There are times when we have to work in the weekend. So far this hasn’t happened that often (maybe 3 times in the past 2 years?). I’ve had to work in the weekend of 15th September, since we were doing the final cut over. Basically this means that we were moving the data from the old system into the new system. Why did we have to do this in the weekend? Well, it was necessary to prevent any disruption of the business.

This went well and we went live on this monday, the 24th of September! These days I’m busy providing post go-live support and also preparing some handover documents. Also, this week I’ve already been packing up my wardrobe and moving it back home, which I’ve slowly moved to Hamburg over this past year.

It sure has been an eventful year and it’s good to see something from the beginning to the end, but I can’t wait for my next project after my holiday! Still 2 more weeks to go, before I go on my well-deserved holiday to Hong Kong

This week, the PICNIC festival takes place in Amsterdam. PICNIC is ‘one of the world’s leading events where creative minds from the world of media, entertainment, science and the arts convene’. I heard about this fesival in two ways:

1. My brother told me he went to a cool festival, where they were using RFID
2. I heard a short news item on BNR Nieuwsradio where they mentioned that they cloned people at PICNIC (see video clip below). And that most people are unfamiliar with RFID…

lees verder…

A while ago I saw the book Freakonomics lying in the bookshops at the airport, not knowing what it’s about. This week I’ve finally finished the book and I quite liked the view which was presented in the book - the correlation between crime and abortion and other interesting theories. The authors have definitely been thinking out of the box and continued to do so on their blog. Click here for the blog.

I recently started to use RSS feeds (yes I am a late adapter) and the are really great, here is something that caught my eye on the BBC feed which I had to share:  Apparently A former US intercontinental ballistic missile base is up for sale on eBay. You get the whole deal with a network of underground tunnels and silos, but no nuclear warheads for only $1.5m.:
 

The Silent Guardian is the latest non violent weapon which will make people run away without killing them. The Silent Guardian protection system according to the makers at Raytheon is a revolutionary less-than-lethal directed energy application that employs millimeter wave technology to repel individuals or crowds without causing injury. When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. Being in the vicinity of the ray is not barable beyond a few seconds and basically you will start running. lees verder…

The Colbert Report on Blackwater

Lets talk about outsourcing security and some core tasks of the military. In a recent point of view, the HCSS With the rise of Blackwater to become officially part of the ‘total force’ concept, the US government has effectively outsourced part of its army’s core-business. Ulrich Mans and Rem Korteweg estimate that about 100,000 contractors are currently deployed across the entire military spectum.
I was hoping that mister outsourcing could shed some light on this matter. To be continued……

The European commission is rightly worried about the levels of corruption in the new EU member states. Corruption undermines the rule of law and the way government relates to citizens. Criminal and terrorist organizations are only able to operate when there is a transition possible from the illegal to the legal, corruption facilitates this process. They are able to pay for specialists within and outside the government to perform illegal services. 

Bribes are one of the most successful ways to get around the law. In a growing European Union with more border land vulnerable to the trafficking of illegal goods one should start to worry about the government officials monitoring the border and make sure that anti corruption measures are put in place. 

The BBC noted that search site Google has called on governments and business to agree a basic set of global privacy rules. “Without global standards the health of the internet was at risk”, said the firm’s privacy chief Peter Fleischer told during a UN agency conference last week. Noting that “Every time a person uses a credit card their information may cross six or seven national boundaries”

Funny! The rights group Privacy International rated the search giant as “hostile” to privacy in a report ranking web firms by how they handle personal data in June this year….While since May this year there have been roumors that the EU would investigate Googles actions in light of the EU privacy laws.

Additionally, Google chose to  agree with the Chinese government on the censorship of its search engine for Chinese citizens: Google’s China service blocks politically sensitive material to comply with Chinese censorship rules. this impedes privacy in a different way. The economist came out with a very good analysis last week stating that we have to make sure that we trus google like we trust banks in holing our information and taking care of it……..what happened to its mission: Don’t be evil!