I went to Olga & Jelly this afternoon.

Jelly has a birthday, and I brought her a plant that somebody sold me on the market yesterday: "ah, why don't you take two, it's nice to give as a present".

It was a pleasant afternoon, and we had dinner together -- nice.

I've installed most of the tools I need to create a website in MMBase. These include Eclipse, Tomcat and a Tomcat-plugin for Eclipse. This way I can program on my desktop computer, which is easier than on the webserver.

The latest version in CVS of MMBase requires Java 1.4, which doesn't work yet on my server, so I'll stick with an older version of MMBase (1.6.5) for now. I don't think it matters too much for Guus Bosman.nl; the main changes seem to be in multi-media libraries. I'll upgrade later, when OpenBSD has a working JDK 1.4 port.

Today is a day for some experimenting with new software for this website. For a long time I wanted to change the program I'm using, and after quite some research I've decided to make a switch to MMBase. This is a Java-based system that is used for many major (Dutch) websites, such as Nu.nl, Overheid.nl, Amsterdam.nl and many broadcasting organisations (Vpro, Netwerk, NOS).

This will be a lot of (fun) work, so it will take a while before you'll see any results. In fact, I'm trying to keep the difference as small as possible; you can see a very first result here.

Why the switch? It's a good opportunity to get to know a common used (professional) program, which might be useful for my work. The program is also easier to adapt to my personal wishes, and it's simply more fun to program in Java than in PHP.

Today a new version of OpenBSD has been released. It's tempting to start installing it right away, but I prefer to work with MMBase first.