NYC Ramblings

Just a quick update on the whole NYC move business...

• Got a mail today stating that the L1B (or whatever it is) visa request got approved;
• Had to call the embassy to set up an appointment. Can you believe I had to pay 15 euros for that "privilege'?
• At best, I'll have the visa by the 23rd of January.

So it's really going to happen. Bye bye champions league football, I'll have to watch the replays ;-)

Man. U 3 - Benfica 1

Man, that hurts.

If we were down 3-0 and 2 minutes before the end we scored a goal, it would feel different. But that's not what we've done, no. We were 1-0 up at 27 minutes of play, and it was starting to look like they could spend 2 weeks trying and would never get a goal.

Well, they did. 3 times they did. And well diserved it was as well.

Today most Benfica fans are tearfull because we couldn't beat Man U at the theater of dreams, but I'm not, because I know it wasnt't today we lost.
We didn't qualify by drawing 0-0 at Copenhagen, loosing 3-0 in Scotland and loosing 1-0 in Lisbon against Man U. In the end, we were the only team not to lose in Copenhagen, but that's something nobody could guess at the beginning.

Anyway, we go through to the Uefa cup, we can still beat Spurs at same point in time (yes Will, we can beat YOU) and it's not shameful to lose to Man U (this season anyway).

N

Breaking the silence

Well, I think I can post again by now. I've been in some sort of pre-traumatic shock state for the past month, and it finally seems I'm starting to emerge from it.

I guess that in about a month's time I'll be fully into post-traumatic shock.

Anyway, the move to New York is finally going to happen, and this is what's been filling up my mind. Realising that it is going to happen, that I will indeed move away from my family for an unknown period of time (best estimates place that period's duration in just 7 months) and understanding that at times you _really_ must be careful with what you wish.

The current state of affairs is that I'm waiting for my Visa application to be accepted by the US authorities. Tridion applied for the accelerated application, which basically means we can officially bribe the US Government into accepting my application in 3 weeks time instead of the 6 months it might take using the "normal" route. Hurray for capitalism! Amazing what 1,000$ can do.

If everything works out as planned, I'll be flying into NY on the first week of 2007, and will be staying in a colleague's ex-appartment for the first month. Timing was perfect, as this colleague is scheduled to come back to Holland in 2 weeks and will not go back to NY (if at all) before the end of January.

We're hosting a few drinks in The Hague this saturday, so contact me if you want to be there.

Land of the free indeed...

Al-Jazeera starts today its English broadcast and is believed to reach 80 million homes in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia.

What about the United States, that paramount of freedom of speech?

It was apparently unable to secure any deal with cable distributors, and it will only be available via the Internet (which might actually prove to be a better medium). BBC World Service was today discussing how "Commercial Interests" were behind this move.

Land of the free indeed...

More here and here.

Economics 101?

I admit I know nothing about economics, and I never tried to. I can't even apply basic economics to my bank account, let alone try to understand why large companies miss their targets.

But it always comes to me as a surprise when big airlines miss their targets by some small amounts, such as BA's 200 Million USD "miss". As I said, I'm not an economist, and I never tried to. I only can't understand.

A few years ago, let's lay 10 years ago, very often I'd fly anywhere on a half-empty plane. I could choose my seat, lie down and use 3 seats for my legs, have a decent half-meal, enjoy a good glass of wine, and all this was included in my ticket fare, which would be about 2 thirds of what I am paying today.

Now it's impossible to find a plane which isn't in overbooking already, you must pay for wine in most flights, all you get to eat (IF you get free food) is some lousy cheese sandwich, and, to top it all, companies loose more money than before.

What's wrong with this picture? I'd say that it doesn't take an economist to see that something about the whole business model is wrong, but I'll leave that to the experts...

Code search frenzy

So, we all had our code search frenzy searches by now, and finally I decided to search for "Tridion" in it.

Guess what? There IS one result coming back and I have to admit that the url it refers to does show the true nature of Tridion-powered sites... Just look at it:

 http://www2.oenb.at/tridion/institutsleitzahlen/abfrage_menu.php?contenturl=/de/stat_melders/standards_und_codes/Institutsleitzahlen/standards_und_codes.jsp

A php page redirecting to a JSP page? Which other {W|E}CM player would give you this level of flexibility?

So this is it! Summer's officially gone

Every year this time of the year comes. Every year it feels the same way.

This is it. I felt today, for the first time since last winter, the smell of open fires on people's homes. Damn, I miss Portugal...

And do you want that with fries?

Here's the basis:

• Large Migration project (approximately 25.000 web site pages with different content)
• Some structure for most content
• Javascript and random HTML (like forms and select boxes) within content
• 22 sub-sites with shared content and independent content maintained by independent editors

New web site developed in about 4 months with many automations and "interesting" solutions.
Migration process with some failures, still over 90% of content has been migrated already.
Some content in wrong place (being cleaned up now), many test pages, being cleaned up now.

Site is delivered to customer for acceptance testing (and bugfixing).

Customer bitches about content not being correct - as if noone knew... - and claims that functionality cannot be tested [...].

Customer today says that it looks as if the site has not been tested.

Now, excuse me for being ignorant, but isn't that what Acceptance Testing is supposed to be?

Hang over...

Great night out in Utrecht yesterday.

Great drinks, pool, meal, drinks, drinks, some more drinks, then some dancing and drinks.

And some drinks to finish it off.

Now, I pay for it. It's hard not to be 20 all your life...

Update on XP most used list

Couldn't resist and had to re-read some of my earlier postings. In this one I listed the applications XP automagically determined to be my most used.

Now here's a comparison with today's list, just for the fun of it:

1. VMWare Workstation (DEV DEV DEV) ;-)
2. WinRAR
3. XMLSpy
4. Notepad++
5. MS Excel
6. Command Prompt
7. iTunes
8. MS Word
9. MS Visual Studio 2003
10. UltraEdit 32
11. Windows Grep
12. Eclipse
13. Notepad
14. Backup

I'd say that someone has been working a lot with long text files...

It's been a while...

From all my previous "blog-breaks" this was probably the longest one... (and you can thank Mihai for getting this one here...)
So here's a quick what's up on Nuno's life:

• Still in Tridion, still quite happy, no plans to change that
  
• Might change countries early next year (again), but this time it will be a very big move (hint: can't go there by train)
• Been doing loads of development work, and am I glad for it. After nearly 10 years doing Sys Admin, Infrastucture, Network and Project Management, finally got back to where it all started (technically: not really since there was no Java nor C# when I started coding in my teens)
• Having hopped from customer to customer in the first part of the year, I'm now finishing a 5 month project for the dutch Chamber of Commerce, and overall, it's not too bad (a few ups and downs with their data migration, but nothing that can't be solved)

And that's pretty much it.

I need to check the house policy regarding the release of code samples for Tridion implementations in this space, but I guess it can be done. Problem is that so much of what we do is linked to customer projects/products/modules, that you're never really sure if you're not violating someone's IP on the code, so I'll have to be selective.

I actually never really stopped blogging during this period, but you would have to have access to Tridion's network to be able to read what I post, so never mind.

I'm following a WSAD training at this moment, covering Struts and JSF, pretty cool stuff. Hopefully I'll need to use this soon or all the knowledge will be gone.

Talk again soon.

N