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10 things to do when you're in Iceland

Luc Van Braekel — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:57:10 +0200

I had a wonderful week in Iceland, visiting natural wonders and discovering new experiences like whale watching and swimming in the geothermal blue lagoon. To cut a long story short, here's my list of ten things to do in Iceland, of which I already did eight.

1. Geyser watching

The big geyser Geysir has gone silent, but his nearby brother Strokkur is erupting about every five minutes.

2. Whale watching

Take a three hour whale watching trip and you will see big humpback whales, smaller Minke whales and dolphins.

VIDEO
3. Foss watching

Foss is the Icelandic word for waterfall. And there are quite a few in Iceland. Here's a video of Gulfoss, the Golden Waterfall:

And here's Hraunfossar, where the water is streaming out of a lava field, and the nearby Barnafoss.

4. Visiting Thingvellir

Thingvellir is several things at the same time: a peculiar lava rock formation, the open-air site of the old Islandic parliament, and the place where the North American tectonic plate and the Eurasian tectonic plate are toucing each other, or rather: are drifting apart at a rate of 5 to 7 millimeters per year.

5. Swimming in the Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa, also situated on the border of the two tectonic plates. The hot water is in fact the waste product of the nearby geothermal power plant.

6. Learning about Icelandic history

You can take the Saga Circle daytrip, or you can visit the Saga Museum, the Settlement Museum or the Maritime Museum. Here's an evocation of a Vinland saga at the Saga Museum:

See the Flickr photo page to read part of the saga in the caption.

Vinland is the name the Vikings supposedly gave to North America. The Viking world map as described in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla is particularily interesting:

See the Flickr photo page and hover with the mouse over the picture there to read some annotation I made.

Another integral part of Iceland's history are the cod wars with the UK in the 1970s:

7. Watching Aurora Borealis

One of the things I didn't do yet. I hope to return to Iceland in a few months, to see the Northern Lights and to experience Iceland in the dark winter. Here's a nice video of Aurora Borealis made by Christian Luijten:

8. Visiting Landmannalaugar

I had hoped to visit Landmannalaugar and see the contrasting colors of this mountain formation. Unfortunately, this place is hard to reach because of snow and mud, and the bus trips are only starting this week.

9. Visiting Perlan in the hills of Reykjavik

Perlan, or The Pearl, contains a gigantic water storage facility, a restaurant, a panoramic observatory and the Saga Museum.

10. Eating lots of fresh fish and lobster

Of course, if you think I forgot something, feel free to add your tips in the comments. And for practical reasons, I've limited myself to places in the southwestern part of Iceland. See all my pictures here.

Success through creative swarming and coolhunting

Luc Van Braekel — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:25:51 +0200

I was at the iAOC conference in Reykjavik this week. The keynote speech was given by Peter Gloor, a Swiss researcher at MIT. With social networks and Web 2.0 gaining importance, his research and publications about the impact of swarming and collaboration on innovation are very relevant. He blogs and he has written books on swarm creativity and coolhunting.

In this hour-long video of his presentation, Peter Gloor explains why collaboration, networking, sharing, coolhunting and coolfarming can make the difference between success and failure in projects and business ventures. His talk is based on research using social networking analysis of e-mail correspondence and forum messages.

VIDEO

There are excellent summaries by Steve Lubetkin of the other sessions of the conference at the Philadelphia PRSA blog, and a transcript of the liveblogging at Philippe Borremans' (the other Belgian participant at the conference) Blackline blog.

Steve Ballmer has a Facebook profile

Luc Van Braekel — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:10:02 +0200

Steve Ballmer was in Belgium today for a keynote speech at Microsoft Mix Essentials. Blogger Bruno Peeters of BVLG asked him if he had a Facebook profile.

[video]

Steve Ballmer: "I do have a profile on Facebook. If you actually look, there's about ten Steve Ballmer, and I'm only one of them! I'm the one that has a picture that actually looks like me. I'll tell you again, I'm hitting a golf ball. That's the real Steve Ballmer. So yes, I do have a site on Facebook. I will tell you, it's hard to keep up, I get many friends requests of people I don't know (...) We obviously value our partnership with Facebook, we provide advertising services and technological services to help sell over half of the advertising inventory in Facebook. (...) Nowadays I get as many new invitations from new friends networks. And I expect to see a lot of innovation. As the minister said: when you encourage inclubation you also encourage competition (...) and that's a great thing."

That was the important question. On less important matter, a journalist asked him if he was still confident on the Yahoo offer.

Steve Ballmer: "I'm very confident that we've offered a very good price. There's not much new to say than that it's a good price. If you let us know, if you don't let us know, maybe your shareholders will think it's a good price. I like what we're doing in this case, because everything we say privately we're also saying publicly. So there's not much new, I think, for me to say today."

Belgian streets named after US presidents

Luc Van Braekel — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:32:21 +0200

When Ronald Reagan died in June 2004, I wrote:

It's remarkable how in Europe streets, squares and tunnels are named after Democratic presidents (Kennedy tunnel in Antwerp, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt in Brussels, Clinton Park in Roeselare), but how reluctant local governments are to pay the same honor to Republican presidents. When, if ever, will there be a Ronald Reagan Square?

Yesterday I realized that I had all the necessary tools and information to prepare a small showcase. I have a list of all the street names in Belgium, I can semi-automatically filter those streets which are named after US presidents, I can distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, and I can display everything in a table:

The high scores of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt are due to the US role in ending both World Wars. Eisenhower's score will probably be due to his role as a general and not so much to his role as president. Still, it's puzzling why not a single street or square has been named after Ronald Reagan, whose role in ending the Cold War was significant.

I can also display everything on a map of Belgium, using Google's geocoding service and maps API and GmapEZ.

The blue markers are streets named after Democratic presidents, the red ones are named after Republican presidents. You can zoom in or out by clicking the plus and minus signs, you can drag the map with the mouse, and when you hover the mouse over a marker, you will see the street and town names.

Video: writing for the web

Luc Van Braekel — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:57:49 +0100

Bram Souffreau, web editor at Concentra (publisher of newspapers Gazet van Antwerpen and Het Belang van Limburg), talked about "Writing for the web" at Barcamp Ghent. HIs presentation focuses on the writing style that bloggers and web publisher should use.

.be domain names are anonymous by default

Luc Van Braekel — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:04:39 +0100

In a remarkable move to protect the privacy of its customers, DNS Belgium (the administrator of the .be top level domain) is hiding the names and addresses of all private persons in its public WHOIS service. The only element that is made public of the owner (or "licensees" as they call them) is the email address, which can of course be chosen in such a way as not to divulge any name.

For organizations, the name, address, phone and fax numbers are still made public.
The WHOIS service where anyone can find the identity of a domain name owner was originally conceived to provide contact information for legal or technical complaints. Will this new approach encourage hooliganism on the web? Not according to DNS Belgium, because there is a procedure for obtaining the identity of domain holders:

In order to avoid any abuses, DNS BE will provide a procedure enabling to request the personal data of a private domain name holder e.g. when starting a court case. This request will be evaluated by the DNS BE legal service. If the evaluation is positive, the requested data can be communicated to the requestor.

When you register an international domain under .com, .net, .org etc. but you don't want your name to be made public, you have to buy "privacy protection services". Most large registrars offer this as an optional service. Enom.com offers privacy protection for $6 per year. Godaddy.com does the same for $6.99. Services like that hide your name and address against spam or stalkers, but fulfill the legal requirements by forwarding subpoenas, cease and desist orders, tax documents etc., at least when they comply with U.S. legal regulations.

ZatteVrienden and Drupal

Luc Van Braekel — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:19:41 +0100

During lunch break at today's Plugg conference I had the opportunity to talk with Cain Ransbottyn, founder and big boss of ZatteVrienden, a successful Belgian blog with a focus on entertainment, celebrities, virals and gossip. I asked him how ZatteVrienden uses Drupal and what kind of platform they use, so the video you will see has a highly technical content. By the way, Cain and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert are former classmates!

[this video is also available on YouTube]

Why I deleted my Ecademy account

Luc Van Braekel — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:49:53 +0100

I've had a (free) membership of Ecademy for years now, and I thought: let's expand my network and import my address book, so that I can make connections to selected (remember that word: selected) people that are already members of Ecademy. So I imported my address book, but what happened? Automatically, and without any confirmation or ability to select, messages were sent out to Ecademy members found in my address book. Fortunately, no mails were automatically sent out to non-members. But still, I had at least expected some possibility to select and confirm before anything was sent out.

Here's the message that was sent out:

No, I was not "sending invitations", I was merely importing my address book, and the Ecademy software decided to send out invitations without my permission.

I find that this practice goes against basic internet netiquette. I feel embarrassed by the blunt and intrusive behavior of the Ecademy software. I have sent a request to Ecademy support to delete my account completely. No mercy.

Drupal at Fosdem 2008 - videos

Luc Van Braekel — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:12:13 +0100

Here are my videos of 8 Drupal-related presentations from yesterday's Fosdem devroom sessions in Brussels.
Drupal Theming by Morten Heide and Bèr Kessels

Usability and Drupal by Thomas Moseler

Combining Amazon Web Services with Drupal by Thomas Bonte

Asset Management in Drupal using the Asset Module by Wim Mostrey

Introducing the Apache Solr Module by Robert Douglass

Challenges for the CMS of Tomorrow and its Developers by Wouter Van den Bosch and Tanguy Coenen

Web Service Development for Managers by Mixel Kiemen

Drupal and MySQL High Availability by Kris Buytaert

Go, Atlantis, go!

Luc Van Braekel — Fri, 8 Feb 2008 23:29:30 +0100

Waking up at 5 am in order to go to another hotel where a bus will pick you up at 6am to go to Kennedy Space Center where that same bus will pick you up at 11 am to go to the NASA Causeway (10 kilometers from the launch pad, the closest you can get) where you will wait three hours to see the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis at 2:43 pm... It's definitely worth the trouble!

Shot with a Sony HDR-CX6 with a 10x optical zoom and without a tripod. Notice how in the first 30 seconds, you only hear the clicking of cameras and the cheers of the crowd. The sound of the launch needs more than half a minute to bridge the 6 miles.

My impressions: the flames were brighter than I had expected, even in plain sunlight. The sound was less thundering than I had expected: roaring, but not deafening. Oh, in case you didn't know: Atlantis carried the European research module Columbus to the International Space Station, as well as a French astronaut.