers and reports and before being handed to the teacher this software checks what the student turned in with previously submitted papers but also other sources such as the internet. To get started I thought I’d just copy a piece of text from my own website and put in a Word document and submit it, see if it actually worked.

For about the last ten years my mother’s mother (my grandmother) has had Alzheimer’s. Over the years it has become worse and worse. The past month she also ate less and less. Two and a half weeks ago she collapsed in the bathroom and soon thereafter she was brought to a care home. My grandfather took care of her before that but it was becoming too hard for him. He’s not very young and vital anymore either and my grandmother hardly could do anything herself anymore.

Last Saturday evening I came back to Holland. Sunday was spent visiting family and Monday morning at 11 I had the first class of my new studies: English. I have four classes at the moment: Literature, Linguistics, History and Context of English and Language Proficiency. To be quite honest I like all four of them at the moment, although I only had one lecture and one workgroup session of each of them.

At 12 this morning/afternoon I had my dissertation presentation and they were happy with it. Then I turned in my thesis and laptop and I’m now officially done. Hooray! I put online a PDF version of the (KeyNote) presentation for those interested, although it probably will not make sense to many of you, due to the lack of text and explanation. It’s my first Zenified presentation. Flying home on Saturday.

They’re done! Five times almost a hundred pages of pure deliciousness. cough Look at these beauties. All that’s left is the demonstration and submitting it, then I’m off!

As I quickly flipped through this article I wondered, why haven’t eBook readers caught on yet? I would love to have a simple, thin, light device with a big screen (preferably around A4) that could just display PDFs. That’s all it has to do, display PDF and allow you to flip through the pages. The device described in the article costs $650 and that’s way too much. Isn’t it possible to produce a cheap (say around $100-$150) device that you could plug into the USB port of your computer to upload a number of PDFs to.

Apple is recalling 1.8 million batteries given out between 2003 and 2006 in iBook G4s and Powerbook G4s that may overheat and catch fire. It turns out I’m the lucky owner of such a battery (my battery’s serial number is in the ranges given). So I ordered a new one. Great. If you own an iBook or Powerbook you better have a look at this. It seems to be that battery recall time of year, not so long ago I think Dell also recalled batteries didn’t they?

I was trying to find some old sites of mine on Archive.org today. It’s quite fun to do that actually (for me anyway). Sadly I wasn’t able to retrieve my oldest website I ever created (which used to live at http://huizen.dds.nl/~zhemel). I remember I used to run a website listing free stuff on the internet (free websites, e-mail etc.) but sadly I forgot the name. The oldest project (dating from 1999) I could find is ZEFNet Mail Center.

I don’t talk about my personal life on this website often. Most of that gets written at Zef.Nu, my Dutch website. However now I will also give those who are unfurtunate enough not to speak Dutch, and those who are not willing to learn it just to read about my life, a bit of insight in what has been happening and will be happening with me personally. Ok that was a very complex sentence, but I don’t feel like putting much effort into making it more understandable.

When somebody gave me the idea for this I was like, yeah, I’m not going to do a geeky thing like that. But I figured, by this time next year I’ll be studying English and probably quote something Shakespear said, so what the heck. import pyrdf from pyrdf import RdfStore, RdfResource, RdfType from rdflib.Namespace import Namespace NS_P = Namespace(‘http://www.zefhemel.com/ont/person#') store = RdfStore(NS_P) store.prefix_mapping(‘p’, NS_P) store.prefix_mapping(‘j’, NS_J) pyrdf.setDefaultStore(store) store.load(‘peopledata.rdf’) Person = RdfType(NS_P[‘Person’])

Let me tell you a tale of somebody that became very dear to me, even though she started out as just one of my many electronical devices. Let me tell you the story of Zuzia; the other kind of Apple story. It was about two years ago when I decided to take the plunge, I sold my old Windows laptop to my brother and ordered my first Mac ever, an Apple iBook G4.

My exams are over, they went pretty well I think, generally. Quickly after I finished I was in Holland for two weeks to rest. I came back with a cold, but by now I’m back on my feet and ready for the second half of my studies here at Trinity College in Dublin: my dissertation. I have about 5–6 months to write it. The working title is “Middleware for advertising, discovery and invocation of semantic services on ad-hoc networks”, a title that made quite some jaws drop.

A bit more silence the past two weeks. This was mostly because my exams are coming up. I only have exams once and I have six of them. If I fail one I will not get my master degree, so the pressure is high. However, to be fair I should note that never in the history of this course anybody failed one, so it should be ok. Tomorrow (Monday) I’ll have NDS 101, which is about emerging web technologies (dynamic content, peer to peer and such), web retrieval (ranking techniques like Google’s) and artificial intelligence.

I was too occupied with other things to think of my 3-year blogging anniversary which was three weeks ago. February 10th of 2003 was when this ZefHemel.com weblogs first saw the light and lots has happened since then. A summary. First of all I posted over 1,100 stories in these three years and my readers (you) wrote almost 2,500 comments to those. The kind of posts changed over time. It started out as just links with a small comment, then changed into bigger articles with mostly my own content.

It’s roughly one and a half year ago when I wrote The Change. The essence was this: It has been a while, and I thought I’d give you an update on my feelings regarding this subject. In short it comes down to this: not much has changed. Those who thought it would just be a stage and I would pick up programming soon enough: sorry, you were wrong. I was reminded of my disliking of programming again two days ago when a friend asked if I had time for a “fun little programming problem”.

The beginning When I was young my dad taught programming (in Pascal) to mathematicians and physicians on our local university. I always want to learn programming too, but my dad told me that he wouldn’t teach me until I was 10. Anyway, it was probably 1993, I was 9 and my dad said “ok right, you want to learn to program so bad? Ok, let’s do it”. Yay! Remember that I’m Dutch and hardly knew any English at that age.

I’d like to wish everybody a very merry christmas and happy holidays! :)