Guus Bosman

software executive and technologist

You are here

Home
Java

SCEA, part I

Sat, 05/22/2004 - 11:03am

Books I'm studying from.I am preparing for a Java exam I want to do. The certificate is called "Sun Certified Architect for J2EE", and it's my goal to get it in the next two months.

The exam consists of three parts. The first part, which I'm studying now, is a theoretical exam. It is not very difficult, because it deals with things I often work with. It is interesting to read all the theory again, and also to learn the vocabulary by hard. This makes communicating ideas with others much easier. Today I've been studying all day on it, and tomorrow I'll continue.

I hope to do the test for part one in the beginning of June, after the deadline of my current project.

»
internet

Webserver Vrije Universiteit

Thu, 05/20/2004 - 3:45pm

Tonight I was looking up something on the website of my university, and I noticed it was extremely slow. I didn't pay a lot of attention to it; I thought there was perhaps a problem with their internet connection.

But the real cause is very likely this article on Slashdot that I accidentily came across a few minutes later. The article about an ex-professor of mine, Mr. Tanenbaum, is making so many people go to the VU website that the webservers there are having a hard time staying 'alive'.

This is called the Slashdot effect: a link on the frontpage of that hugely popular website would cause Guus Bosman.nl to immediately go up in smoke and it would definitely upset my ISP.

»
chess

Working on Ascension Day

Thu, 05/20/2004 - 2:04pm

Today is Ascension Day, which is a national holiday in the Netherlands. Chess is closed today, and many colleague's are taking tomorrow of as well.

For me it was a working day today. Since a week I've been working on a new, short project that has to be ready somewhere next week. I didn't mind working today at all -- the project is very cool and it's really fun to make sure that the project will be ready on time.

It's my job to make sure that whole project take makes sense from a technological point of view, which is a nice responsibility. The website we are creating has to be secure, and we are integrating the website with around 10 external parties, which is really nice.

»
Deutsch

Subjunctive I

Tue, 05/18/2004 - 12:27pm

Yesterday we studied about the Subjunctive I, or Konjunktiv I in German. It was a logical next step after learning about the Subjunctive II last week. The Konjunktive is a so-called Modus: a way of structure a sentence.

We also watched TV: we saw the German 20:00 o'clock news together and discussed it afterwards.

»
dailylife

Homework Sunday

Sun, 05/16/2004 - 1:25pm

Today I've been doing homework all day. For the German course there was more homework than usual so I spent the whole morning on it.

I'm also working to get a new Java certification. The subject is not very difficult, but it requires some time.

In Middenmeer there was a large fire last week.

»
dailylife

Eurovision Songcontest 2004

Sat, 05/15/2004 - 7:06pm

European Songcontest 2004.I had a fun evening watching the Eurovision Songcontest. Last year we watched it for the first time, and I was looking forward to see the show again.

Like last year, a very large part of the fun were the comments by Terry "only 23 to go" Wogan, the voice-over of BBC 1. About the Dutch: "Watch out for the vocal group, they are making their own particular fashion statement".

I liked this year's winner, Ukraine. Terry Wogan: "This is gonna get a lot of votes when the pubs close". The Ukrainians made a really nice show; a real performance. The Dutch were really boring, just two guys on stage.

»
Java

Tomcat clustering

Sat, 05/15/2004 - 12:02pm

Tomcat Clustering. Image (c) OnJava.comToday I've been working a nice Java project, just for fun. It's been quite a while since I had time to do that; I've been quite busy the last few weekends.

I looked into a feature of the new Tomcat, a servlet container that I often use at my work. I've been working with version 5 for a while now, but one of the new things I didn't try yet was clustering. This is a mechanism to provide more up-time and better scalability in a web-application.

Today I set up a few instances of Tomcat at my desktop, and experimented with and read about the clustering and load balancing features of this open source server.

I found two nice articles on OnJava.com about this ([1], [2]) that were very helpful to provide a quick start. The experiment went quite well; the hardest aspect was to configure a multicasting IP address.

It's nice to see 'little' Tomcat start to support features that its bigger brothers have had for a long time. However, I feel that it's mainly useful for testing purposes and as a development tool. If your website is big enough to warrant clustering, you'd probably want to go for a commercial tool such as WebSphere or WebLogic, if only for the support contract.

»
travelling

Jaap to Bulgaria

Sat, 05/15/2004 - 4:08am

Jaap, my father, is going to Bulgaria! He left yesterday evening for a study visit. The visit is about is the quality of initial vocational training and quality assurance mechanisms for training, which he has been working on here in the Netherlands.

The cool thing is that he decided to go by train, which is a real adventure: he's traveling through seven countries. This morning around 7.00 o'clock he arrived in München, where he took a direct train to Beograd. He'll arrive there around 23:00 o'clock, and then take another train to Sofia.

Jaap is keeping track of his stay in Bulgaria on his website.

»
chess

Day in Zeist

Thu, 05/13/2004 - 1:53pm

Today we had a Chess meeting in Zeist all day.

There was an informal get-together yesterday evening. I had to do some administrative work, so I arrived only at midnight in Zeist. The bar in the hotel had just closed, but the personel was very friendly and gave me a beer anyway.

Soon afterwards we went to a pub around the corner, De Druppel. That pub closed around 2:30 o'clock, which was probably for the best as everybody had to get up at 9:00 o'clock.

It was a very interesting day; there were presentations of projects Chess did, and presentations on the business processes and quality assurance of Chess.

»
Deutsch

Subjunctive II

Tue, 05/11/2004 - 5:03pm

Yesterday we learned about the Subjunctive II, or Konjunktiv II in German. Next week we'll get the Subjunctive I; it's useful to refresh all these things.

At my work I started on a new project. It's a small project, but with a tight deadline: in about two weeks the program has to be ready. I enjoy the fact that there's a mixture of short-term speedy projects and long-term projects at Chess.

»

Pages

Recent comments

Recently read

Books I've recently read: