Entries from Simon Butcher

Today I'm flying off to Greenville, South Carolina, one of 31 Greenvilles in the USA (or 32, if you count Greeneville). I've been told by Mr. Brewer, who went not too long ago, that the southern hospitality is something to behold. Even after my last business trip to Miami, where I was told repeatedly that “this is not what America is like”, I think I need to brace myself for yet another culture shock.

I'll be privileged enough to be stuck for several hours in cattle class on Delta to Atlanta, only to wait there for six hours waiting for my connecting flight. Maybe it's not so bad, since it doesn't beat my 8-½ hour stint in Dubai. Fortunately SITA have Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place there, and it'll take me at least an hour to get through customs.

Whilst you all bestow me with sympathy comments (or not), I thought I'd share my thoughts (read: ramble) on some things that evoke a sense of culture shock for me.

In May 2005, JCDecaux launched Vélo'v, an award winning automated bicycle rental system in Lyon. The concept was simple: One simply picks up a bike from one of the automated stations (or bike ranks), and then once they're done they return it to any station they wish.

The project was a success, and now boasts over 2,000 bikes available in Lyon available at more than 175 bike ranks. Cyclocity is now available in Vienna, Córdoba, Gijón, and finally Brussels (Cyclocity) last year. There are plans for expansion into several other European countries (Paris comes on-line in mid-July), but also plans as far as Australia! Such a system would work perfectly in Melbourne.

Brussels is now being used to demonstrate this environmentally friendly transportation alternative to other cities, using it to supplement existing public transport with strategic locations for bike ranks initially within the pentagon (city centre).

John's marathon effort last week has made me feel guilty, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Today was the Brussels 20km (half) marathon. I didn't participate because I was busy doing battle with an Emsen, wielding only a Fixa (bloody Swedes), but a mate of mine did run today.

John: my congratulations on the achievement! I feel sufficiently like a fat-bastard now, possibly even enough to encourage me to get fit for next year's run on May 25^th 2008. Maybe even the ING Brussels Marathon, since it's basically a choice between a 5km, 20km or 40km run back to my apartment. Hmm…

Meet Louis: Ordinarily he works for Bruxelles-Propreté, the garbos here in Brussels. Louis is an incredibly busy man since he started his second job with Nintendo as the half-brother of Mario. Unfortunately, this has left Louis little time to properly communicate with plebeians with regard to how garbage should be handled.

Lately, Louis and his team of public relations boffins have decided to attempt rectification of their past communications that disappeared silently — They have attempted to convey to the great-unwashed how glass should be recycled. In order to tailor the message to the masses, they've decided it's a good idea to treat everyone like children.

Belgian politics is amusing for outsiders, which probably helps explain why most Belgians are not particularly open about their political views.

Floating around lately is this, the NEE party («nee» is “no” in Dutch). NEE aims to provide voters in the up-coming general election a the choice to not vote for any of the candidates, as opposed to a blank vote which still essentially gives votes to all parties.

As a concept this really isn't too bad, since a vote for NEE would steal votes from parties you didn't really want to vote for but had no choice — overcoming the lesser evil principle. NEE's principal, Tania Deveaux, is offering 40,000 blow-jobs as a publicity stunt which has lately pushed the group into the international spot-light.

Since writing about how I monitor Dynamics AX batch processes from a more technical perspective, I have been asked how to set up monitoring for a complete Dynamics AX system.

Many years ago, Scott introduced me to Nagios, an open-source product designed to be able to monitor anything. At the office, we use it to monitor practically everything, and to fulfil Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, such as monitoring temperature or backup reliability. If we could, we'd monitor the coffee machine with Nagios.

Naturally since we've built our monitoring around this system, we use this to monitor our Dynamics AX environment too. Much of the information here could be adapted for monitoring other systems too, but the focus of this article will be simple monitoring for Dynamics AX.

Oh dear, it's Eurovision time again. Having said that, though, the quality of the Eurovision Song Contest has risen greatly over the past few years given the state of the competition, with some countries quietly employing professionals to help write songs.

After last year's win to Finland, it's been hosted at Helsinki's Hartwall Areena, somewhere I've been hoping to visit for years for the Assembly demo competition.

I managed to watch the show using the excellent Octoshape P2P streaming plug-in which provided stable video of excellent quality. Finland's YLE with the EBU gave us some awful cut-sequences, Krisse the terrible tart (a not-so-funny Finnish comedian), and even Santa — without which the show wouldn't be tasteless enough to be Eurovision!

I recently watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which offers an interesting perspective on what happened to GM's EV1 — possibly the first practical electric car to appear. By its final generation, the car boasted the lowest drag co-efficient of any production car in history, clocked a top speed of nearly 130km/h (but was in reality limited because of gear design), and had a maximum range of 120–250km per full-charge.

The EV1 was amazing technology for its time, and not a bad looking car either, but for various reasons GM destroyed the cars and moved on to much more important things like the producing gas guzzling pile of junk known as the Hummer, and joining the Global Climate Coalition to help sway negative Kyoto Protocol sentiment. They had to do something special since they destroyed several tram-ways last century.

So, what happened to the electric car anyway?

People who know me here in Brussels will roll their eyes at this article, possibly within reason. Yes, this is a blog entry about a bloody barcode. Yes, I work for a company that works in the AIDC industry. No, however, this wasn't inevitable, and I knew about it a long time ago but tried to avoid fashion: I'm not a fashionable guy, to say the least.

As requested by Scott (of Smile in Europe fame), I'm going to temporarily join the Japanese mobile phone fad of adding a QR Code 2D barcode to my blog. There is no way in hell, though, that I'm having it tattooed to my skin!

I never knew there was a Disneyland in China until recently. Oh, wait, no, that's not Disneyland, it's Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park (北京石景山游乐园).

It turns out the aptly abbreviated BS Amusement Park have nicely epitomised Chinese attitudes to western copyright law, and once again made their own cheap knock-off version of something successful.

Just under a month ago, we completed an upgrade of our Axapta 3.0 SP5 KR3 system to Dynamics AX 4.0 SP1. For those who don't know, Microsoft Dynamics AX is the new name for Microsoft Business Solutions Axapta.

During the upgrade, we ran into many problems, so I thought I'd write up the highlights so others in the same position could benefit. I don't seek to condemn the product, in fact I think the product in general is very good, however I believe this information should be available to help others out. All of these problems have been presented to Microsoft, at least a month ago, and I've also provided my solutions where applicable.

One month after Walibi started its 2007 season, and it seems the park continues to struggle. Rides are still failing, despite another busy day within the park during some stunning record breaking weather.

Thinking of visiting Walibi? Perhaps save yourself the disappointment and wait until July, presumably when all the problems are solved. My visit today left me feeling empty and has, as you can see, left a rather bitter taste in my mouth about this season.

Last time I wrote about Walibi, I detailed that the Vertigo was still unfinished, and the Turbine was still in disrepair. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then.

Okay, so I broke my blog. Again. I really should stop tinkering when I have no time to fix things I break. If you're reading this, I obviously got it working again.

Internet Neutrality is a nasty subject, and something I have strong feelings about. So much so, I support Save the Internet. However, there's something else that really rubs me the wrong way.

I'm referring to the ongoing control of the Internet by the USA. While I understand the yanks have a long history with the network, but the time came many years ago for them to relinquish their grasp over the network and allow it to become more autonomous and internationally unbiased.