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

Man, I missed the road!

Finally, here I am on a real out-of-country assignment. After spending years without knowing which country I lived in anymore, I was starting to get itchy about all this work on the same country. Now I'm finally on the road again - only 400 km away, but hey - that's a start!

Anyway, nice hotel. I'm at the Luxembourg Sofitel, and it's so weird that it looks exactly the same as the Algiers Sofitel when I went there 5 years ago...

Strange.

Anyway, and once again, glad to be back on the road!

Ora aqui está uma boa notícia

Eu digo: até que enfim!

Inglês no ensino primário.

Care to join us?

I suppose I should get some advertising money out of this... ;-)

Anyway, if you feel like joining a very dynamic and young company, (profitable as well, might I add) working in the domain of EVERYTHING related to Content Management (or in other words, EVERYTHING), check these links:

- Senior Consultant
- Technical Consultant

When I say everything, you do realize I mean: Enterprise Level Everything. Sorry, no PHP/MySQL around here (not that often anyway). We mostly deal with .NET and J2EE applications, back-end integrations, etc, etc.

XML/XSLT experience is a very valuable asset, willingness to travel, presentation skills, speaking more than one european language (sorry brits - we can still make an exception for you, if you're really good ;-) ), 5 - 10 years IT experience, etc, etc, etc.

PS - I say sorry brits and not sorry franks, because if a french person is reading this, he probably speaks 2 languages already ;-)
PPS - The Senior Consultant link is for a job in Brussels, but we're also looking for 2 in Amsterdam.

I knew I shouldn't have...

Years and years ago, about the time I bought my 386 (60 MB disk + 4 MB RAM!!) technology was not a subject to be discussed at the café's table.

Discussing technology, reverse engineering (of games, mainly) and networks was not for the masses. This was absolutely restricted to a group of friends - geeks as me mainly - with different ideas about the application of technology but with a common love for it.

It was about that time (we're talking early 90's) that I first heard of the Singularity and the implications it would have on everyone's life, and god - did I want the Singularity to arrive. Funny how - at that time already, within a group of people aged from 15 to 20 - we were discussing IA as the means to achieve it rather than AI (see glossary at the end if you're feeling lost - maybe, if you're feeling lost, stop reading ;-)).

Anyway, I then started working and got into the more mundane aspects of life: creating a career, finding a good partner - physical and mentally -, having and raising a daughter. And let all this meta-talk go to sleep inside my brain.

And then, about 2 months ago I stumbled accross Charles Stross's Accelerando. And I knew I should stop reading it. And I didn't.

From there to having re-devoured Neuromancer, filling up my Amazon queue with book orders and spending my nights doing research on all that is to come was a snap. And I'm re-reading Accelerando, just to be sure I got it ;-)

In short, I'm now in that state of mind where communication is not possible in normal terms, and desperately searching for a mind I can speak with about this. Maria is quite smart and very well intended, but I'll bore her to death before I even get to explain the difference between AI and IA.

So, if you live in the Netherlands, if you actually knew what The Singularity is before googling for it, please do contact me...


The Singularity - basically and simply put, the one single time at which the computing power on earth will equal the human brain's computing power. By others, also seen as the moment at which human progress will be at its fastest. By still other groups - and sometimes the same people - the end of humanity and the start of post-humanity. More on this at a later post.
AI - Artificial Intelligence. Come on, this one was easy.
IA - Intelligence Amplification. Instead of coming up with a thinking machine, come up with a machine that amplifies MY intelligence.

What's in a name?

I seriously think that your choice for Corporate Content Management system should not be based on a given system's name. I also know that - in the front of Web Content Management (so, excluding all the ECM big-boys like Documentum and Oracle) - basically our biggest competitors are based on Open Source.

But this is ridiculous... You just can't be taken seriously by any proper company with a name like this, can you?

Just imagine ABN Amro's VP for technology announcing to his Board of Directors that they would invest xxx Euros (replace xxx by any obscene amount of money) on the next WCM platform, named "Joomla!"

But again, what's in a name?

What a surprise... (not)

The Register's reporting on a new TCO comparison betweeen Linux and Windows. You know, another one of those "studies" commissioned by one of the big players.

The fun part is that this time it's sponsored by IBM, so, quite "surprisingly" and contrary to all the others we've seen, this time Linux's TCO is 40% cheaper than Windows.

More here.

Mas quem é que lhe pediu isto?

A política portuguesa nunca deixou de surpreender. Eu ainda tinha esperança, bem lá no fundo, que a Maria de Jesus lhe pusesse a cabeça no sítio, mas pelos vistos nada havia a fazer. O monarca avançou mesmo com a candidatura.

Agora pergunto eu: vamos mesmo votar nele? Acham que ele vai ganhar as eleições? Eu até tenho medo da resposta, pois arrisca-se muito a ser positiva, e vamos mais uma vez mostrar a todos os nossos parceiros europeus que não queremos avançar. O que nós queremos é continuar a viver na utopia do "antes é que era bom" e vamos votar em alguém cujo maior contributo para a nação portuguesa - em tempos recentes - foi criticar publicamente toda a estrutura da União e do próprio parlamento que ele - soi disant - representava. Sim, soi disant porque monsieur Mário Soares por vezes dignava-se a comparecer no PE, quando não estava ocupado a escrever artigos de opinião para revistas conceituadas - artigos esses pagos a peso de ouro, não duvido.

Eu que até já me tinha habituado ao tweetie - e ao seu excelente inglês - vou agora ter que passar pela vergonha de confirmar que sim, voltámos a ter o mesmo presidente, sim, ele tem já mais de 80 anos, sim, arrisca-se a ter funeral de estado, sim, esse mesmo, aquele que dizia viver em Bruxelas, sim, aquele que criticou tudo e mais alguma coisa sobre a união europeia (aqui entre nós, chegados àquela idade não há muito mais para fazer senão criticar os outros).

Cresçam e apareçam portugueses, não se deixem levar por esta farsa.

Dizia - salvo erro - o Pacheco Pereira, e muito bem, que Soares vai possivelmente vencer por ser a alternativa a Cavaco, nunca por mérito próprio. É bom saber que ainda há gente sem papas na língua...