The last few weekends we have been sorting and packing our belongings.

A move is always a great opportunity to clean up and sort the archives.

Really excited about our new opportunities in Washington, DC!

Sorting papers.

Storage.

Long-time readers know that the server of this website is running in the Netherlands. When we left for the States my parents offered to give the server a place on the attic in Middenmeer.

The server has been running continuously for well over seven years, and doing a great job. But it's starting to show its age -- a scare about a hard disk maybe going bad, and increasingly noisy fans -- so we decided to buy a new one.

The new server arrived without operating system. My father installed and configured OpenBSD earlier this week, so it is now ready for me to install the LAMP stack and some other utilities, and start transferring our websites to the new server. OpenBSD is not for the faint of heart, and it's pretty cool to see it up and running so quickly.

Even enabling the network stack was no problem ("oh, I just did echo dhcp > /etc/hostname.xl0"). Thank you!

Today I went for lunch with Petra; it was great to see her and catch up. We went to Redbowl, an Asian fusion place in Cary, where we had saté with peanut sauce. A shared favorite.

After lunch we did something very Dutch and unusual: we walked across the road to a coffee place. The coffee was excellent, an espresso with freshly roasted beans.

For the first time in weeks it's cooler now, only 79 degrees.

A good day to stay at home and do some house keeping.

I went by the mailbox this morning to pick up two books that I ordered. Looking forward to some fun reading.

- Documenting Software Architectures, Views and Beyond. I saw this in someone's reading list on LinkedIn, and got intrigued.
- Statistical Machine Translation, by Philipp Koehn. Ever since I read a book on MapReduce I wanted to dive deeper into modern machine translation techniques. Really looking forward to reading this one.

This morning the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Fay Hartog Levin announced that she will be stepping down in September.

The Ambassador cites family reasons for her resignation, and says that she will serve the interest closer to her home in Chicago. Hartog-Levin is the 65th United States Ambassador to the Netherlands; she presented her credentials to Queen Beatrix in August 2009. Her parents were Dutch Jews who fled from the Netherlands to Suriname in 1942 and emigrated to the United States in 1948, shortly before she was born.

From her announcement:

I thank the President for granting me the opportunity of a lifetime, and Secretary Clinton for her
inspiring leadership. Special thanks to Prime Ministers Rutte and Balkenende, Deputy Prime
Minister Verhagen and Foreign Minister Rosenthal with whom I have had the good fortune to
work as well as with the many other officials throughout the Dutch government who are
committed to maintaining and strengthening the bonds between our two nations.

I came across an interesting publication this morning, the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. ThoughtWorks, a software development company, is often ahead of the curve, technology-wise, and it's interesting to read their "Technology Radar".

The Tech Radar is a short PDF with recommendations on which technologies to Adopt, Try, Assess or Hold. It gives an opinionated overview of new and emerging technologies in software development. Last week they released the 5th edition.

Their July 2011 edition recommends to "Adopt" GIT, the version-control software, and to "Hold" older and less flexible tools such as ClearCase, something that I think makes a lot of sense. Quality software is not created by artificially constraining developers while doing basic things like check-ins. Folks in my team have been pushing to move to GIT as well, something that I'd like to experiment with.

Interesting is the Radar's emphasis on solutions for the "software last mile" problem: how do you get code in production in a reliable way. I'm very familiar with these "DevOps" practices, because if you don't have a solid process and tools to transfer code from development, to test, to staging, to production, you really don't have quality production system.

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Famous Dutch-American astronomer Tom Gehrels passed away last week at age 86. Professor Gehrels discovered thousands of asteroids and comets and published numerous scientific articles.

Gehrels, who was born in the Haarlemmermeer, the Netherlands, pioneered the first photometric system of asteroids in the 50s, and wavelength dependence of polarization of stars and planets in the 60s, each resulting in an extended sequence of papers in the Astronomical Journal. During World War II Gehrels was, as a teenager, active in the Dutch Resistance. After he escaped to England, he was sent back by parachute as an organizer for the British Special Operations Executive.

Gehrels joined the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 1961 as an Associate Professor. He earned his B.S. in Physics and Astronomy from Leiden University in 1951, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1956.

Read more about Tom Gehrels in this interview with Govert Schilling in Sky & Telescope Magazine.