I have no words to say, on this slow and useless day

Long time, no post, I know. Life is a bit slow, although I'm doing fun things in between.

Anyway, I'm quite happy to tell that starting tomorrow, I'll be working a full-time gig at my current employer (as opposed to the half-time gig I've been doing up until now).

It's strange, the first time in over two years that I'll be working full time again. But, I'm looking forward to it.

There's a realy nice image from APOD of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with accompanying text. The LHC is the largest particle accelator around, and will be finished in May. Parts of the LHC are produced by the Nikhef institute, which is right down from the hall where I work. They even have a countdown clock hanging in the main hallway to countdown to the moment when the first experiments are executed. It's been in place since I work at my current job. And it's nice to slowly see LHC news everywhere.

(via Jeremy Zawodny)

Project Kill Day went well today, but I put in 9 hours of work today, and now I'm quite tired. Good thing that the last item clearly says: Take some rest -- So I'll hit the sack not too late to be fresh again tomorrow.

I did some things differently though. For example, waking up as early as suggested isn't really my thing. Instead, I just woke up an half hour early, rushed through my morning ritual and ended up at work at 9AM, which is about an hour earlier than usual. Also an hour early before (most of) my colleagues, which gave me the time start working well. Other than that, the walking quickly worked well, and also having to decline helping other people (which I usually like to do -- This was pretty hard), simply because I was too busy. Other than that, I tried to minimize social interaction, but it's hard when your (work)roommate is having his birthday ;).

Now the question is: did it work -- after all, such a day is meant to move things forward n a big way. I'm happy with what I did today. I didn't got it moving as far as I initially wanted, but that's okay, since I ran into something unexpected (This feedparser bug, spent almost 2 hours writing proper Media RSS support for it -- Not of enough quality to roll a patch though.), but in the end I managed to fix that, and also managed to get the state of the project in such a way that I can lay it to rest for the coming 2-2.5 weeks.

Tomorrow will be a project kill day at work. The intention is to push my project forward, and in such a state that I can leave it to rest for the coming 14 days, so I can get into full time thesis mode. I haven't done such a day before, so I have no idea if it'll work out for me. I'll let you know.

Thesis work is progressing well, btw. Final experiments should be finished somewhere by Friday. Then I have still 10 days to finish writing.

A while back I stopped working on the MoodViews project, and instead focused on a newer project, called Kunststofzuiger. Basically, it's a text-based search engine for the Dutch radio show Kunststof. The way it works is that is performs automated speech recognition on the audio of the show, and then used the recognized text for searching. Before I started working on it, the index consisted of a few dozen episodes from about a year ago. Now it indexes new episodes (as they become available) of the show every day. Making this work all together nicely was a pretty serious engineering effort and now that that is done, we can do some actual research with it.

But, for the time being, my work on Kunststofzuiger is done, and I'll be moving on to a new project next week. Which, as you've probably guessed involves blogs.

Business with school and work kept me from regularly updating, but now I have a bit of time to bragtell you about my work projects which just went live.

First, there's Moodspotter, which basically is a search engine which shows you what moods people were in when they wrote something about your query. This screenshot probably explains a bit more :


There's also Moodsearch, which is currently very basic, but it'll be expanded in the near future with extended functionality.

We quietly launched a new version of Moodsignals at work last Saturday. Moodsignals analyzes (and makes pretty graphs of) mood annotations of LiveJournal posts and is able to detect when unusual events happen in those annotations. It then analyzes the language used during these unsual events to give an explanation. It also uses news archives to match those unusual events to news events.

What's new?

Auto updates
When Moodsignals was launched in March this year it didn't automatically update, but we had to start the discovery process of new events by hand. Something which we didn't do often, for various reasons. This was fixed last week, and new events (we call them peaks) are now discovered on a daily basis. This is of course, a huge improvement.

Spped improvements
An efficient caching mechanism was implemented, making the generation of the graph of a peak a one time thing.

General interface improvements
The user interface has been made more responsive when generating graphs. This is possible through the use of Ajax technology (We used jQuery, to be more specific), since generating a graph happens in the background now.

Feeds
We've enabled the generation of RSS feeds, which allows you to monitor which peaks are dicovered by Moodsignals. There's a generic feed were all peaks are listed, but you can also subscribe to a mood specific feed of peaks, so choose whatever suits you.

Tags
A lever of user interactivity has been brought into play. Each peak can be tagged by users with the tag(s) of their choosing. It enables the grouping of different mood peaks, but related to the same event, or the grouping of peaks in different time frames (but grouping them together would make sense because they are similar, or something).

Linking back
Last but not least, we do our best to link back to the original posts on which we base our analysis whenever we can, so you can have a look for yourself if we're doing thing right, or not.

It's been too long since I actually wrote here. It's been a busy couple of weeks. Let's do a recap:

Work

I did a presentation at my work to discuss some new features I've been developing for MoodViews, which went ok. After that I worked on the demo for the open day at the Science Park, which was yesterday. While the ocncept seemed pretty simple, there was quite a lot of work involved in producing it. I'll talk more about the new MoodViews features later this month.

Study

This is one of the other things I've been busy with. The deadline for the class I'm currently taking is next Thursday, while the test is next Monday, so it's going to be a busy week.

Other

Besides all that it was a good few weeks with birthday parties, a Buffy marathon and such. Lots of fun!

Yeah, the first day went pretty ok. When I arrived at work, it turned out that my working computer wasn't moved to my room yet, and I didn't have a login either. I did get three keys though, one for the rooms of our group, and two for getting in and out of the building. So in the morning I was working at the computer of someone who's on vacation, and under a login of someone else. At 11:00 I had my first meeting, which was a crash course in understanding how MoodViews works, which is the main project I'll be working on. After that I had lunch with a couple of people who work here too, so I got to meet them. And when I returned my working computer was all set up, along with the new server. But... still no login, so one of my roommates logged in for me. I spent the rest of the afternoon digging in the MoodViews source code, which for the most part isn't too difficult.

Yeah, it's time to let out the secret. I've told a lot of people this already face to face for a couple of weeks now, but I'm only now writing this publicly. Tomorrow I'll start my new job as a part time research programmer, working for the ILPS group, that is a part of the Informatics Institute, which in turn is a part of the Universty of Amsterdam. A small part of what I'll be doing there will be general support things, and the rest of it will be having to do with blogs. Needless to say, I'm very excited to start working there. This means of course, that I've quit my job with the printing company, where I worked for the past seven years.

So, wish me luck for tomorrow!

As it's a week after Drupalcon ended, I'm reminded of the fact that times flies. It really doesn't matter if you're having fun or not. In the past days I've been catching up on work stuff, on my aggregator, which showed about 1,379 unread items last Monday, which in turn led to a mass posting of interesting items in my del.icio.us account, which in turn led me to be the 114th most helpful user of del.icio.us, according to CollaborativeRank.

I have classes starting again next week, and by looking at the rough roster, you can see that it will be quite busy. Yellow is for study, brown(ish) is work. I might squeeze in a few extra hours, especially on Tuesday afternoon, 'cause as it is, I'll be spending 15 hours a week studying, and only 18 hours a week working, which isn't really enough to cut it for two months I think. But still, I'll be looking forward to be sitting in the college benches again, after a five month break. I don't know if I'm used to it anymore, but we'll see. Oh, the classes that I'll be following are Semantic Web, Data Mining, Business Modeling & Design and Organizational Structures.

You know, working with a 64 bit super fast machine is a lot of fun. And I also like Fedora's update manager. All I needed to do to install the MySQL module for PHP was issuing this command:

yum install php-mysql

And 30 seconds later PHP was updated and had also MySQL support.

This was all in preparation for installing an internal wiki for the company I work for. So, a couple of weeks ago I worked with Jabber -- It's set for a definitive roll out this or next week, and now the whole wiki thing. Things are moving forward, and I really like seeing that.

Oops long time no write! bad me :).

HEALTH
Wasn't in a great shape say about the last week with a cold playing up. It all came to a sort of climax yesterday where I was doing reasonably ok during the day, but completely crashed into feeling sick when I came home. Head felty heavy and stuff. well you know how it is. At somewhat like half past ten I thought I was felling better, sat down the comp, and that was the totally wrong thing to do as it turned out. went to bed about 15 minutes later.

STUDYING
Yay! It's end of the season now I suppose. At least until the herkansingen beginnen. Which I will loads of. Another year passed, and this time the result is about zero (m,easured in study points). So, needless to say, I'm a bit in doubt whether I will continue next year. It's also depends on some other factor which I will not mention here, but I'm a bit inclined tot stop for a year if I can do that without too much conqequences.

WORK
While the studying stops work continues. And I still like it. I have got some interesting new projects coming up, now that I can pull myself away for a bit from my current project (the invoice program, i believe I mentioned it before here).

WWW
wow! my domain www.bje.nu has finally been transfered to the same ISP on which I have already got 2get-music.info running. It took a long time because my previous ISP is still sh*t. Glad I'm geerting away from them. Anyway I've been busy building something, expect results quite soon :)

OK, I'm at home now,
had a day where I was mucho tired again, and that makes a day kinda inspireless :(. Been finetuning the crashed computer again, it's almost fixed now, except for the Informix DB connections that don't work yet. And that's pretty important.
Ooh, and I was real glad that the Project Informatiekunde appointment has been put off till monday, cause we (Nadine and I) where originally scheduled for tomorrow morning at 10, but our report is still ike nothing so it would be quite useless anyway. Luckily Nadine has a working shift at that time.

It's been a while (yet again) since I wrote anything down here. Had quite a busy week so to speak.
First of all, the invoice program I'm developing at my work,
has gone live finally, which unfortunately doesn't mean that I'm finished with it, it just needs more attention from me now.
On tuesday, in the afternoon my work PC crashed completely, and we tried to back up thing, but it didn't work :(.
Wednesday I had a meeting with ankie, neti and marthe and I had great fun there !
(hey, I was in good company so that's always fun:).
Thursday and Fridays I worked real hard again. The people working with the invoice program decided it was time to stress test my program by printing & exporting like 87 invoices, even though I have told them several times it was a bad idea in general, and now esp. since my machine was still down. Well, they did it anyway and it went pretty wrong (printing-wise), cause make Word make 250 documents kinda stresses out your machine until it hangs. It does weird things then. And well, I couldn't fix it by changing the program, so whe had to think of soultions in those days. Oh well.
Yesteday I did pretty much nothing except going to a party with my bro. had a bit of fun came early, went to bed not so late and nw i'm sitting here well, doing nothing again. Gotta do some stuff later on ...

Oh, to begin with last week. It was quite a busy week in a way due to some project I had to finish at work.
Quite a scary thing, since it is a project that I have been working on for almost a year now. But since last
week it is used for real, and not as a test anymore. Well, and I had some late work to do ;).
But in the end, it came out allright and it's more-or-less finished now. Though I'll still be around to
update it etc. etc. etc. That's how it is with software projects.
Anyway I got my eyes set on a new project already, which will be a web oriented project to bring a database online
where people can make orders and such things. Next week I'll be installing the machine that is supposed to be
running the software.
Oh, and thursday was a great day btw, except for getting up early (hey there's always something to complain about, right). But anyways, after classes I went home to put on another shirt, and I met willem, riding on his bike. Since whe hadn't seen each other in quite a while we had a little chat and stuff. And well he hasn't changed for a bit actually. Well, maybe a bit, but I couldn't really notice it.
Oh, and talking 'bout meeting people you haven't spoken to in quite a while, when I updated my LiveJournal profile last week to add some interest things and stuff, I came across an old friend that I know from the Corrs mailinglist, and well, she has a LiveJournal too. Great to see you again emilytan :-D
And in the evening there was this midweeking where I had just great fun ;).
Oh, and now it's weekend. Isn't it just great doing nothing ? ;)

Just wanted to congragulate myself on being at work before 10 am. Since coming back
from Boston I have a hard time sleeping well, so I constantly woke up late and arriving
late at work. Hope I can sustain this now :-)

Last friday was quite a hectic day at work as I had some deadlines to concentrate on. All was going reasonably well until a tiny little bug came creeping in the program I was working on. It managed to keep me busy for about three hours, till I solved it. That was a kind of unforssen delay unfortunately. Oh, well.
In the evening I had diner with my family at the place where my sister works to celebrate her upcoming birthday. Was great :).
Over the weekend, I wasn't like super-active, but I did managed to get a few things done. One of them is that I worked on a new site about the handheld I bought lately (see prev. entries). It's coming along ok, will give you the url as soon as it's ready for public viewing:).
Also, a new (testing) version drupal of drupal was released over the weekend, and I intend to be debugging it over the next weeks (I need the final version for another webrelated project).
Oops, I guess that's pretty much techie talk already. Ehhrm, well let's get back to work then :-)

All done with the the editing of my livejournal page for the moment. I like it, but perhaps it's not the most original and/or exciting one. oh well ...

Hmmm, i managed to forget to vote yesterday. I keep forgetting important stuff lately, and it's pretty much starting to annoy me for a bit. Gotta concentrate with whatever i'm doing or write it down or something.

Well, as for the day itself, it was pretty much a generic one. or maybe not. hmmm. anyway I got into a bit of a disagreement with some people on a project that i'm working on. they blame me wholy (sp?) for a couple of mistakes, and well it's not fair. oops, this is probably too vague without a decent explanation, so here. I started writing a program for invoices that we send to our customers somewhere in the summer of last year. I then went on developing, and kept pretty much on showing the results gradually to the people that would be using it in the future. It went pretty much ok until last December, the invoice program was used for testing purposes. Two weeks for the deadline they tell me that a requirement is missing. So I was a bit pissed then, cause it was pretty much work to change it. I did it though, and pretty much in time. Then the people from administration got caught up in stuff regarding the euro (price converting) and they didn't use the invoice program until yesterday. Well, they used it yesterday, and I'm now filled up with work again due to some bugs etc. a couple of bugs where (of course) related to the changes I did late december so the admin people and I started a bit talking about it. And now they say it's my own fault because they've said it (according to them), but I can't recall it. so they've either not said it, or they have not said that it was very inportant (which it pretty much is). well it was a bit too small to talk extensively about it, the main deal is that I gotta fix it anyway, regardless wether i'm to blame or not ;).

Hmmm, 5:30 now, time to go home and have something to eat. new buffy episode (for me;) tonight, can't wait after last week's one.

okay, first entry tonight.... I'm still figuring this thing out for a bit,
especially layout and such things...

Anyway, had a pretty easy day today, no work, just some college, but i woke up too late for that :-). Then i spent saome time on contacting the helpdesk for my adsl connection, but i was told to call back after three o' clock. so i had a couple of hours to spare, did nothing much except for renting new cd's and reading my mail.
then went back, called the helpdesk again, and again, and etc etc. it's still not 100% clear what is wrong with it but will continue to work on it tomorrow.