Guus Bosman

software executive and technologist

You are here

Home
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>
»
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.

»
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.

»
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.

»
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).

»
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.

»
dailylife

Kaaterskill Falls

Tue, 05/11/2010 - 7:40am

When we were first in the Catskill mountains 12 years ago I didn't know the Dutch history of the Hudson Valley.

Close to the resort where we worked are the Kaaterskill Falls. Kaater is Dutch for 'cat', Kill is an old Dutch word for 'creek'.

»
dailylife

A trip back in time

Sun, 05/09/2010 - 5:14pm

Yesterday we made a trip back in time -- 12 years, to be precise. In June 1998 Sasha and I met each other for the first time in Tannersville, New York in an exchange program. Yesterday we visited the hotel where we then worked.

The resort changed owners several times since we were there, and sadly it's in pretty bad shape. Two workers were patching things up for the summer season and allowed us to go inside and take some pictures.

It was amazing to see the places were we worked that summer, and a great day trip.

»
dutchusa

Queen's Day

Sat, 05/01/2010 - 12:00am

Queen's Day.Tonight I attended two parties for Queen's Day in New York.

Both drew large crowds; there were hundreds of Dutch people, most of them in orange. Within 5 minutes at the first party somebody spilled beer on me; totally in line with past experiences years ago. It was a lot of fun; I especially enjoyed the second one in Mars 2112, organized by NLBorrels.com.

Queen's Day is my favorite day in the Netherlands, wonderful memories of Amsterdam.

»
dailylife

Weekend & OCR

Sat, 04/24/2010 - 8:12am

It was a busy week at work; nice that it's weekend. Sasha traveled to Durham so we left for the airport early on Thursday, and she came back home yesterday evening late. By coincidence one of her professors from the Netherlands was in Durham Thursday also so they met up.

I'm working on a project for 'the other website' that involves scanning a lot of old documents into PDF files. It's pretty cool that Adobe Acrobat Reader has built-in OCR, and that OCR works so well these days. I haven't tried OCR in a long time; the previous time must have been when I lived with my parents some 15 years ago. OCR means Optical Character Recognition: the conversion of scanned images into text. The algorithms and technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, it's really a solved problem now.

No big plans for this weekend, perhaps we'll visit Rutgers, a local university in Somerset, which has a big cultural event today. Someone we know is participating and it would be fun to say hello.

»

Pages

Recent comments

Recently read

Books I've recently read: