Today is tax day in the Netherlands: time to get these return forms in and hope for a bit of cash from the government. Two years ago the state started demanding that business owners start filing their reports electronically, using a Windows and Mac only tool based on Adobe’s PDF. Last year they got smarter and developed their own tool, which works on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux. The secret ingredient? Open Source libraries. Specifically: gSOAP, OpenSSL, wxWidgets, GTK+, ZLIB, Independent JPEG Group components, Autopackage, and NSIS.
April 1, 2007
March 29, 2007
Open house at the Red Light District
Amsterdam is famous for its wonderful canals, the Van Gogh museum, the flower market, the … ah, who are we kidding, when you go to Amsterdam, you visit the Red Light District. If you have been to the Red Light District before, but shyness or prudishness, or even plain old out-of-pocketness have stopped you from availing yourself of the services of a prostitute, or from watching an erotic show, now’s your chance to look behind the famous red-lit windows. On Saturday March 31 from noon to 6 p.m., the Prostitutie Informatie Centrum will hold an open house (Dutch) at the Red Light District. You’ll be able to visit prostitutes’ rooms, a sex theatre, and even (children, cover your eyes) the Salvation Army.
Tags: Amsterdam, prostitution, Red Light District
March 28, 2007
Do not swap endangered species for words
With the slogan “will only words remain?”, these adverts warn against the extinction of rare animal species using images consisting of the names of the endangered species. The video adverts are particularly impressive, though I also like this particular one depicting a zebra crossing.
(Via Houtlust, here and here. Official IFAW campaign site)
Tags: advertising, endangered species
March 22, 2007
Another day, another flying car
Flying cars are a thing that overenthusiastic inventors have been promising the world for almost as long as the automobile itself exists. The last of these inventors are the Dutch company PAL-V. They’ve got a hunch that thanks to relaxed regulations and improved technology, their motor-cycle-with-roof cum gyrocopter might just succeed this time around. I especially love their use case. If business were this brisk, you probably would not need a flying car.
Tags: driving, flying, flying cars, PAL-V
March 21, 2007
Olympic rowers offering job aboard boat
Golly! This here digital revolution hasn’t passed by the Netherlands’ finest athletes. The Holland 8 (the Olympic rowing team) are looking for a new coxswain, and are using Monsterboard to help them in their search. (Via :)= Esc.)
March 20, 2007
Computers learn to talk to each other
When a PC talks to a printer, the PC has to know in advance how to address the printer and what the printer is saying.
On March 21, PhD student Jurriaan van Diggelen will defend a thesis that suggests a system where ‘agents’ (autonomous computer programs that act on behalf of a user) learn to communicate with other agents on their own. Such self-learning software could for instance be used to search the Internet for cheap holiday packages, collecting the necessary information from the servers of travel agents, airlines, hotels and so on, even though the program would initially not know how to talk to these servers.
The thesis is called Achieving Semantic Interoperability in Multi-Agent Systems (PDF). Via Web Wereld.
Van Diggelen tested his theories with a sophisticated RSS agregator. He identifies a translation problem: different systems know about the same concepts, but give them different names. The agent has to learn the names that apply to the same concept. A second problem is one of specialisation: “So you don’t know about ‘football’, but do you know about ‘sports’?”. The aggregator could reply “Yes,” and provide a more generic answer than it was looking for, but still one that could be presented to the user.
March 18, 2007
Apollo 11 flag no longer stands on the moon
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to land on the moon, they planted a US flag there; the photo Armstrong took of Aldrin with the flag is so well-known that it has become an icon. In its extensive report on this flag, NASA writes: “it is uncertain if the flag remained standing or was blown over by the engine blast when the ascent module took off”. Last week however, according to news paper BN/De Stem, a visiting Buzz Aldrin told an audience of students from the Delft University of Technology that the flag was no longer standing; when leaving for earth, the astronauts accidentally knocked it over.
Realising how sensitive the US public would be about such a thing, the astronauts decided not to tell upon return.
(Source: BN/De Stem)
Tags: Buzz Aldrin, Delft University of Technology, moon, space
March 14, 2007
Jorinde Moll interviews The Stig
Jorinde Moll of Dutch car pimping show De Grote Beurt (The Big Job) has managed to get an interview with Top Gear’s super secret race driver The Stig.
Having finally interviewed The Stig, blonde Jorinde’s comment on being the first human alive to publically speak to the white-clad masked race driver: “There’s something about him. I’d like to bite his neck.” Thanks Jorinde.
(Link: jalopnik)
Tags: Jorinde Moll, The Stig
March 12, 2007
Jumpstyle dancing: an heir to Gabber
I just stumbled upon this techno sub-genre called jumpstyle, or jumpen (Dutch for jumping), a name that describes the style well. At times it appears to be a mix between gabber and folk dancing. Loads of kids are uploading videos of their moves to Youtube, so that you have plenty to sample. According to Wikipedia, jumpstyle started in Belgium and is now slowly spreading to the South of the Netherlands.
Below is a tutorial for the style. Warning: being a type of hard techno, the sounds emanating from your computer may not be considered workplace friendly. The actual tutorial starts 27 seconds into the clip.
Deep linking to parliamentary documents
Rumours have it (Dutch) that this slow progress is because the state has friends that it wants to share its big pie of work with, even at the cost of transparent government. I blogged about one of these friends before.
The new front-end can be found at www.geencommentaar.nl/parlando/.
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Tags: blogging, Geen Commentaar, Parlando, parliament, transparency, WWW