Catching Up

So I spent some time off in Bergen (in Norway), and had a wonderful time. We went hiking in the mountains, in a lot of snow, of course, and had a good time there, and made new friends.

A First Look at OmniFocus

I’m a big fan of Kinkless GTD, or better yet, I was a big fan. Recently I got my invitation for the alpha program for the newest kid on the GTD tools block, OmniFocus, and now I don’t look back anymore.

When Will the Web 2.0 Bubble Burst?

Every day a load of new start-ups appears on the scene. Every day is full of announcements of new Web-2.0-like tools, platforms, and whatnot. Every day another start-up gets new funding, sometimes in ridiculous amounts. TechCrunch is full of news like that. And every day I ask myself: Haven’t I seen all this before? Before the new millennium millions, if not billions of investor and stock money went down the drain with the crash of the first wave of web start-ups. Venture capitalists invested without questioning business plans, if such a thing even existed. Personally I crashed rather soft. I was still a student, and I found a new job without any problems. I switched from new economy to old economy for a while.

Bootstrapping a Web Project with Java and Rails

For a current gig I had to set up a Java web project from scratch. The set-up isn’t that unusual:

  • Spring 1.2 (yes, it’s rather old, but the project uses a portlet framework which used to work with Spring 1.1, and I don’t want to make the big jump just yet, the upgrade to Spring 1.2 went just fine though)
  • Hibernate 3.2 (hence the upgrade to Spring 1.2)
  • Tomcat 4.1.38 (again, the framework, and it’s a very stable version)