Marines cleaning up the mess again

As you can read here in the original post, it is now clear that the Marines are on the ground in force and there to take names in Afghanistan. Here is an excerpt that caught my attention:

"Operation Azada Wosa — "Stay Free" in the local Pashto language — kicked off Monday and represents a new push by the U.S. military to retake territory that NATO troops have so far been unable to conquer and hold. The 2,400-strong 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is on its first mission since it started arriving here more than a month ago."

If you read between the lines you see that this is something of a rather large push, using a MEU which consists of something like this (as described here):

"A typical MEU (SOC) structure has 2,100 Marines and sailors. It is equipped with:

• 7 to 16 light armored vehicles
• eight 81 mm mortars
• eight TOW missile systems
• eight Javelin missile launchers
• 15 amphibious assault vehicles
• six 155 mm howitzers
• four M1A1 main battle tanks
• 12 CH-46E medium lift assault helicopters
• six CH-53E heavy lift assault helicopters
• three UH-1N utility helicopters
• four AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters
• six AV-8B Harrier Jets
• two KC-130 re-fueler/transport aircraft (on call in the continental United States)
• two reverse osmosis water purification units
• one LMT 3000 water purification unit
• one sea tractor
• four TRAMs (10,000-pound capacity forklifts)
• two 4,000 pound capacity forklifts
• three D-7 bulldozers
• 30 5-ton or 7-ton/12-ton trucks
• one dump truck
• four Mk48 logistical vehicle systems
• seven 500 gallon water containers
• 63 HMMWVs."

Note the links at the bottom of the article and you see reason for concern, it seems the Pentagon is considering putting even more troops on the ground... is this our next big move in the war on terrorism?

News from the front in Afganistan

With my best buddy still away for a few more weeks, there was a bit of a scare when an USO tour stopped by to entertain the troops. It seems the country singer Toby Keith's show was shelled, causing a bit of a panic.

It seems that there were no injuries, but I will be glad when he is back home in a few weeks. That is not the place to be right now...

Trac for AbTLinux has been recovered

A few weeks ago the AbTLinux project lost its Trac machine. I was able to pick it up last week and a bit of digging in the internals turned up the fact that two of the three cooling fans were pretty borked. It sounded like a sick helo trying to land at high altitudes, if you can imagine that. It was specifically the case fan in the back and the tiny fan on the video card.

Until repairs can be made I have dissected the machine and was able to recover the entire Trac database. I have found new hosting, uploaded the old database, and the work put in to setup our development plan for 2008 was recovered.

Check it out at the AbTLinux Trac site.

Telfort internet success story

As I published some time ago, No Internet from Abel, I was having some rather extreme difficulties getting a new ISP hooked up after moving to my new house. After 18 days of frustrations I was forced to look for a new provider, well Tele2 was the next crappy ISP I had the misfortune to run into.

I called them right after canceling on Abel, but after not hearing anything back from them in a week, I contacted the help desk. They tell me that they have no record of an order for 20MBit Internet, but would love to hook me up. But wait a minute... my address does not support that speed... no sir, you can only have 1.5Mbit connection... right.

After hanging up on them, I browsed the selections available to me and Telfort popped up with a good offer. I placed the order online this time, received a tracking number to follow my order within a day, a letter confirming all was in processing and I would have a new connection in 3-5 weeks.

So I wait, but in 3 weeks I get an email confirming my connection would be available this week! How can that be, inside of 3 weeks????? No way. But I come home that same day to find the starter kit with modem and a second letter telling me my connection was active. I plug in the modem, discover that the setup works (not bridged either, but default is routed!), can you beat that!

I am an avid fan now... in a few months my telephone connection with Tele2 is over (contract until August) and I plan to let Telfort host my VOIP. Well done Telfort, you have just won a customer!

PRIMA project stirring up some excitement

The PRoject Information Monitoring Application (PRIMA) had their kickoff in January and I presented their first iteration results here in February.

Since that time it has been quiet on the blogging front (well, they have been blogging away, but I have been holding back) as I was waiting for a good time to bring out a progress report. Now is the time!

The last weeks have been about pushing out the results of their work to the rest of the department. We arranged for a machine to run their application, setup the application to run centrally in the department on a normal monitor, and when that was not enough we stole one of the larger gaming LCD screens to put up in the department. It was needed to impress the big boss and convince him that a very large LCD screen would be perfect to put on the wall for the final application.

It was rather funny to watch the reactions of our colleagues once they noticed we had setup PRIMA centrally without telling anyone. The just started to appear from everywhere to come take a look. As you can see it started slowly with our departmental boss showing it off to some of his contacts outside of our department, then all of a sudden it was a massive group from our own department flocking to check out the new flashy build information, and finally it was presented as a live demo to the big boss of SNS IT Development. He summed the results up pretty well when he said we need to put this up on a VERY big screen and that we were to order it as soon as possible.

Our departmental chief was as happy as can be that Lisa and Ikram were able to impress the big boss so much that he immediately sent Lisa and Ikram off to shop online for a very big LCD screen (we are looking at around 46" LCD screens, really gonna be beautiful)! In the next weeks Lisa and Ikram hope to take delivery on the new screen, continue to add functionality, and basically keep impressing everyone with their progress on the PRIMA project.

One side note, the centrally displayed PRIMA application has stirred up the imagination of everyone. This has caused input to start rolling in on what is confusing in the displayed information, what might be missing, what they might like to see added, etc. It is rejuvenating to see the enthusiasm it stirs up and it is hard to imagine what the reactions are to be when the planned functionality hits the screen over the next 2 months.

Cycling to work in Spring 2008

Finally got a chance to ride the racing bike to work this week. I have been averaging around 240-260km totals per month on my city bike, but this is not as nice to ride.

I just did an easy ride to work with a total of 31km on the meter. Was nice weather and I took a detour through the country side on the way home; Petelaar, Dungen, Rosemalen, and then back to my house.

Nothing heavy on the speed side, just around 30km per hour average when traffic and other bikers on the bike paths allowed it (have to be careful around here, they don't expect you to come up on them so fast from behind).

Tour of West Portland 2008

Based on the Ronde van Vlaanderen and nicknamed De Ronde Van Oeste Portlandia, this years ride was as wet and nasty as last years (see here for a video). This year they have posted the story on BikePortland.org, there are some photos on the site and you can see the route here:

AbTLinux Trac site down

We seem to have lost our Trac site due to hardware failure (fan acting up). I am not sure if the box had a meltdown or was just taken offline as a preventive measure.

Either way, I have removed the site link and will put it up after low (thanks!) gets a chance to setup a new hosting location. He is a handy guy to have around and I am sure we will be up and running again soon.

And I just setup our development plan for 2008...

AbTLinux - development plans for 2008

I have laid out some development plans over at our Trac site in the form of milestones, deadlines, and such for the versions up to 1.0. Basically I put a release on the schedule for every month, with plans to complete but a few issues in each period.

This is more to facilitate progress, something new every month, than to put pressure on myself. Again, the only developer so far is me!

I have on the schedule for the next release v0.3 two items:

1. provide for default configuration overriding
2. implement 10 new packages from our supported packages list

Turning your macbook into a router

Maybe there are more of you out there that have had some reason to need a home network that would work through your macbook, so here is my solution for creating your own home network through your macbook.

I recently moved, had problems with ISP's not delivering on their promises so that I was left with out an Internet connection. I was able to sort out a wireless connection through one of my new neighbors, so that was solved, but what about the rest of my network here at home? Since the macbook comes with a wireless connection and an ethernet port I see no reason not to use it as a temporary router until some ISP can hook up my house.

Once you have a connection over the wireless card on your macbook, you will need to adjust the System Preferences to allow your wired home network to connect over your macbook's ethernet connection as follows:

System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet (tab) | Firewall (tab) | Services (tab)

Internet: within this tab you need to select the route you wish to share in your home network, in my case it is the wired Ethernet card so I chose Built-in Ethernet.

Firewall: within this tab you can select the ports or services you wish to allow through your macbook's firewall; I selected only Network Time and Remote Login - SSH.

Services: within this tab you set the services you wish to activate on your macbook, up to you what you want to open up here.

I stopped and started the Internet and Firewall services with the provided buttons and as long as the macbook is on, connected through both the wireless and wired Ethernet connections you should have a working home network.

Should you have any problems, try turning off the firewall as a test to whether the home network works at all. Most problems come from a firewall settings being too strict (no, I am not advocating dropping the use of a firewall, just simplifying your testing for you...).

Just for some fun, what my blog is worth

This was kinda funny, not sure what they base it on, but I would love to see who would want to pay for my blog (must have money to burn). Down side is that they would be paying in dollars, which ain't worth much anymore...

My blog is worth $4,516.32.
How much is your blog worth?

Empowering Full Scale Straight Through Processing with BPM

Last week I got the idea to try and get permission to submit a paper to BPM 2008 6th International Conference on Business Process Management. It took a trip to the Radboud University Nijmegen on Monday, where my co-author and I sorted out the details for a plan of attack.

I spent much of the next three days writing late into the night, but it is finally finished and submitted. Should it be accepted, then I am off to Milan, Italy later this year. If not, then we will target another venue as this is a rather interesting industry paper.

I will publish the paper at a later date should it get accepted, but the abstract will give you an idea of the contents. Fingers crossed!

Abstract:
As one of the larger Dutch financial institutions, SNS Bank in the Netherlands has made a strategic decision to empower her customers on-line by automating her business processes. The ability to facilitate the customer is achieved by applying BPM techniques in her existing selling channels. Both the publicly available and internal processes are being revamped to provide the customer with full scale Straight Through Processing (STP).

This paper takes a tour of the latest BPM project at SNS Bank, provides empirical evidence that this move has already allowed SNS Bank to reap the benefits of BPM, and discusses the remaining challenges for both business and IT.

No Internet from Abel

It has been a long time since I have had a chance to post anything, but I am about to tell you why... I have moved into a new house this month, which should not have had much effect with regards to my Internet access.

As you can imagine I started the Internet migration by selecting a new provider months ahead of the move and signed at the end of 2007. I received a letter dated Jan 2008 that the move would be competed on 5 March 2008. Great!

Later I received two more letter both stating that I have been assigned some user id and password, that the connection would be there in March, and basically that everything is in order. I am happy, all seems to be going well.

Then reality sets in, with the move taking place on the first of March, the telephone line being setup on 3 March, but on 5 March I have no Internet... uh oh...

A mail to the support address of Abel takes 5 days for a reply, but at 50 cents a minute for the support telephone line I am a bit hesitant to call for this. After a simple reply that they were working on it, I decided to call the support line. The date was 10 March, I was on hold for 20 minutes before hanging up. I am not sure if the line is full as you only have a voice saying everyone is busy, please wait. I try later in the afternoon and get the technical support after about 3 minutes of waiting; the problem is being worked on (the neighborhood telephone box is full says the KPN telephone company) and they will call me back today about it with an update.

After four days and no reply from Abel, my wife calls them at their local office number, same song and dance. I am again to be called, they are working on it.

Again, nothing...

Again, 3 days later....

I call them and hear that they can't deliver on the promised Internet, connection not possible, will refund your money, have a nice day. So. There you go...

It is 18 March and I am forced to try another provider. They say it will take 4-5 weeks to setup Internet. As you can imagine this might be a bit of a problem for me to post anything at all for some time. Wish me luck. :-(