Guus Bosman

software engineering director

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movies

Castells

Thu, 04/12/2007 - 11:23pm

Castells.Tonight Sasha and I saw an absolutely delightful movie, Castells. It's a documentary about people in Catalonia, Spain who create large human towers.

The movie has breathtaking visuals, but it offers much more than spectacular images of this intriguing sport. The movie shows the social life of the villagers and the preparations by the colle, the participants in these Towers, workings towards big festivals and holidays (see the movie trailer).

These human towers are truly fascinating and I had never heard of them before. A Tower can be up to 9 stories high, and the upper layers are formed by small children. In the movie there is one little girl , Zoraida, who is scared and only climbs to the 8th layer in a training. These little kids are completely incorporated in this sport and are expected to perform with the adults-- Zoraida is perhaps 4 years old.

Every now and then the tower would collapse and everybody will fall on top of each other. True harm seems to be rare, although the children sometimes get bruised and cry. The movie is touching, funny at times and an absolutely recommended film to see.

Castells is the opening night movie of the Full Frame festival here in Durham, which is the largest documentary film festival in the U.S. I'll be watching a lot of documentaries this weekend, and even if they're only half as good as Castells then this will be a great weekend.

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politicsnews

Duke lacrosse charges dropped

Wed, 04/11/2007 - 4:30pm

Duke lacrosse.Today the State Attorney General of North Carolina finally announced that the sexual offense and kidnapping charges against three former Duke lacrosse players are being dropped.

It's a long, sad case based on what turned out to be about false accusations, with an overly active District Attorney who wanted to get reelected.

It is tremendously important to be careful and diligent when researching rape allegations such as these. However, when it became clear that the accusations were clearly false District Attorney Mike Nifong should have dropped the case.

Today's conclusion by the State Attorney General: "We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations," Cooper said. "In the rush to condemn, a community and the state lost the ability to see clearly. Regardless of the reasons this case was pushed forward, the result was wrong. Today we need to learn from this and keep it from happening again to anybody."

It's strange to see this from so close. The Kroger supermarket on Hillsborough Road where we do our shopping played a small role in the case.

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guusbosmannl

And we're back!

Wed, 04/11/2007 - 9:22am

The website has been down for over 3 days -- the longest outage in years!

A power outage in Middenmeer, combined with my parents being out of town were the root cause of the outage.

Thanks to Jaap the various problems have been resolved (thank you). The resignation of the Minister for Energy in the Netherlands has been demanded.

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dailylife

Saturday morning

Sat, 04/07/2007 - 12:53pm

Kroger on Saturday morning.I tried to go to the Farmers' Market in downtown Durham this morning but I couldn't find it. Today's the first day that the Market opened, it will be every Saturday morning throughout the summer.

Since a few months there is a Starbucks store in Kroger, the supermarket we usually go to, and I went to pick up two cups of coffee.

In a few weeks there will be the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 and last night we saw video clips of some of the participants. It promises to be a wonderful show of bad musical taste again. It would be awesome if we could see Terry Wogan's show somewhere, although the chances of that are slim...

The Dutch participant, Edsilia Rombley, won't stand a chance with a boring performance. The Bulgarian participants, Elitsa Todorova & Stoyan Yankoulov, aren't too bad, but to win the competition more extravaganza is required. Titles as "Push that button" or "Shake It Up Shekerim" are more likely to score high, as is the "vampires are real" act from one of the small European countries.

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guusbosmannl

Installing GD on OpenBSD 4.0

Sat, 04/07/2007 - 10:10am

Drupal uses GD, a library to manipulate images. The operating system of my webserver is OpenBSD, and I recently upgraded to OpenBSD 4.0. The upgrade went fine, except for GD: I couldn't upgrade it. I would always get the following error message: lib not found freetype.13.1.

It turns out that OpenBSD now comes with a new version of GD, which requires the freetype library. The only supported way to install that on OpenBSD is by installing xbase.tgz, the X-Windows libraries. I don't use X-Windows and it's not exactly a clean solution to install 10 MB of code to get a single library to work, but it helped. After a reboot of the server GD now works under OpenBSD 4.0.

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foodanddrinks

Sriracha sauce

Thu, 04/05/2007 - 7:32pm

Sriracha sauce.When I worked in Rosslyn we often went for lunch in Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant.

They serve a number of delicious dishes, and I especially like the noodles soup with Vietnamese meatballs. There is always Sriracha sauce on the table, a hot chili sauce. I'd never tried the sauce before and I really like it. It has a natural deep red color, and it's very spicy and very tasty.

I found it in A Southern Season two weeks ago and bought a bottle. Tonight I had green beans and it worked great with this Sriracha sauce.

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theater

Cirque du Soleil - Delirium

Mon, 04/02/2007 - 8:10pm

Cirque du Soleil - DeliriumLast night we went to see Delirium by Cirque du Soleil. The show was in the RBC center, an indoor arena for the Hurricanes and Wolfpack, about 25 minutes from our home.

It was the first time I saw a show by Cirque du Soleil, and it was very entertaining. I really liked the video projections -- they made for great visual effects. The show took around two hours and featured great music, dancing, acrobatics and nice characters. There wasn't much of a story, but most of it was around the "dream" of the main character who encountered beautiful and strange situations.

When the show was after we were from our seat on the I-40 in 10 minutes, a testament to the smart design of the RBC center and its traffic arrangements.

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internet

GPS tracking

Sun, 04/01/2007 - 9:03am

Tracking.I found a nice website that allows you to track where a GSM cell phone currently is.

I tried it with a Dutch GSM phone number and it's pretty accurate, even with satellite pictures of the Netherlands (the resolution isn't great but still reasonable). I couldn't try my own phone because Verizon doesn't use GSM.

Try it at http://www.sat-gps-locate.com.

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