Martin @ Blog

Yes, I’m still alive. I didn’t write much lately, mainly because I had some troubles with my life and the very hot weather. I hope I will be able to write some interesting stuff the coming weeks.
My girlfriend decided this week that she wanted to get some time for herself in order to determine if she still likes our relationship (at the moment she thinks she doesn’t). The reason for this, is that I was having some mental problems (maybe I was a little depressed the last few weeks?), but didn’t talk about it with her. Additionally, I didn’t work very hard on my final project for my Msc. grade, which caused some friction in our relationship as well.
Currently I’m staying at my parents house in order to get things sorted out. Life ain’t easy. I really hope we will be able to get our relation working again, because she definately is the girl of my dreams and I really don’t want to lose her. Time will tell.

On other news, I started programming on the OntoAIMS project, in order to finish my graduation project. I also started learning Perl, which is a very nice language for easy tasks. Especailly the regular expressions, which are also implemented in other languages, are very nice. While I already had some knowledge on Perl compatible regular expressions, I definately learned some new things and it is also nice to know how to use these things in the language for which they were originally developed.

Afgelopen donderdag kwam ik op weg naar huis langs een ongeluk wat op een kruispunt op de ring had plaatsgevonden… dat er een auto achterop een ander rijdt, kan ik me voorstellen. Dat er daarna nog een tegen aan rijdt omdat ie het te laat ziet, ook nog wel… maar vijf stuks vind ik toch wel erg veel 😀

Zie m’n fotoboek voor nog wat foto’s. Ze zijn van matige kwaliteit omdat ik ze met m’n gsm heb genomen 🙂

Sinds gisteren ben ik twee weken in Leeds voor mijn afstudeerproject. Het afstudeerproject wat ik doe vindt plaats binnen een samenwerkingsverband tussen de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven en de University of Leeds. Daarom leek het mijn afstudeerdocente wel leuk als ik twee weken naar Leeds zou gaan. Zo geschiedde, en gisteren zat ik daarom om 9:45 Nederlandse tijd in het vliegtuig, om 15 minuten later Engelse tijd weer voet aan de grond te zetten op het vliegveld van Leeds. Ik verblijf in een studentencomplex van de universiteit, waar ik helaas geen internet heb en ook geen tv is, dus echt veel te beleven is daar niet. Gelukkig kan ik wel 24 uur per dag terecht op de universiteit waar ik een eigen werkplek heb.

Leeds is best een aardige stad wat ik er tot nu toe van heb gezien. Het is een vrij grote stad, volgens de vrouw die me in Leeds begeleid de vijfde grootste stad van Engeland, al vraag ik me af of dat daadwerkelijk zo is. De universiteit is in ieder geval een aanzienlijk stuk groter dan de TU/e en heeft ook veel meer voorzieningen. Zo zijn er allerlei eetgelegenheden op de campus en zijn er zelfs bars en discotheken op de campus; iets wat volgens mij in Nederland nergens is. Sowieso is heel de sfeer hier anders dan in Nederland. Er lopen veel meer mensen over straat en er zijn allerlei mensen bezig met fotografie, filmen en overleggen verspreid over het universiteitsterrein. Ik heb nog geen moment meegemaakt dat er niemand liep hier op de universiteit, zelfs niet toen ik gisteren om 21:00 naar huis ging.

The website I work for, Tweakers.net, has been bought by VNU Business Media. The news became public last monday. The founder of the site, Femme Taken, and the current director, Daniel Kegel, decided to sold Tweakers.net because they think VNU gives Tweakers.net the opportunity to grow further and improve some parts of the site.
While this news is still relatively hot, today there was a new announcenemt. VNU will probably be sold to a group of private investors. I’m not sure if this is very good news for Tweakers.net, but on the other hand, this announcement has been expected for a few weeks already. Among one of the private investor firms is the company Carlyle. People who have watched the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 should know this name, because this is the company which is involved with the defence industry in the US and has some US politicians on the payroll. The most famous one is the former US president George Bush sr. While a lot of people now maybe think this company is entirely evil (which is may be), it should be mentioned that the number of investments in defence companies is only one 1% and the focus of Carlyle is telecom, media and real estate. Before VNU is aquired by this group of companies, the current shareholders have to accept the offer of the companies and sell at least 95% of the shares (I guess).

Yesterday the Dutch organisation Bits of Freedom, which is watching the preservation of the freedom of speech and privacy in the Netherlands, procured the Big Brother Awards. This is a prize for persons and organizations who doesn’t seem to care about the privacy of Dutch citizen. The winners for the Big Brother Awards this year are the minister Rita Verdonk, Sony BMG and the Flevo Ziekenhuis. Sony BMG got its award for the famous rootkit which is installed when one tries to play an audio-cd of the company on a personal computer. I wrote about the awards in Dutch on Tweakers.net.

One of my collegues of Tweakers.net, a guy from Belguim, was elected for participation in the Dutch TV-show ‘Het groot Dictee der Nederlandse taal’. This show consists of a ‘dictee’ (don’t know the English word for this, and can’t find it either) of the Dutch language and is recorded in the buildings of the Dutch parliament. This ‘dictee’ contains several words which are pretty difficult to write. The program is broadcasted on Nederland 3 at 20:15.

The Dutch language has the interesting property that there exists an official orthograpy (I think the English word ‘spelling’ is also appropriate here, but I’m not sure). This orthography describes exactly how words should be written and which rules should be followed for situations which are not documentened, e.g. the use of words of foreign languages in combination with a Dutch word.

This orthography is defined by an institute called ‘De Taalunie’, which is a government funded, not for profit organisation with people who know very much about language, and the Dutch language in particular. In 1995 this institute introduced a new definition of the Dutch language, which was controversial. The aim of this new definition was to solve ambiguities and inconsistencies which existed in the Dutch language since 1954 (which was the year of the latest update until 1995) in order to make it easier for people to determine how words should be written. This new orthography caused that some words were written different than before, especially the combination of two words.

This year, there is another update to the orthography of the Dutch language. This update will be effective somewhere in 2006 (not sure when) and should solve some incosistency problems which are still there since the update of 1995. Last week some Dutch media institutions announced that they will ban this new update, with the arguments that the new orthography lacks consistency, makes it to difficult and is ‘not logical’. The Dutch national paper ‘De Volkskrant’ and the Dutch broadcast institution ‘NOS’ (which produces the Dutch news program) say that they will not use the new spelling. Personally, I think their arguments are very weak, and the examples they are use to justify their decision, they mainly come up with words that are hardly used, such as ‘Nazitop’ (the leaders of the German NSDAP party which only existed until 1945 or something), havenot (I personally even don’t know what this word means) and some other words which are not used very often.

While the newspapers are ‘heavy’ users of the Dutch language, and generally are able to say something meaningfull about the new orthography, a big group of ‘normal people’ on the internet have their verdict ready about the new orthography. This is ok, when you have some arguments for a certain statement, but obviously most people really don’t know where they talk about.

Statements as ‘this is already the third time I have to learn the Dutch language again, while I’m only 19 years old’ (when he’s 19, there is only one ‘new spelling’ introduced since he’s alive) are typical. On the forum of Tweakers.net is a complete topic with (mostly) people who really have no clue what they are talking about.

One of the moderators of the forum, however, explains exactly my problem (I don’t feel like to translate it into English, sorry):

Ten eerste wordt de spelling niet om de vijf, maar om de tien jaar aangepast, een lekkere demagogische leugen, dus.

Ten tweede was de spellingswijziging van 1995 de eerste sinds 1954. Die van 1954 maakte een einde aan de ouderwetsche spelling die zoo verouderd was dat hij niet meer gebruikt werd.

Probleem dat toen geintroduceerd werd was de “voorkeurspelling”: je schrijft kopie, maar je mag ook copie schrijven. Dat was dusdanig onduidelijk dat er decennialang tegen geageerd is, omdat simpelweg niet duidelijk was wat de status van de voorkeurspelling was.

Ook de 1954-regels betreffende de tussen-n waren dusdanig verwarrend dat veel mensen ervan overtuigd waren dat het iets te maken had met een meervoud.

In 1995 is er geprobeerd (en met enig succes) om wat meer duidelijkheid te scheppen in de spelling. Ondanks de initiele bezwaren tegen pannenkoek (want dat kon niet, want meervoud, en meer van dat soort ongeinformeerde onzin) lijkt het allemaal best wel werkbaar.

Nu wordt er geprobeerd een aantal onvolkomenheden uit 1995 recht te trekken, waarbij inderdaad een paar rare situaties ontstaan. Goed kans dat die voor augustus nog rechtgetrokken worden, zoals ook het groene boekje uit 1995 een rectificatie kreeg. Maar de paar overtrokken voorbeelden tussen de duizenden woorden worden natuurlijk graag breed uitgemeten in de sensatiepers omdat het volk nu eenmaal zijn brood en spelen moet krijgen.

And

Zolang ik mensen (onder andere op dit forum) nog hoor klagen dat de d/t-regels zo ingewikkeld zijn betwijfel ik ten zeerste of zoveel mensen terecht kunnen claimen dat ze een verschil gaan merken.
Als jij inderdaad moeite hebt gedaan je alle wijzigingen uit 1995 correct aan te leren dan is het inderdaad zo dat je een aantal van die dingen nu weer aan moet passen. De overgrote meerderheid is echter nooit verder gekomen dan de verontwaardiging over pannenkoek, en het adagio dat niemand meer wist hoe je paardebloem moest spellen. Alsof dat een woord is dat de meeste mensen dagelijks gebruiken.

Wat vind jij er nou eigenlijk “niet bepaald leuker” op worden? Dat je van woorden die je niet of nauwelijks gebruikt nu makkelijker kunt bepalen hoe je ze moet spellen, in plaats van ze altijd op te moeten zoeken omdat er geen duidelijke regels aan de spelling ten grondslag liggen?
Zelfs de discussie over het afbreken van Frankrijk vind ik zwaar overtrokken. Afbreken van woorden dient normaliter zoveel mogelijk vermeden te worden, in het groot dictee mag het niet eens, en buiten dat dictee zal er niet vaak iemand over vallen.
Verder vraag ik me af waar de meeste mensen zich druk om maken. De spelling volgens het groene boekje is voor de overgrote meerderheid van de Nederlanders hooguit relevant als ze een sollicitatiebrief schrijven. (En dan is de spelling van paardebloem meestal weer niet relevant.)

The (IMHO) most important improvement is the fact that concatenations of words are now clearly defined. For most people it was unclear if one should write ‘open-sourcesoftware (which was the correct version), ‘open source-software’, ‘opensourcesoftware’,’ open source software’, ‘open-source software’ or ‘open-source-software’. Now, it is defined that a concatenation should be written without dashes or spaces, except when there is a ‘klinkerbotsing’. So, when the new orthography is introduced, it is ‘opensourcesoftware’. This is a lot more ‘logical’ then it currently is.

By the way, the Dutch minister Van der Hoeve has the opinion that the media is very late with their complaints. The new orthography was already presented in April this year, and now, more than a half year later, they come with complaints.

Yesterday, my server again losts its internet connection. It seems that dhcp is causing the trouble, but I can’t put my finger on the exact cause. However, I read on the website of our provider about the possibility to get a fixed ip-address, so I sent an e-mail asking if that is also possible for our connection. I hope this will fix the problem and has probably as added bonus that port 25 for outgoing traffic is not blocked, so I’m able to run a ‘normal’ smtp server.

I also wrote an article for Tweakers.net about the release of version 1.0 of Ruby on Rails. This project exists for only 15 months now according to the project website, but is very popular with webdevelopers. Mainly, because of its strive to ‘not repeat yourself’ and the adaption of ‘webdeveloper trends’ such as AJAX. According to some people it is a decent replacement for J2EE with Hibernate, but I think currently it is mainly a competitor for PHP and maybe Python. According to what I read about RoR it force the developer to create a good strucure for a webapplications which very likely will make RoR applications better maintainable than their PHP counterparts. Maybe now it is a good time to step on the RoR wagon?

While wikipedia is critized a lot recently, a comparisation of the online encyclopedia with Britannica reveiled that the quality of articles about science topics are about the same within the two encyclopedia’s. Both contained errors, which is not suprising for Wikipedia, but actually is surprising for Britannica. Most people regard ‘printed’ encyclopedia’s as the golden standard when talking about accuracy. Wikipedia had four major errors in 42 articles, while Britannica had three errors. However, the text quality is sometimes very poor on Wikipedia.

Finally, via Planet Gnome I saw this video. I think there processor isn’t usable anymore (however, a clockspeed of more than 3,8GHz on a AMD Duron processor _is_ impressive).

On photography now: Last Tuesday I bought a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash and yesterday I used it. My girlfriend had the final presentation of a project about floors with light tiles. Because this project is rather ‘hot’ on the university (yesterday there was even an article about it in the Dutch national paper ‘De Telegraaf’ and someone is making a documentary about it), I was going to be the ‘photographer’. Some pictures are not very good, the shoot is not bad.

Today I sold my Canon Powershot Pro1 camera.

This morning a package was delivered by DHL. Unfortunately I was taking a shower, but our neighbour was kindly enough to receive it an carry it up four stairs. It turned out that I received the yearly christmas present of my employer: A fatboy!

Last weekend we also ‘celebrated’ Sinterklaas (a Dutch tradition). I got some very nice presents:
Alicia Keys – Unplugged

A very good cd (maybe her best cd this far)

Also I got a DVD of Genesis: The Way We Walk Live in concert:

I got also a tripod for my camera, but unfortunately the one I got (Hama Traveler) was not heavy enough to support my Canon EOS 300D camera, so I got my money back for that one. Now I’m looking for a suitable tripod.

I forgot to mention one other present:
🙂

A student in (where else?) America has been suspended from the Marquette University because he wrote negatively on a weblog about students and professors, without mentioning their names. The student is not allowed to finish the current year and should do the current semester again next year if he wants to finish his education. A semester costs 14.000 dollars.
I think this is pretty sad.