Van Gils Blogs

For a while I used google for a lot of things: search, mail, calendar, news reader and so on. Things went “wrong” when I realized that I missed mutt (my present mail reader) too much. I switched back to mutt on my debian server, dropped the calendar after a while and so on. At the moment I only use google for search on the web and reading news.

In itself that isn’t such a bad thing. Pretty happy with the situation actually. I just spoke with Eric who is considering to move all his stuff (even his blog!) to Google. The main argument in favor is: no maintenance. Google simply takes care of updates of the software, backups of data and so on. The argument against is privacy: Google already knows a lot about me. Should they know more? Some say privacy doesn’t exist on the Web anyway. Others claim that if everyone starts putting all their personal information online then a situation of “information overload for search engines” will emerge and privacy for web users will be back.

Anyway, the big question is: to move everything to Google… or not? Thoughts?

Yesterday I scored 50.00 % at the lindeboom. It was the last evening of the season by the way. I always wanted to score exactly 50% or exactly 0 imp A “dream come true” so to say. Oh, we also won a few beers (by making the final trick with ♦7). Here’s the last deal of the evening:

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Serena opened a multi 2♦ and my RHO followed with a strong 2NT. Smelling beer I confidently bid 3♦ after which LHO had a problem… after a while she bid dbl after which it was smooth sailing for Serena: a big score (apparently we needed it for 50%) and another beer! Yay!

So far the weekend has been quite interesting with plenty of relax time (which is a good thing). Friday was an interesting day at work as I learned a lot about the (political) situation about enterprise architecture, a topic that strongly influences my own work. The trip back was not as smooth as I hoped given the holiday traffic, though. I left at 4 but it still took over 2 hours to get home! In the evening Koen and I watched some TV which was nice… He preferred sandwiches over pizza so that’s what we had for dinner. I did some reading in the early evening (Booch’ new book! yay ).

Saturday I got to sleep in. I had some vague plans to go to “van Mourick” to look at some paint samples but really wasn’t in the mood for it. Instead we went to the new Plus-supermarket here. Nice store. Big, which a lot of fresh products including fish. After that we had to quickly rush to the mall to buy some presents for ErikP and Ton (aka Loekie), rush home and hop in the car to Erik’s party in Arnhem. All in all a great day.

Finally, yesterday I put in some of Koen’s red gel. It looks more impressive on him, though, as his hair is much lighter than mine. But still, it’s fun to change your hair color for a day. We both got to sleep in (sort of) and were planning on going out for a walk. However, since the weather was so bad we had to postpone that untill approx 15.00 Well, it did give me plenty of time to do some coding!

I’ve taken several attempts to create an app in Ruby that generates bridge deals. There are several apps around to do that but it is more fun to do it yourself. Besides, it gave me something nice to code while / to learn Ruby better (desperately need to brush up on my ruby if I want to do some coding for AbTLinux). Anyway, I had a rough version with some unit tests but it had … issues. After some refactoring and modeling I came up with a solution. Here’s a high-level overview of the design:

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