Guus Bosman

software engineering director

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A sad day

Thu, 04/30/2009 - 10:14pm

It's a sad day today in the Netherlands.

During a parade in honor of Queensday, a crazy guy drove a car through a crowd of people, killing five and wounding many others, in an apparent attack on the Dutch royal family.

The Geen Stijl weblog had the most update information, both factual and rumored (viewer discretion advised).

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dailylife

Hot

Sun, 04/26/2009 - 8:27pm

It was 91 degrees Fahrenheit today; 32 degrees Celsius. Summer has began!

I went for a run in Umstead park in the afternoon. Of course I ran slow to be careful about the heat; it's good to start getting used to the high temperatures again. The humidity has increased but it's not as muggy yet as it will be in the summer here.

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dailylife

Queen Beatrix

Sun, 04/26/2009 - 10:22am

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.Yesterday we had a dinner from the Duke Economics department, with a traditional 'pig-out': North Carolinian style barbecue (pork) with hushpuppies, coleslaw and other 'fixings'.

Later in the evening we had a fun birthday party. Our Argentinian friends told me that the newspapers in Argentina were full of speculation that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands may announce her abdication next week. The official state press agency is denying it -- so it may be true.

Ettie is celebrating her birthday today -- happy early birthday!

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dutchusa

Cafe Amsterdam

Wed, 04/22/2009 - 9:45pm

Cafe Amsterdam.Next to the bookstore in the National Gallery of Art there is a lunch restaurant.

When we walked by it I was surprised to see a menu in Dutch, with dishes such as gebakken vis and rode kool. In line with the exhibition, the menu was in Dutch style and the restaurant was temporarily called "Cafe Amsterdam".

We had already had lunch so we didn't eat, but the appeltaart was on a buffet and looked very authentic. According to the menu there was also boterboek and flensjes with apples.

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Work NC

Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex

Tue, 04/21/2009 - 9:29pm

Roadierage.comTonight I attended a presentation on Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex by Rob Kainz and Derrick Heffner.

We went to the presentation right after work; it was organized by the Triangle User Experience group (an Adobe Group) and sponsored by Railinc.

Rob and Derrick founded Roadierage.com, a website for the music industry. Rob has been developing the website using a combination of Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex.

In the presentation Rob spoke about the caching and paging mechanisms that he used, including an interesting trick to cache the Ajax responses (essentially query results) as XML files on the file system to speed up repetitive queries. Using a Ruby sweeper method to invalidate the cache when model objects changed made for an elegant implementation.

My main interest was to learn more about Adobe Flex and it was useful to get hear some real world experiences; it was a well spent evening.

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art

Pride of place: Dutch cityscapes of the Golden Age

Mon, 04/20/2009 - 9:27pm

View of Hoorn. This weekend we made a wonderful trip to Washington DC. On Saturday we arrived in time for lunch at The Boulevard Woodgrill in Arlington, the area where we lived for two years. Lunch there was great, just as we remembered it, and it was a lot of fun to be back in the Courthouse area.

We spent time in Georgetown and in the evening we went out around Dupont Circle, with an excellent late night dinner at Pizza Paradiso. A very small, very friendly place with very good pizza.

Sunday morning we visited "Pride Of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age" in the National Gallery of Art. This exhibition is a corporation between The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in the Netherlands and the National Gallery, and combines works from those museums with many other paintings from all over the world. I first read about it in December when it was showing in the Netherlands.

We spent a long time in the gallery; it was truly wonderful. A highlight of the exhibition for us was "View of Hoorn", by the relatively obscure painter Abraham de Verwer. Together with the two Albert Cuyp paintings this work was a beautiful showcase of 'Dutch light'.

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travelling

Road trip

Sat, 04/18/2009 - 8:13am

We'll be leaving shortly for Washington DC for a short stay; traveling back tomorrow.

It's going to be a fun road trip. Tomorrow morning we plan to visit the National Gallery of Art.

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dutchusa

Dutch bikes

Fri, 04/17/2009 - 7:32am

"But can New York revert to New Amsterdam?"

The New York Times has an article about Dutch bikes, which 'may be the first status symbol of the Great Downturn':

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/fashion/16CODES.html?em=&pagewanted=all

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internet

Forgotten PostgreSQL Windows password

Tue, 04/14/2009 - 9:52am

This morning I've been upgrading the Postgres database on my Windows XP laptop to version 8.3.

During the installation it asks for the password of the service account of previous PostgreSQL version. The default value is 'postgres', but sure enough I forgot what password I used when I originally installed it.

I found this useful post on how to change the password for any Windows user. From the Windows command line execute the following to reset the password to 'postgres'.

net user postgres postgres

That worked, so now I'm ready to complete the installation and be able to use the new Ruby pg gem that was recently release for Windows.

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sports

After a trail run

Sun, 04/12/2009 - 1:33pm

Trail run.I just did a great trail run at the Eno River (where we walked with Ettie and Gerben).

Sitting in the sun now and Jaap just fixed the website (thank you).

Life is good.

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