Guus Bosman

software engineering director

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travelling

Train to Washington DC

Mon, 05/31/2010 - 9:37pm

Train station in Trenton, NJ.We drove to the train station in Trenton, the capital of New Jersey, which is about 45 minutes away.

Sasha took the train at 7.00 pm and she'll arrive in DC around 10.00 pm. Ready for a new week after a great 3-day weekend.

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dailylife

Train to Trenton

Sat, 05/29/2010 - 8:40am

Sasha took the train from Washington DC to Trenton yesterday, where I picked her up. This weekend is Memorial Day weekend and we're in Somerset, NJ.

It had been 17 days or so since we had dinner at home together, so it was fun to cook and make an elaborate meal together.

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plants

Poor plants

Tue, 05/25/2010 - 9:47pm

Poor plants.In the last 6 months we've traveled quite a lot for work, mostly between North Carolina and New Jersey. The plants in our apartment in Durham have survived quite well, thanks to help from friends.

We bought a few plants for the apartment in New Jersey also, to make it a little more cozy.

They are are tough enough so survive a week without water, although they look like this after that week (a few hours after getting water they will be fine again).

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travelling

Weekend in DC

Mon, 05/24/2010 - 6:43pm

On Friday I drove from North Carolina to Washington DC where I'd pick up Sasha in the evening. I saw Sasha's office at the IMF (nice) and we both realized that it would be another 5 hours driving to New Jersey (not so nice).

Since Sasha would have to return to DC on Sunday anyway we decided last-minute to stay the weekend in DC. We returned to The Quincy, a hotel downtown which is unaffordable during the week but has great rates on Friday and Saturday night, and free parking on the street in the weekend.

We went for a long walk on Saturday around the monuments and downtown. We had dinner in Cafe Belga -- an outstanding meal. Sunday we visited the National Gallery of Art and saw the Hendrick Avercamp exhibition. On Sunday night I drove back to Somerset, New Jersey.

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dailylife

Google I/O 2010

Wed, 05/19/2010 - 7:23pm

The Google developer's event is going on right now: lots of HTML5 and several new and improved Google APIs. The event is held in San Francisco, but I've been following the news coming out.

I especially liked the announcement of the Google Font Directory, a directory of high quality open source fonts. They can be included in commercial and non-commercial projects alike.

Non-Latin fonts, such as Cyrillic for Bulgarian, are not yet supported but this is coming soon, according to the blog post.

It's very easy to use. Add the following to your HTML section:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

and now you can use 'Font Name' the standard way:

<div style="font-family: 'Font Name', serif;">Your text</div>
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internet

Broken laptop screen

Mon, 05/17/2010 - 8:09pm

Laptop screen.Just before the weekend Sasha's laptop screen died. When you start the laptop the screen displays vertical, colored stripes.

Dell sent a replacement screen today and tomorrow an engineer will come and install the screen at my work. I could have easily replaced the part myself but it's a nice service.

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dailylife

Back home in Durham

Sun, 05/16/2010 - 9:54pm

Sasha and I left at 8.40 am this morning, and arrived around 2.00 pm in Washington DC in the house where she'll be staying. We met our friends there, and I left two hours later.

The second part of the road trip was much less fun than the first, driving alone, but the radio kept me company. David Plouffe, the campaign manager of Barack Obama, spoke in Richmond last week and NPR in Virginia broadcasted his very interesting speech on the influence of new technology on his work and on election campaigns.

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dailylife

Internship & 8 hours driving

Sun, 05/16/2010 - 8:03am

We'll be leaving in a few minutes from Somerset to Washington, DC. Sasha will start an internship on Monday at the International Monetary Fund. A great opportunity.

After I bring Sasha to her new place there, I'll continue driving for another four hours until I reach Durham, NC.

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internet

Modern times

Thu, 05/13/2010 - 9:23pm

A while back I connected my accounts of several social networks and tools to each other. If I update my 'status' in one place it shows up in the others automatically. So if I type a status update on my phone, it gets routed to my website, to Facebook and to Hyves (a Dutch Facebook clone).

I maintain two separate streams; I have a separate stream for work-related updates. Those will show up in my LinkedIn account, on Skype and on Yammer, which is a sort of Twitter for companies.

This week I changed the way status updates are displayed on my website. They are no longer limited to a box 'What am I doing?' but they became real nodes on the site, so you can add comments to them on the site.

(Diagram source).

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internet

Actuate & BIRT

Tue, 05/11/2010 - 9:09pm

BIRT designer.This morning I attended a roadshow by Actuate, the company that created the open source project BIRT. I recently introduced BIRT in one of my products, and I'm very happy with that decision.

The roadshow was in Plainsboro near Princeton and about 40 minutes away from our place. Most of the presentations during weren't very informative -- 'they had a low information density', as one of my friends would put it. I always wonder, am I the only one who feels that things could be told 5 times faster?

The part I liked were the short 3 minute demo's. While my product uses BIRT mainly to generate PDFs and other files, BIRT could be used for dashboard functionality as well. Apparently you can hook in your own Flash library to it, which is nice because we use FusionCharts already.

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