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First days with fitbit

Yesterday was the first day I was wearing my fitbit. After the first day the results have come in. What can I say …? Well I pickup more calories than I burn. This means I’ll have to change a couple of things in my life. I’ll try to increase the number of steps per day. Yesterday was a pretty active day but I only reached 6000 steps. Still 4000 to go / day to reach the 10.000 you have to reach / day.

Tomorrow is the first workday again. Let’s see how many steps I take per day. In general I work behind a computer so it could be disappointing. Luckily I have to talk to a lot of people to get all the necessary information to let the team continue.

Let’s see how fast I can get my weight down again. It went up slowly but steadily the last couple of years. Goals is to lose some KG by the end of the year. The idea is to also put up some fitness material once we have moved to our new house.

I’ll post progress on regular basis. See it as a technological experiment to see if the fitbit actually helps me. Who knows I might even buy the scale.

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Linux Exchange Integration

Like many of us, most of the companies I work for have a Windows based environment. This implies that our mail is handled by Exchange. In many cases you can access the mail with IMAP, however some companies choose not to open up anything except the webmail (and OWA).

As you may know, Android has the possibility to do over the air sync of calendar,email and contacts using the Microsoft ActiveSync software. As Android is a Linux device with a Java layer on top. I already checked if I could extract the sources from the Android app. During my search I came across a small project called davmail . Davmail is a project written in Java that acts as a proxy for OWA. It connects to the OWA of your company and exposes the receiving of mails using an IMAP or POP interface. You can also send mails using standard SMTP. This will then be translated in a Active Sync call to send the actual mail. It also exposes your contacts and calendar. I’ve not yet managed to get the Calendar working but at least my mail is now working. Up until now I was always booting a Vmware. The only thing this VM would be doing was running Oultook.

Let’s hope these days are over and I can finally leave the Windows behind. (Not if it would be a Exchange 2010 at least the webinterface would be a RIA but as it’s still the 2007 edition not much rich GUI is available for Linux).

So everybody looking for an alternative give it a go and let me know, I’m pretty interested to hear what you think about it.

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Veel sterkte Bruno!!

Ik las net enkele posts van Bruno . Het deed me onmiddelijk terugdenken aan mijn vader en de tranen schoten me in mijn ogen. (Mijn vader is nu al een 4tal jaren geleden overleden, er werd een alvleeskanker geconstateerd. Laatst op een bbq kwam ik een specialist tegen en we geraakten aan de praat. Blijkbaar is alvleesklier kanker een van de zwaarste gevallen en ligt het sterftecijfer heel hoog veel hoger dan de % die ons waren meegedeeld) Mijn meter (geen rechtstreekse familie van mijn vader had borstkanker, zij is er wel goed uitgekomen. Kanker is dus zeker geen doodvonnis!!

Ik wens jullie veel sterkte in deze moeilijke tijden. Ik heb het ook meegemaakt en hoop dat het net als bij ons jullie familie veel hechter bij elkaar brengt, ik hoop ook dat het bij jullie zo afloopt als bij mijn meter en jullie je leventjes mooi verder kunnen zetten. Dat jullie nog veel kleinkindjes mogen krijgen. (-> in oktober wordt mijn moeder moeke!!)

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Contact info

Hey Peter,

I had the same problem some time ago, didn’t find an email adres on their blog so no way to contact him. Didn’t know I had made the same mistake. Anyway you can always contact me using bjorn at pczone.be. I’ll put it on my blog somewhere 😉

Sorry for the troubles :s

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Silence is a good thing (this time)

I haven’t posted in a long time, reason is actually very very simple. As a startup I’m getting really a lot of work, maybe even to much work. But you don’t hear me complaining, I’m really glad that I’ve got this much work.

One of the first investments I did was the purchase of a 24″ TFT screen. I have to say, It really improvese my coding speed. In a couple of months I’ll buy a second one for xinerama!! I’ll take a picture when I’ve build the setup, but it really is true that you work faster if you have a larger image to work with!

Next week I’ll be attending javapolis, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) java event in Europe. I’ll be going the thursday and friday as I don’t find the wednesday interesting enough, give me a shout if you’re also going! I’m always interested in talking with other ‘geeks’.

Hope I can get some free time during the christmas period to work some further on my mono topreader project as I really want that getting into a usable state.

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Prime Potter

Well we always accuse the prime minister of the Netherlands to look like Harry Potter. If I can remember some flemish pollitician even called him that.

Well with the events of yesterday I propose we should call our own prime minister Harry Potter. Our country was 900 million € short, they sat down a couple of days and when they came out of their offices they had managed to magically get more than 900 million €. Could you do the same to my bank account pease ?! 🙂

I’m really interested at how we will notice this in our dailly lives! Both as a consumer and as a self-employed person.

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Spreading the word

My girlfriend is still attending college, she is studying to become a teacher in sports and informatics. She was asked to do a presentation at here school today. As we at home mostly use opensource she is familiar with the linux phenomenon. She is actually quit pleased with the results, ie she fully agrees that firefox is a better browser than internet exploder.

Yesterday she was poking my brain about opensource so she could do the presentation. She took our camcorder and started with recording our mythtv box. She really loves this piece of softwer, I don’t think she wants a normal vcr ever again :).
She also took my copy of an elephants dream the first opensource movie. She also recorded the fancy xgl stuff,just for letting her fellow students see that linux in some fields even surpassed windows already. (in my eyes they already did in almost every field 🙂 )

So I wanted to give here a big kiss and hug for helping me spreading the word of opensource software. I hope the presentation goes well for here. Schools and computers mostly don’t go together that well, I hope the dvd and avi file work on the crappy material they have over there.

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One more converted

Yesterday I had a meeting with my boss. During our last workshop I did part of my demo on ubuntu and most of the other people were really amazed at how far the linux desktop had evolved. My boss mailed me a couple of times asking more information on my linux (ubuntu).
Yesterday he told me he had installed ubuntu and kubuntu. He was really amazed as all his hardware (including wireless) worked out of the box. With windows he had to search ages for his printer drivers, he had to seperately install his wireless,… in short he was dazzled with how far linux was.
I’m proud to say I converted one more it professional to ubuntu, let’s hope the count goes up rapidly!!