Yesterdays newspaper

Yesterday in the newspaper I receive there was an entertaining story on the back of the paper. What made this story interesting to me was the attitude a tram driver in Amsterdam had. His name is Harry Smit and he drives on line 9. I hardly take the tram when I’m in Amsterdam but he actually makes me want to do so. He apparently loves his work and isn’t afraid to share this joy with the people on the tram.

When he had to work on Christmas, he showed up in Tuxedo and provided people with treats. He knows the regulars on his route and recognizes them and greets them. When an English passenger asked to be notified when the tram would stop at the “tropenmuseum” he took out his false teeth, got the spare ones out of his bag and replied “This are my English speaking teeth, what do you want?”

As an aside because people know him, pickpockets and freeriders  shun the tram he drives, because he knows them as well. So he even made the tram he’s driving somewhat saver.

But what I found refreshing is that Harry loves his work and isn’t afraid to show this, and uses his humor to make the best of every day. And in the end, shouldn’t we all just try to follow his lead and make working fun as it should be. So kudos for the reporter Otto Holzhaus for writing the article, and Harry for making sure that fun is an important part of his work.

Tarzan

When I walked into the living room this morning, something I’ve always dreaded became reality. Our pet rabbit Tarzan lay in the living room without any life signs. Cindy and I knew this was coming as he was very sick and almost 8 years old.

For us, Tarzan was definitely a member of our family. He had his cage in the living room and regularly ran around in the living room when we where at home. The name we gave him was carefully chosen as we previously had a rabbit called fluffy which injured himself and died within half a year after we’ve got him. We decided that our next rabbit should have a strong name and Tarzan it became. He was a very friendly rabbit, but didn’t like to be picked up as he like both feet on the floor.

And strong he was indeed. In our old house he ruined almost all the the skirting in the livingroom, became a daddy and moved with us to our current house. Where he learned that the skirting is not to nibble, there are numerous manners to fetch those leaves of a plant in the livingroom, and running around in our living room so fast that we couldn’t follow him.

Every time you would walk into the living room, Tarzan would run in his cage, and greet you happily, waiting for his cage to be opened so he could run around in the living room. At times he would be jumping up high, especially when provoked by a waving hand until he had enough of the game and would then drop under the table and enjoy the sunshine until it was time to get back in his cage. He knew this because we would open up the closet and he would get a reward for going back into his cage. (Pavlov still has it’s uses ).

I will miss these moments and it feels like a good friend has left us. There’s now an empty space in our living room, which currently looks horrible, its quiet without this small animal running around in the living room.

Farewell Tarzan, the best rabbit friend somebody could wish.

Going to the Gentse feesten

This weekend some friends and us will visit the Gentse Feesten. I’ve got no clue what they’ll be about, put I will publish some photo’s on my flickr account (assuming I won’t forget to make pictures). It will be a good test for my mobile phone especially with regards to it’s battery life). Currently the N95 approximately needs one charge every day, depending on what i’m doing with the phone.

Finally some sun..

Finaly some sun again in the Netherlands, I’m not sure how long it will last, but as long as it lasts, lets just enjoy it.

me 2day

A picture of me 2day, just for the fun of it. have to say that I actually need another shave

Another upload test

This is another small test of the functionality of uploading pictures to wordpress. It works like a charm and I’m starting to appreciate it. Especially the fact that it waits till I’m @ home before starting to upload everything. Haven’t had the opportunity yet to test it with the GPS stuff. But that time will definitely come.

The picture is from our backyard, though the subject is somewhat to close by. , and I had not yet found the macro function that is available.

Some picture testing

 

Well, this is my first test out of my N95 using Shozu. And it seems to work, i’m able to send some pics over to here.

Some disturbing thoughts

This morning while reading my feeds I had one of those moments while reading several feeds that i connected some possible dots and they where somewhat disturbing to me. One article I read was over on scobleizers blog about the Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive. And I read some other posts concerning google and dell whether they would be using some sort of spyware. Though this is disturbing, my take is that openDNS of course has some reasons to come forward with this, and I haven’t seen it confirmed yet on other sides. But if true Google and Dell should make sure that this is mended.

But this made me thinking, Google is already heavily in the advertising business and with the recent additions is entrenching even more heavily. But the nice thing of using a search engine is that you can easily use another one. If google is starting to use to much of my data, I’ll just search for another comparable engine and I’m off. These companies have a vested interest in obtaining as much user data of me as is possible, because they might be able to find patterns and provide me with targeted advertising.

As I never had heard of aQuantive i had a look at their website because i was curious about the company. As it seems to be build out of some other companies i had a glance and saw their Atlas company. And maybe this triggered me, I wasn’t sure yet, but it actually doesn’t matter really what triggered me. I saw the opportunity and it disturbed me. These companies live of gathering data about users. (just as google does) But what I found disturbing is that after the acquisition it could be possible that they would slowly push for some stuff in the Windows Operating System to start gathering user data (they already do this with your consent for instance with regards to msn to enhance the user experience..).

But what if they just start doing it. The OS can call home numerous times because for instance the WGA check, windows update and error reporting. It would be relatively easy to just sneak some user data in there which could be used to target users. They control the browser as well, so they could sneak stuff in there as well without the large mass of users knowing it, and you would definitely get some nice user data which you could then use to convince advertisers that they have the best data and hence it would make sense to advertise using their system….

The disturbing thought of course is that most users won’t be able to move away from this as is possible when moving away from the search engine. Only future will tell us whether they’ll do it. But I think it’s important to start keeping a sharp eye on both of them as competition increases.

Is the old media sleeping

That’s one thing I’ve been pondering about, there’s a lot of stuff happening now a days especially by the proliferation of video via sites like youtube, dailymotion, yahoo and google video and several others. These sites, which are mostly user generated are already either having contracts or are getting into courts with the old media. Most court cases are about the sites not being able to distinguish between copyrighted and non copyrighted cases. Most clips are not much longer than a few minutes and provide a welcome diversion to most people. (A shift is underway where the television is loosing ground and the internet is gaining..)

But more is at hand which might be even more disturbing. Some will probably now justin.tv, where a person is wearing a head camera 24/7 and submits a live feed over the internet. And here it’s getting interesting. How will the media and possible the right holders respond when people start submitting live feeds from concerts, sport events and the like…

Will they start banning all these recording devices? Will they start jamming the feeds in one way or the other? In a few months the first ones will show up and my guess is that the Olympics in 2008 will be the big test. Can they keep the cameras out of the sporting events or will we see a lot of events via the ustream.tv’s?

One thing to consider is that this could possible harm the revenue for a lot of sporting events, but could also bring into the limelight a lot of unknown sports..

Flash(Flex), Silverlight and JavaFX my thoughts

The last month there where a lot of announcements regarding Flash(Flex), Silverlight and lastly JavaFX. All seem to occupy a certain space in the RIA environment. And of course all vendors are making claims which isn’t to surprising I should say. But these claims have made me thinking about them.

our product is multi platform

This is one of those that you’ll here a lot. But I guess all of them regard multi platform somewhat different.

Silverlight

For instance Silverlight runs on Windows and Mac, and can run on windows mobile devices… No talk yet of it running on any other platforms like Linux, Symbian, Palm or Solaris. So it runs on approximately 99% of all PC’s, 50% of the servers and 10% of the phones. (All percentages are roughly written down, they might differ depending on who has measured it.)

Flash(Flex)

Flash runs on almost all operating systems on PC’s, has got a server component running on Linux and Windows and has an implementation on mobile phones called flashlite. It runs on most mobile platforms like symbian and windows, but there’s no mention of it running on Linux phones. So it will run on 100% of all PC’s, 75% of all servers and a large percentage of phones.

JavaFX

This one is the latest kidd on the block and seems to be able to run on anything that runs Java, which is a lot of stuff (though they might need to upgrade to the latest version of java. So this puts it potentially on 100% of the PC and Server market and an almost perfect score on mobile phones (on most already there’s some sort of Java implementation)

Conclusion

Strangely the last one to enter the market seems to be in the best place with regards to platforms supported followed by Flash and Microsoft entering the last place, mainly because they’re focussed primarily on their own stack and lack substance in the phone area, (the one i guess where the biggest growth is possible)

We will support you developers and designers

For the developers it’s pretty straight forward, all three support you via an IDE, and in most cases you can use the IDE you’re most comfortable with. F.I. Microsoft will incorporate it in visual studio, adobe is offering Flex developer and Flash CS3 and JavaFX is supported by Eclipse and Netbeans. If you’re a Java / PHP / Ruby programmers in most cases you’ll like Flex and JavaFX, if you’re a .net programmer you’ll definitely have a preference for Silverlight.
Now for designers, it’s something different. Most designers have had a preference for the Mac and software like photoshop et al. Adobe is very entrenched here and has the upper hand.

Flash(Flex)

Has probably the best support and userbase in this area through it’s products. You’ll have trouble finding a designer not capable of working with these products.

Silverlight

Microsoft is bringing to the market new products called expression studio which entails products for designers. As they’ve just released these tools it’s not clear yet whether designers are picking it up in large amounts. Though a drawback for some of them might be that they can’t run it on the Mac.

JavaFX

There have been some remarks about support for designers, but nothing has been finalized yet. It remains to be seen how solid there offering will be. And which platforms are supported.

Conlusion

Well the king of the hill is very clear, it’s adobe with a lot of dedicated designers. Microsoft is trying to hook some of these designers up, but it’s not clear yet how they’re faring. JavaFX is a dark horse with nothing solid yet and it remains to be seen what they can deliver to entice the designers in.

In the coming days i’ll write some more on these three products…