I liked the game Diplomacy that we played today a lot. I'm a big fan of this type of games: the emphasis is on negotiations, and there is (hardly) any luck involved.

We had a great day, which is of course the most important, but I'm also quite satisfied with the end result. I share a third position with Evert (out of seven players). The results:

Quite a difference with yesterday, when I woke up nice and late: today the alarm went at 7:00 o'clock.

Today I'm going to Jerry's, where we'll play "Diplomacy", a game. I've never played it before, it's supposed to be really good.

When I came into our livingroom it smelly really nice of the hyacinth my mam gave me a week ago.

Yesterday at the end of the afternoon Mark and I did an experiment with my website.

We were looking at a program that can be used to measure the performance of a website: how many visitors per minute can it reasonably handle? We need such tools for our work, and we did a quick experiment with a new program that Mark found.

I don't know exactly how many visitors my website usually has. I should really find that out once! A very rough estimate (for last Tuesday) indicates that every two minutes a page of our combined websites gets visited.

Background
The website you are reading is running on a new PC, and that computer doesn't do a lot more than handling the website. That means that in theory it could deal with quite a lot of visitors at the same time.

However, the connection of my computer to the internet is a major bottleneck. It's an ADSL connection with a maximum upstream of about 380 Kbit/s. If there are a few people on my website this is definitely fast enough. More than, say, ten visitors per minute would be a problem: the website would become very slow.

The experiment
The program we used yesterday is called JMeter. It behaves exactly as a user visiting a website: the website doesn't see the difference between a real visitor and JMeter. Because it's automatic, you can configure it to behave as a group of visitors too; which is of course the powerful aspect of such programs. We configured the tool such that 40 people would visit my site every minute. Half of them would see the whole website (including pictures); the other half without pictures. We then run the test for 15 minutes.

The result
The main result: when 40 people per minute are visiting the site, it will take around half a minute for a new visitor before he sees the frontpage of the site, and another minute before all the images and pictures will have been downloaded. That's pretty good! Of course for a professional website that would be quite slow, but for my self-made and self-managed hosting solution it's quite reasonable.

We also re-run the tests with an even bigger amount of visitors. If 400 visitors per minute visit the site, many of them will be blocked: the computer simply refuses to serve them. This type of test is called stress tests: seeing if the server would crash under heavy pressure. With 100 visitors per minute the site gets very slow of course: an average of more than one minute per page without images, and much longer if images are included. But the important result is that the computer didn't crash, and kept functioning.

I managed to activate our fire alarm when I was cooking. I was cooking a hamburger on the small grill and it caused a lot of smoke. In that sense it's quite fortunate that we don't have an automatic sprinkler installation.

Mark, a colleague, borrowed me a very interesting book: "The PhotoShop Book for Digital Photographers"; I'm reading it now.

Yesterday Marjolein and Jerry came for dinner. They brought home-made Guacamole, so we had beer with chips, Guacamole and Bulgarian lukanka (dried sausage).

We had a really fun evening, with a lot of talking, food and drinks. For the first time since a long time I cooked Bulgarian: mlechna salad and gyuveche. I think next time I'll use a different yoghurt for the mlecha; I didn't like the taste of this one too much. The gyuveche was pretty good, if I may say so.

Tonight I went to a Bulgarian movie: "Letter to America", or Pismo do Amerika in Bulgarian. My parents had seen it a little while ago and they told me about it.

I liked it a lot to see Bulgaria, and to hear Bulgarian again. It's been exactly a week now (almost to the hour, as I left Sofia Airport around 23:00 o'clock), and I miss it! The movie was playing partly in Sofia, but mostly on the road to a small village in the Pirin Mountains. At one point I saw the signs on the highway leaving Sofia, pointing to Plovdiv.

It was a good movie, with interesting characters and beautiful music. But, to be honest, I think I would have liked it less if it had been in another country.

The movie was playing in the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam; I had never been there before. It's located in the middle of a public park, and it's a beautiful old-style building.

It's a girl!

Fiona Strausz was born today... wonderful news!

My good friend Tibor told me in the morning that "he was not going to work today", and he just sent me a message to tell me Fiona was born; it's their first child. Mother Janneke and daughter are fine. Fiona's website will be online soon on Fiona.strausz.nl.

Many, many congratulations from both of us!

My mother came to Haarlem this afternoon, and we had tea together. I showed her the pictures of our trip to Bulgaria; we hadn't seen each other yet since I came back.

My father came a bit later, from an appointment in Amsterdam, and we went out for dinner the three of us. Very nice.

I'm reading a graduation paper of a friend now. She studies Public Administration, and she's researching conflicts that occur when companies merge.

It's quite interesting to read, because it deals with subjects I normally don't read about. She took a case study and analyzed what went wrong in that particular merger, using a process model.

Yesterday evening I went to meet Daniël, a friend who lives in Hungary. Every two months or so he returns to the Netherlands, and it's always a pleasure to see him again.

There were a lot of people yesterday; it was a nice evening. I was home around midnight.

It was the first train trip on which I used my new train discountcard. I used to have a student-card that allows free traveling, so it's a bit of an adjustment to pay for each train journey.