.:About:.

About? About what? About me? We'll see..

About this site
This site has been an ongoing thing for the last couple of years and once in a while I decide to start all over again. That's what I did *again* a couple of days ago.

This site is hosted by SourceForge Net an online community for programmers. Their services consist of *free* webhosting, secure shell access, MySql, and mirrored downloads for your projects. Last time I checked there were 106,177 registered projects and 1,136,481 registered users. It's also *the* place for information about programming and getting help for any problems you might encounter realizing your programming projects. Jump to my Project.

This site was made using the following tools:

  • 1st Page 2000, a free web design tool by Eversoft

  • HTML Tidy, a tool for cleaning up html code

  • Notepad

  • Paint Shop Pro


  • About me
    Picture of me, May 2005, Rila, Bulgaria.
    Picture of me, August 2006, Eating a lemon :-).

    What about me? Well nothing much to say really. I'm a 48 y/o male from Holland, Europe and living in The Hague, a city located in the south-west of Holland, directly at the North Sea. Things I like are good conversations, a good glass of wine, intelectual chalenges, good food (preferable seafood), Formula 1 racing, music, my kids, traveling, meeting people and my work.

    I am working as a programmer at an insurance company and started working in the ICT business in December 1997. I'm a Jack of all Trades they say and maybe that's why project managers like to stand behind me, breathing down my neck. I'm still waiting for some female project managers.

    We just finished updating our hard- and software for the company. That included upgrading our Oracle databases from version 7 through 8 to 9, our Uniface software development tool from 7 to 8, our workflow management system, our Calligo printing system, the COBOL and C development environments for UNIX, our SAN network, our financial software CODA, various interfaces to keep all the programs communicating, our JCL (Job Control Language) scripts on the mainframe, scanning our 3,500,000 lines of C and COBOL sources for tricky, environment dependable code, and much more.

    The project took our team the better part of a year to complete. Maybe a little anecdote? Ok, so we were in the middele of 'the rehearsal' of our upgrade weekend, as a test to see how things would go in the 'real' upgrade weekend, planned in the next weekend.
    We could not figure out, why our workflow management software (StaffWare) was not working anymore. It was working perfectly on the friday before the weekend. We have gone through all possible solutions, but to no avail. We called support and they could not help us resolving this problem. As it turned out, Staffware was reinstalled with the default options. One of the options (Working Days) was defined as being weekdays from Monday through Friday. We were testing on Saturday, so it didn't work. Fo figure. Embaressement galore... :-)

    I'm an administrator for our Version Management System. We're using PVCS from Merant as our Version Control software. Further more I am responsible for the Calligo printing software as an technical supervisor and our DPS7000 mainframe computer. I developed Company Coding standards for COBOL on both UNIX and Mainframe computers as well as Shell scripting on uour UNIX boxes. I am als responsible for getting coffee for my colleagues. :)

    ***NEW***
    Due to license trouble with our Calligo printing software we're changing to aia/itp for our document printing solution. I'm going to a course on 23, 24 and 25 of October 2006 held in Veenendaal NL. Public transportation (Tram, train, bus and/or taxi) or maybe I will convince my colleague Masha (who's taking the course too) to take me there by car.. Women drivers.. Yippie!

    Update

    I have to say.. Masha has been flipping off bad drivers like no man could. She's a good driver and made me swallow all my prejudices about women drivers.. She made me say that on the Inet. ;-)

    ***NEW***
    It might get boring but we have some license trouble going on with Uniface. This means we'll switch to .NET. I downloaded a perfectly legal copy of that from *somewhere*. Getting familiair with the 2.0 Framework. Not sure about performance tho. We'll see... ;-) C#. I'm a little familiair with C, C++ and Java, so it would not be a great problem to switch to C#, I hope.

    Update

    Working on my first program. A prime number generator. So far it has not been that difficult. Things I want to do is make the program configurable on processor load. On my 64 bit AMD system it's taking up 100% processor load. Can't have that for really long lasting calculations. I'll figure something out.

    That's **WORK**. In private I yam who I yam. Generally loving life with a hickup once in a while. Guess that's just natural. I am as old as I feel, on Mondays that would be 69, on Fridays 18. Weekends and Hump days rule! Thanks Djoolie for learning me that.

    http://biertjuh.sourceforge.net
    biertjuh@users.sourceforge.net