Year in review 2006!

I like to take a quick look back at some of the major events in my life over the last year, not only in the private sphere but including my software and sporting milestones too.

This year started with a trip to the states for me, visiting family and my best friend that was just back from Iraq. It was a very nice trip with a surprise phone call from my wife telling me that we were expecting our second child!

I was able to finish up all the major project on our house that were in the planning, such as a new brick path in the backyard, finishing off the loft and fixing up the second room for my daughter in expectation of our second child.

In the summer vacation we were on the route of the 3rd stage of the Tour de France, which was very exciting to see! I had pretty much just started cycling myself at the end of last year so it was nice to be in Limburg and to climb many of the better known hills in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately a month later I crashed on my bike and broke my left hand, pretty much ending my cycling for the year (did ride a bit since then, but the weather has turned bad so that was that for this year). My total for the year was a single flat tire and over 2700 km’s (and around 1300 km’s on my bike I ride to work)!

Just before the World Series started my wife arranged for digital television here which gives me the NASN and all the live USA sports one could wish for! I was in heaven and finally saw a World Series game live!

For Halloween I arranged for my daughter to be able to trick or treat in the neighborhood. This was greeted with such enthusiasm by everyone that we ended up with a rather large group going door to door and many new faces that want to be part of the event next year!

I was also surprised with the naming of my best friends baby boy to include my name! An honor and a treat to see ones name being passed on: Matej Eric Roth, my little buddy!

On the software front, AbTLinux has taken off with another student group providing the requirements for our configManager. I have started working on the design and implementation of our package manager and much more, see the site!

My Publication Management System (PMS) was adopted by the entire Computer Science institute after being used at our departmental level for over a year. This was good news as it gives me a larger user base and more feedback to improve on this software.

Of course, the biggest event of the year is only a few weeks old and lying next to me on the couch as I write this… my son, Max Orson Marius Jody Schabell! We have been truely blessed this year!

From my family to yours, we wish you a happy new year!

A baby boy!

This one is a bit of a personal posting, to mark the birth of my baby boy! He arrived in this world today, big (4885 grams and 55cm) and very hungry!

I will be taking off the rest of the year to relax (all you fathers out there know that ‘relax’ is a relative term here in this context with a two year old and a new baby in the house) and enjoy the family addition. ;-)

How Google ranks our pages?

I read a very interesting article at the American Mathimatical Society about how Google works the Internet and comes up with an quantitative value for the relevance of your page(s):

How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack

I wanted to post this as a follow up to my previous entry, “Google page ranking tools”, so now we have a better idea what these tools are reporting! ;-)

Divide by zero solved?

I read this morning that Dr. James Anderson, from the University of Reading’s computer science department has solved the divide by zero problem… can you believe it!

You can read about it in the bbc article here and more about Dr. James Anderson here.

Mutt mailer index overview!

I have been getting tired of having to look up the various Mutt flags that show up only once in awhile on the index view. 

I decided to put them here for myself and maybe for you out there who need only this information and not a complete Mutt tutorial to plow through. 

;-) 

Status Flags 

In addition to who sent the message and the subject, a short summary of the disposition of each message is printed beside the message number. Zero or more of the following “flags” may appear, which mean: 

• D message is deleted (is marked for deletion) 
• d message have attachments marked for deletion 
• K contains a PGP public key 
• N message is new 
• O message is old 
• P message is PGP encrypted 
• r message has been replied to 
• S message is PGP signed, and the signature is succesfully verified 
• s message is PGP signed 
• ! message is flagged 
• * message is tagged 

Furthermore, the following flags reflect who the message is addressed to. They can be customized with the $to_chars variable. 

• + message is to you and you only 
• T message is to you, but also to or cc’ed to others 
• C message is cc’ed to you 
• F message is from you 
• L message is sent to a subscribed mailing list

Ubuntu java, moving from 1.4 to 1.5 using java alternatives

Today I migrated my box at home to Ubuntu Edgy (6.10), went pretty smooth but borked out my locales (I can deal with that) and removed Perl for some reason. After straightening that out I wanted to move on to java 1.5 for my Java projects. This is when I hit the 'java alternatives' setup in Ubuntu for the first time.

The problem is I don't want to remove java 1.4 so I had to figure out how to reset the links in the alternatives system to point to java 1.5 and not java 1.4 anymore. Here is what I did:

# first install java 1.5. 
$ sudo aptitude install sun-java5-jre

# After the install finished I still had java 1.4 linked via the alternative system.
$ java -version

java version "1.4.2-02" 
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build Blackdown-1.4.2-02) 
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build Blackdown-1.4.2-02, mixed mode)

# here we can look at the current settings in the alternatives system. 
$ sudo update-java-alternatives --list

java-1.5.0-sun 53 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun

# we want the 1.5 version so need to set that. 
$ sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-1.5.0-sun

# results are clearly that we are on java 1.5 now! 
$ java -version

java version "1.5.0_06" 
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05) 
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode) 

Setting up eruby with apache2

I was trying to get my AbTLinux project trac site to display the ruby files in the browser today and thought it might save someone a bit of work by placing my solution here.

# 1)  installed eruby which gives you /usr/bin/eruby.

# 2) copy or symlink eruby to the apache2 cgi-bin direcotry. 
{cp | link -s} /usr/bin/eruby  apache2/cgi-bin/eruby

# 3) add the following code to your apache2 httpd.conf file.

AddType application/x-httpd-eruby .rhtml 
Action application/x-httpd-eruby /cgi-bin/eruby

# 4) add ruby file extensions to the DirectoryIndex 
#    directive, so it looks something like this. 

DirectoryIndex index.html index.shtml index.rhtml 

Just restart apache2 and you are ready to go, see the AbTLinux trac browser for the results! ;-)

Google page ranking tools

Today I checked out my sites Google Page Ranking and was surprised to see my ranking numbers. I guess I am getting some traffic after all! ;-)

There are a few sites and tools you can use to check any sites page ranking. They almost all include an option to generate some code to include a reporting counter on your site, some of them are pretty nice. I have added some to all my sites just to be able to keep an eye on this value. Here is a list of some of the nicer sites providing this sort of tooling:

• CheckPageRank
• BlogFlux
• MyGooglePageRank
• PR Checker

My favorite counter is the one on CheckPageRank, here is their code to add the counter to your site:

<!-- CheckPageRank.com PageRank script -->
<a href="http://www.checkpagerank.com/" title="Check Page Rank">
  <img src="http://www.checkpagerank.com/images/check-page-rank.gif" 
    alt="Check Page Rank" border="0" />
</a>
<br />
<script type="text/javascript">
  <!--
     checkpagerank_url = '%domain%';
     checkpagerank_display_icon = true;
     checkpagerank_display_text = true;
     checkpagerank_new_window = false;
  //-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://www.checkpagerank.com/js-checker/pagerank.js">
</script>

For a counter with simplicity I love the one from BlogFlux, here is their code to add the counter to your site:

<a href="http://pr.blogflux.com/">
  <img src="http://pr.blogflux.com/pr.php" 
    alt="Google PageRank Checker - Page Rank Calculator" 
      width="80" height="15" border="0">
</a>

Good luck with your page rankings!

AbTLinux package manager progress

This last week I got some time free in the evenings to work a bit on the abt package manager, part of AbTLinux distribution. I am working on it this weekend still but have implemented the following functionality based on a test package (fortune):

• abt -h | –help
• abt [ -n | news ]
• abt show-details fortune
• abt show-journal
• abt [ -d | download ] fortune
• abt [ -i | install ] fortune

I have all of the above functionality working and the install function is up to and including queuing the package for install. For more information you can see the project site and check the mailing lists or code repository (SVN on sourceforge) for progress reports.
I have been digging into Ruby as a programming language on the way and received my Ruby book (The Ruby Way, second edition, by Hal Fulton) order this weekend. That has sped up my work considerably! I am expecting to make some good progress over the coming month, so stay tuned! ;-)

Trying out a new technology: Meebo.com

After helping some people at work set this up, I thought I might try it for a bit myself. It is called Meebo and is a chat service that you can run from your browser (ajax based). It includes all major chat services, AIM, YAHOO, MSN, JABBER and ICQ.

One of the more interesting features is the chat widget that you can include in your website. I have added it to the bottom right corner of my site and if I am logged into my chat account, anyone can see that I am online and reach me by putting a message into the chat window there. This is a neat idea from the Meebo people, but I am not too sure how functional it is on the open Internet, so I am going to run a bit of a test for awhile and see if my family and friends overseas find this useful.

Hope to chat with you soon! ;-)

Signed up for Basic Teaching Qualification (University level)

This week I became aware of the possibility at work to take a course, IOWO: LBK, that provides me with a basic university teaching diploma. Since I have been teaching from time to time at the Radboud University Nijmegen I decided to get together with my boss and discuss the possibilities. It seems to be funded by the University if you are teaching there and my boss thought it would be good for me too.

It involves 6 courses over a total of 260 hours, taking anywhere between one and two years to complete depending on how you plan it. Pretty interesting and would be a good refresher on the various courses I have had on teaching in the past.

Published my LogManager to PHP Classes

You can find my LogManager class on PHP Classes.

Published my BiBTeXManager to PHP Classes

I have wanted to do this for some time, but have now finally gotten some free time to submit some of my work to PHP Classes. I have started by uploading my BiBTeXManager. I plan to post more classes I have made soon as this seems like a nice central place to post my personal PHP library of classes. ;-)