All content on this site is owned by Guus Bosman. All rights reserved.

Icons

Most of the icons on this site are copyright by Guus Bosman. A few exceptions:

- The globe for the “traveling” icon was created by miagyone and released under a (CC BY 3.0) license - http://www.officialpsds.com/Green-Globe-PSD44812.html
- The typewriter for the “technology” icon was created by Invisiblefaerie1 and released under a (CC BY 3.0) license - http://officialpsds.com/Typewriter-PSD75402.html

Old and new icons.Over the last few weeks I have worked on a new version of this website. The most important goal of my website is to stay in touch with family and friends, but it also serves as an online business card for my work as software engineering manager. And, to be honest, the site was getting a lit bit old and needed a fresh lick of virtual paint. Most importantly, I wanted to make the site work better on mobile phones and on the iPad.

In April I read Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design and that inspired me to work on a new Drupal theme. I based it on Dave Gamache’s Skeleton CSS framework and modified it to my needs. This is the first major redesign since March 2007.

The changes

• Anonymous users now go to a new landing page, instead of going to the blog
• Logged in users will continue to see the blog as the main page. This way, there is a specific a page that I can tailor for people that don’t know me in person, with a focus on my business persona.
• The HTML is completely HTML5 compliant (I need to take care of 1 last non-validating item, related to the Boost caching mechanism)
• The layout of the website is now mobile-friendly. You can see the effect by resizing the window of your browser. It gently collapses into a single row of nicely readable text. A couple of smart tricks around the menu (using CSS3 media queries) does the rest.
• Last but not least, after 12 years I am updating the icons on the site.

New icons

With the new style of the website came the realization that the old icons were, well, old. I created them myself over the years and there wasn’t a lot of consistency between them. Moreover, they were created with a size limitations of 32x32 pixels and there’s no way to scale them up since I created them as bitmaps.

In my previous job we worked with an off-shore company that creates icons, and for a small fee we got access to a library of many hundreds of thousands of icons. I started looking for something similar and ultimately decided on using Odesk.com, a global job marketplace, to find a contractor. I placed a contract and received 9 bids, of which I selected Hungary based freelancer Zsolt Markus.

He did a great job and recreated many of my icons as vector images, with a good eye for detail. The icons are now on the site, in a 64x64 pixel format, and if I ever want to resize them or tweak them I now have Adobe Illustrator vector files available.

Still to do

There are still a couple of bugs to work out. If you come across any issues, please let me know. Here is a list of things I’m working on:

• Formatting of top menu on the iPad is not correct (for logged in users)
• The input field for comments is very small
• The login form on the /welcome page doesn’t work yet.

It was fun to redesign the site, and learn something about HTML5 and CSS3 in the process. If you come across any problems or have any suggestions, please let me know.

Long-time readers know that the server of this website is running in the Netherlands. When we left for the States my parents offered to give the server a place on the attic in Middenmeer.

The server has been running continuously for well over seven years, and doing a great job. But it’s starting to show its age — a scare about a hard disk maybe going bad, and increasingly noisy fans — so we decided to buy a new one.

The new server arrived without operating system. My father installed and configured OpenBSD earlier this week, so it is now ready for me to install the LAMP stack and some other utilities, and start transferring our websites to the new server. OpenBSD is not for the faint of heart, and it’s pretty cool to see it up and running so quickly.

Even enabling the network stack was no problem (“oh, I just did echo dhcp > /etc/hostname.xl0”). Thank you!

My article was posted on Slashdot!

Friday I wrote about a court ruling in an interesting case, and later that day it was posted on the main page of Slashdot.

Slashdot is a technology-related news website that I’ve been reading for many years. It’s not as influential as it once was, but it’s cool nevertheless to see my article linked to from such a big site.

Slashdot is famous for the so-called “Slashdot effect”, where a large influx on readers brings down the performance of a website. My site is pretty well configured, and has strong caching for anonymous users, so it dealt with the spike just fine. As of Sunday evening the article has been read about 6,300 times.

I took Friday off from work and we spent a long weekend in DC. Went to the National Gallery of Art, where we saw the exhibition of Gabriel Metsu’s work.

You can now log in to Guus Bosman.nl using your Facebook.com account.

This means you have one less password to remember!

The old method will also continue to work.

Today I upgraded the website to Drupal 6.

The upgrade went smooth and most parts of the website have been converted. The only thing remaining is the address book. This requires some extra work and hopefully I’ll get to that Sunday or Monday, which is a day off, Labor Day.

The visible changes between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 are pretty small, but things have improved behind the scenes. If you see anything that doesn’t work right, or something is missing, please let me know.

The next few articles will be available for registered users only.

This means those articles will not show up in the RSS feed. This is a temporary thing.

Please log in at http://www.guusbosman.nl to read those articles.

For the address book on our site I used CiviCRM, an open source CRM system. I recently upgraded from CiviCRM 1.9 to 2.0, and since the APIs changed I had to update the block with birthdays that I wrote two years ago.

The primary change in CiviCRM 2 that impacted the block was the merge of civicrm_individual into civicrm_contact, a sensible schema change. Secondly, the public API’s method calls are now organized in smaller modules and were renamed.

I just upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.5.

Upgrade was a breeze, as always. I didn’t use sysmerge this time, and simply patching worked fine.

Small change in procedure; no reboot into the new kernel was necessary until all userland components were also upgraded.

You may have noticed that the website has been really slow in the last month or two. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and I’m happy to say that the speed is back to normal.

The problem started two months ago when a new DSL modem was installed and the website started to work really slow. Jaap and I have done a lot of research to see what happened, including re-wiring lots of cables and switches and network cards… thank you so much! The first suspect was the new modem, a “Fritzbox”, but all the settings looked fine and there was nothing in the log files. Traceroute told us that performance was quite decent. Thanks also to Ben from OpenNMS for your help.

In the end, it turned out to be unrelated to cables — instead, there was a configuration setting on the server (“DNS servers”) that needed to be updated. Once that was done, performance was back to normal. A great relief.