Musings

This is the view I’m enjoying right now. Looking out living room window of our holiday-flat in a little village in the mountains south-west in Switzerland. This is a really small village, some 1300 inhabitants and almost non-existent tourism. But there are sheep and goats and this village happens to have the highest vineyards in Europe, so the supply with cheese, meat and wine is endless and excellent. And the people are extremely friendly. Great area for quiet holidays or working days. ...

I’m sitting in front of two clustered Notes servers that have died on me when I tried to diagnose a problem using the OpenLog log database. I added some unsupcious looking code to circumvent a problem that of course failed. In order to get more informtation on what failed, I decided to use OpenLog to pinpoint the error. The moment, the agent ran with OpenLog enabled the Domino 6.0.4 server died. The following restart had it hanging on a consistency check. Killing the server with nsd -killand a subsequent nfixup -j -S c:\domdata brought up a lot of “interesting” error messages: ...

Mike Clark has an incredible powerfull idea: Learning through testing. He describes how he uses unit tests to learn a programming language (Ruby in this case). Each unit test encapsulates a bit of language knowledge he has aquired. Writing the unit tests, he explores a bit of the language. Also, there’s a written trail of things he has done and explored. I find this an extremely compelling way of learning a language and keeping track of what you know, so I guess this will go into my: “Things to try out” stack. ...

2600+ pages…. It is over – I want more

I have successfully avoided a lot of the web based tools, aggregators, services, demonstrations of technology and general doo-ahhs. But I have come across two (and I’m probably the last person in the blogosphere to do so) that really have helped immensly in how I read, digest and store information. Let me introduce bloglines and del.icio.us. On second thought though, I don’t think they need introductions. Because I roam from computer to computer, having those resources on a central server, makes it totally easy and practicable to read >160 feeds. And on every computer I have the up-to-date list of subscriptions and read feeds. Just fantastic. Same for del.icio.us - having a handy way of keeping track of bookmarkable stuff is great. ...

Skype has started the SkypeIn Beta (Windows only at the moment). Sign up & set up is skype like easy and it calling my new number worked 30 seconds after paying for it. At the moment I have a 3 month subscription, paying EUR 10. This is more of a test, than a real number - but who knows - that might change. You can call me on +1 (415) 367-3772 - I might be online… ...