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

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.