Guus Bosman

software engineering director

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driving

Two hour drive home

Wed, 07/29/2009 - 8:58pm

Two hour drive home.It took me two hours to get home from the office today while usually it only takes 30 minutes. There were 2 big pile-ups of cars on I-40 very near each other; blocking the highway completely for 30 minutes followed by a few hours of 1 lane traffic (1 instead of 4).

Still, glad I wasn't in the pile-up. When I finally drove past it I saw 28 damaged cars, some in really bad shape.

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northcarolina

Two big snakes

Sun, 07/26/2009 - 1:52pm

Black rat snake. Picture source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/furryscalyman/578071810.We went for a long hike yesterday in Umstead Park. We walked in the middle of the day, and it was humid and hot, around 90 degrees.

We walked the Company Mill trail, a beautiful 6 mile walk through the woods. It took us about 2 hours and 20 minutes.

We saw two large snakes, larger than I've ever seen in the wild before. Both of them were around 3 feet long (90 centimeters).

The first one we heard before we saw it, a couple of feet away from the trail in the bushes when we were near a creek. It was brown and patterned. We're no snake experts but after looking at pictures later it might have been a hognose, northern water snake or a copperhead. We respectfully kept our distance.

Just a few minutes later we saw a similar sized snake, but completely black. That was almost certainly a black rat snake. It quickly moved away and crossed the trail behind us.

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dailylife

A raccoon at the Eno

Thu, 07/23/2009 - 10:52pm

A raccoon.We went for a walk at the Eno River today. We were there around 7.00 pm when the sun wasn't shining very bright anymore and we saw a lot of deer.

On the road near the park someone had put home-made signs: "slow, baby deer", and in their garden were at least 8 deer, including young ones.

There's a large park around the Eno river and on our walk through the woods near the river we saw a beautiful animal that we had seen only once or twice before. I thought it was called a possum, but tonight I looked it up and the animal we saw is a raccoon.

The raccoon was about to climb in to a tree when it saw us. It stared at us for a while, hid behind the tree trunk and then walked away. It reminded me of a cat in the way it seemed to pretend "Oh, I wasn't never planning to climb in that tree, you silly human".

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art

Judith Leyster

Wed, 07/22/2009 - 9:07pm

I just discovered through a review in the WSJ that the National Gallery has again a great exhibition of a Dutch 17th century artist, this time about Judith Leyster.

I don't know Judith Leyster's work, but she worked with Frans Hals and was one of the two only women accepted to the Guild of St. Luke in 17th century Haarlem.

The exhibition will run through November 29 and Sasha and will definitely go check it out, probably in September. According to the WSJ: "She deserves attention".

I'm also very excited about "The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size", an show with life-size reprints of all known works by Rembrandt. It's on display in Amsterdam, which I'll visit in about two weeks.

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fun

Rule Number One...

Fri, 07/17/2009 - 6:34pm

Rule Number One.Photography rule number one:

Don't forget to look behind you.

See this National Geographic blog.

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politicsnews

South Carolina & Argentina

Tue, 07/14/2009 - 6:48am

South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems: education, unemployment, Argentina.When we were in South Carolina last week the political and personal problems of Governor Sanford got plenty of attention.

A T-shirt said it nicely:

"South Carolina's 3 Biggest problems:

- Education
- Unemployment
- Argentina."

A local city paper had a picture of the governor with the title "Don't cry for me South Carolina".

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internet

Books on a phone

Mon, 07/13/2009 - 7:16am

The Mobi Reader on my phone.When we visited a museum in Washington three months ago I saw the Kindle for the first time in real life. The Kindle is a hand held device for reading books, connected to Amazon's bookstore. I'd like to be able to read books digitally, but $399 is way too expensive and I don't like to be "locked in" to Amazon's bookstore.

I read newspapers on my phone every day. The screen is fairly small, but it's certainly readable and the other day I found out how to read books on my phone as well. I've started reading a classic a few weeks ago, The Brothers Karamazov, and in addition to the hard copy I now have the entire book with me where ever I go.

I installed "Mobipocket" on my laptop and cell phone, and downloaded a free copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. It's free since the copyright on the book has long expired. It works great! Obviously, reading a physical book is still a lot nicer, but if I have some time to kill and my phone with me, I can now continue reading my book.

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internet

Canceling a Windows shutdown

Sat, 07/11/2009 - 10:58am

Virus.One of our computers got a virus Thursday night. Of course we have virus scanners and malware scanners, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks. We were able to track down the source of the virus, an infected website.

Our virus scanner (AVG) did not fully protect the computer but it did find the originally infected HTML file. I used the excellent HijackThis tool to manually clean up the resident processes and start-up tasks of the virus.

The symptoms were as typical as they were annoying: errors on Windows start-up ("Services and Controller app encountered a problem and needed to close") and an slow and unstable system. This time something else happened also: Windows would automatically shutdown after a 60 seconds count-down.

I learned this trick: to cancel a pending shutdown run the following command.

shutdown -a
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travelling

Charleston, SC

Wed, 07/08/2009 - 9:49pm

Last weekend we had a great time in Charleston, South Carolina.

We left on Friday morning. It was about 5 hours to get the South Carolina and the journey itself is always enjoyable. With a cup of coffee, open highway and wonderful company driving is a lot of fun.

We arrived around 4.00 pm in Charleston and we found our bed & breakfast quickly. We stayed in "King George IV Inn" that we had booked the night before. A nice bed & breakfast, with a great location. Charleston is a little bit like Savannah, in that everything is withing walking distance. We didn't use the car the whole weekend.

Charleston is a great city, with a lot of night life. The first night we had dinner with a live Dixieland band playing "Up the lazy river" and other hits. It was busy on the street until late at night.

Saturday during the day we visited Fort Sumter, the location of the first shots of the Civil War. The Civil War (1861–1865) is the most bloody war in U.S. history, far exceeding World War II. It was impressive to visit the fort and the museum and read the stories.

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guusbosmannl

OpenBSD 4.5

Mon, 07/06/2009 - 8:57pm

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.

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