Dutch government: Linspire or MS Windows?
Thursday, December 16, 2004, 03:05 - The News
Recently the Dutch government announced that it is about to close a deal with Microsoft for a 5 year software contract for 260.000 computers. As an amount of about 150 million euro is involved, some parties are protesting that there should have been an open-bid process, which is required by European guidelines.

Yesterday Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire, published an open letter to the Dutch prime minister, offering software and support for a total price of about 6 million euro.

Of course quite an amount of effort would be needed to migrate away from MS Windows, the costs of which should be added to the 6 million, but the open letter is fun reading, especially about pretending that there was an open request for quotes that Robertson is reacting to.

And as someone responded in Dutch: it's nice of the open source community to publish open letters :)


Prince Bernhard buried in Delft
Saturday, December 11, 2004, 19:30 - The News
Today Prince Bernhard, the father of the Dutch queen was buried in the Royal Tomb Cellar in the New Church here in Delft. He died on December 1, 2004, age 93.



Even though this is the third royal burial in just over two years (Prince Claus, the husband of the queen died in October 2002 and her mother, Queen Juliana died in March of this year), it still is a very impressive ceremony, which we are not very used to here in The Netherlands. Especially now there were extra military honors as Prince Bernhard played an important role for Dutch resistance in World War II and attended the capitulation of the Germans on May 5, 1945.
The Royal Netherlands Air Force performed a fly-past in a Missing Man Formation, where a Spitfire broke out of the formation with three F16 fighter aircraft as they flew over the coffin on the Markt in Delft.
Prince Bernhard also helped to establish the World Wildlife Fund in 1961.

I work in The Hague, adjacent to the route the horses take, in this case with the coffin on an undercarriage of a canon used in WWII, from The Hague to Delft. So last two times we stepped out of the office to watch the cortege pass by. Very impressive.
Today I stayed at home, because it is very crowded in the city of Delft, and it is very hard to see anything. I watched it all on TV.

After a remembrance service in the New Church, the coffin was brought into the cellars, to find its final resting place next to his former wife, the previous Queen Juliana. Afterwards the cellars will be closed again. The only thing the public can see there is the mausoleum of William of Orange, the "Father of the Fatherland".

I wish Queen Beatrix and the Royal family much strength in handling these losses in such short time.




msoControlSplitButtonPopup
Thursday, December 9, 2004, 02:29 - Programming
Today I continued with my Outlook plugin in .NET project. All required features are now present and there even is a configuration screen to edit the settings and store them in the Windows Registry. So now I have two buttons in the Outlook standard bar: one to perform the actual action and one to display the configuration screen.

I thought it would be cool to combine these into a so called msoControlSplitButtonPopup, just like e.g. the New Mail button in Outlook or the font color selection in Word: when you press the button the default action occurs but when you click the little down arrow on the right hand side of the button, a menu pops up and you can select other actions.

After a lot of experimenting and googling I unfortunately came to the conclusion that this is not possible. This specific button type is only available to Microsoft itself, they did not make it available through the addin API. The customer doesn't mind because he is already happy with the functionality I offered him, but it would have been very cool to have it under a single split button popup....

I'm still thinking about what other possible MS Office addin I could make, because I am very enthousiastic about it and would love to play around with this material some more. I'm also interested to play around with .NET Remoting so perhaps something challenging will come up involving a client-server setup.....


Virtual Bartender Commands
Wednesday, December 8, 2004, 03:06 - Humor
The link to my Virtual Bartender Commands page seems to be quite popular, according to the hits I get from Google / Yahoo / MSN, so I made it into a static SPHPBlog file instead of the loose HTML file that it was.

Now people can see that there is more to this site than just that single page :)

Giraffe
Tuesday, December 7, 2004, 05:57 - Humor
Look closely at below image for about 15 seconds and you WILL see a giraffe. It really works always!



Maarten Nijhoff
Sunday, December 5, 2004, 21:05 - Personal
Today I came across a great website of a fellow Dutchman: Maarten Nijhoff. I especially liked his photography section, with albums of all kinds of trips he made. But the website itself is made beautifully as well.
Have a look at it, and see if you love it as much as I do!


Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 RC1
Sunday, December 5, 2004, 04:18 - Software
Today I saw an announcement for the first 1.0 Release Candidate of Mozilla Thunderbird, an email reader. Besides a POP3 and IMAP email client it also is a RSS feed reader, so I can use it to easily monitor my main sources of news (both in Dutch): nu.nl for general news and Tweakers.net for the technical news.

So far, I like it. It seems to do everything one would expect from a modern email client and the RSS reading is going fine as well. Haven't tried out newsgroup reading yet.

I also use Mozilla Firefox nowadays as web browser and like it as well. I especially like the tabbed browsing windows, e.g. when googling for something and clicking on a few links so they can all load before I start reading them.



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