Guus Bosman

software engineering director


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Bulgaria

New Bulgarian words

Milan and Nadia, Sasha's parents, visited us for a month and we had a great time. We speak Bulgarian with each other, so this was a great opportunity to improve my vocabulary. It's easier learning vocabulary from conversations, since there is more context to remember words by.

For example, I learned the word блато (swamp, marsh) while we were on our way to Wilmington with Irena and we drove through the swamps. лепя and кантар came up when making bread with Nadia, знак and спирачка when talking about driving with Milan. I tend to specialize in my vocabulary... I'm really good in talking about recipes and cooking now.

For my French studies I started using a tool called Anki to maintain my vocabulary. It's spaced learning system that keeps track of which cards you find easy or hard, and repeats them appropriately. It also provides various charts and metrics. A couple of months ago I converted the words from my home-made Bulgarian vocabulary program into an Anki deck. I've added 210 new words to the system while Milan and Nadia were visiting us, so an average of 7 new words per day.

internet

"We crashed, now what?"

The other day I read an interesting article by researchers from my old Computer Science department in Amsterdam: "We crashed, now what?"

The paper is a short description of an experiment they did with real-time recovery of operating system crashes on the Minix operating system. Minix, of course, is message-driven, with most of the kernel's components running in user space. With some smart book keeping they were able to put simple checkpoints in place that allow for successful recovery of crashes of kernel components, caused for example by memory errors. Pretty cool stuff:

"Preliminary results showed that our approach is able to restart even the most critical OS components flawlessly during normal system operation, keeping the system fully functional and without exposing the failure to user processes. For instance, our approach can successfully restart the process manager (PM), which stores and manages the most critical information about all the running processes—both regular and OS-related—in the system. Our preliminary experiments showed that the global state of PM was always correctly restored upon restart and no information was ever lost."

One of the co-authors of the article is Andrew Tanenbaum, professor at the Vrije Universiteit and creator of the Minix operating system.

northcarolina

North Carolina Zoo

We visited the North Carolina Zoo today.

The zoo is in Asheboro, about 90 minutes from Durham. We drove on country roads and made it a really nice road trip. North Carolina's country side is beautiful.

The zoo was great. There is a lot of green and plenty of space to roam for the animals. It wasn't very busy, probably because of the heat, which made it even better.

travelling

In DC with Milan and Nadia

On Monday we left on a road trip. We spent two days in DC, and this afternoon we'll leave for New Jersey to visit Jonathan and Irena.

Monday afternoon we spent in the Air and Space Museum, a wonderful place. It was very interesting for our Bulgarian guests. Yesterday they toured the Capitol and we went to the Bulgarian Embassy for some paperwork for Sasha.

Now on our way to the Library of Congress.

northcarolina

NC Transportation Museum

Another hidden gem in North Carolina that we had never been to before is the NC Museum of Transportation. It's about 90 minutes from Durham, in a village called Spencer, and we visited it on Memorial Day, when the temperatures climbed well above 90 degrees.

The museum has a large collection of old trains, some of them from the 1800's, and beautiful old cars. It was cool to see those trains in real life -- I'd only seen them in movies and comics books before.

northcarolina

Duke Lemur Center

The first time I saw visited De Keukenhof, one of Holland's largest attractions, was when Sasha visited the Netherlands. I was 20 years old and had never visited the place, nor to the Zaanse Schans, whose windmills are famous all over the world.

Now Milan and Nadia are here we are similarly visiting attractions in Durham and the area we've never been to before.

For example, we visited the Duke Lemur center the other day. An amazing place, where on an area of 85 acres more than 250 animals are housed. Some of the lemurs live indoors, others in large cages, but many of them roam freely in a dedicated part of the Duke Forest. It's the biggest sanctuary for lemurs in the world outside Madagascar. All of this 15 minutes walking from our front door, in the Duke Forest.

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