Today I spent a good portion of the day getting my semester started. I ordered books from Amazon, and I sold one on the book exchange (would have been two if only I could find the second one...). In total I saved around $90 for a total of $300ish instead of $400ish.

More importantly, though, I spent most of the day organizing my room some more. I even took out the trash and shopped for groceries...

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Today:

• 8 hours of travelling (6:50 - 15:00)
• moving stuff (3 car loads)
• welcome dinner

Tomorrow: Wake up at 8:30 G'night

 

Dutch children get to call a lot of people Aunt and Uncle (this information may be outdated, but it was definitely true back in the 80s ). Typically this title is reserved for close neighbors and sometimes parents of primary school friends.

Today Tante Lenie brought along a new neighbor: her grandson Lars Jan.

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Yesterday I spent about 12 hours adding some features to PHPSurveyor, an open source web survey package. This is part of a research project of a friend of mine who, unfortunately, got stuck with some survey code that was... erm... inadequate.

The Plot Thickens...

The original plan was to extend the existing code, which seemed reasonable enough. Some moments investigating later, it started to seem less plausible. Finally I had someone else look at the code. I don't remember the exact response, but it had something to do with a 10' pole, so that settled that. *Insert movie clip of someone dragging a folder icon into a trash can*

Most commercial web survey packages are fairly pricey. They start at around $80-$150 for the standard ones, but those didn't have the features we needed. The packages that did were upwards of $5000. (Incidentally, I hear the 'original code' hadn't been much cheaper than that...) There were some packages with academic licenses, but they typically had strange requirements, such as 'citing' the software in any derived academic papers.

Short version: we decided to grab PHPSurveyor and slap on the extra feature we needed (i.e. that would be my job).

The Features

PHPSurveyor lacked an important feature. We had some scenario questions, where we wanted to have the participant rate three scenarios at a time, for a total of 8-12. These would be different for different participants, allowing us to cover a large number of permutations without having each participant answer > 100 questions

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I'm home =) These photo's were taken in Heerjansdam. I took some nice pictures of the area around here back in January, but I thought I'd add some fresh ones anyway.

Being the true workaholic that I am, I decided to make a quick documentary. A documentary on what I do that keeps me from being the laid-back, reliable person that I usually am. Why is it that back in December '04 I was able to post every other day, whereas now I barely write once a month? It's all in my new movie posted here (direct link to BitTorrent: here).

Ok, so actually that's just a 3 minute recording of my lava lamp and... I'm an ass. On the other hand, it really isn't so far off if you look at some of my projects.

Anyway, I'm thinking I should write up some reports on the many, many things I've worked on in the past year or so. I count:

• Twelve websites which I created and/or did significant amounts of work for.
• Two commerical pieces of software for which I did the bulk of the work.
• One high performance C++ library (as an ongoing research project).

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