I was planning to go and pick up Jerry tonight together with Marjolein, his girlfriend, and other friends and family. He's traveling back from Ecuador today, after a staying there to do research.

However, Marjolein just e-mailed and said that he won't arrive tonight. His plane landed in Caracas, Venezuela where he'll be staying a while because there was something wrong with the plane. He will probably arrive here sometime tomorrow.

Yesterday Bella was in Amsterdam for one evening. She was flying from Bulgaria to Washington D.C., with a stop-over in Amsterdam. She is a friend of Sasha; they met in Washington but their families accidentally both come from Perushtitsa, Bulgaria.

Bella had not been in Amsterdam before so yesterday we made a long walk through the city, and we saw many of the highlights of Amsterdam. We started with De Munt and Rembrandtplein, over the canals to the Rijksmuseum and Leidseplein. Later we saw Dam Square, the Red Light District and Central Station. It's nice to look at the city through the eyes of a tourist.

Later we had Belgium beers in De Ooievaar, a pleasant old-fashioned Dutch bar at the beginning of the Zeedijk. We had a very nice evening.

Two weeks ago I was starting up a new project, and I wasn't sure if I should introduce the Spring framework. I decided not to. First, the immediate benefits are not clear enough, unlike Hibernate for example, but most of all I didn't want to introduce too many new technologies at once to the development team.

We are using Struts as MVC framework, which is more and more becoming a company standard for web applications, but not everybody on the team has worked with it before. Another new tool for some of the team members is Hibernate. The (existing) database uses stored procedures. It turns out that there are only a few of those and that they're used only for a few specific data insert statements -- not to manage all possible data manipulations. This means there was no data manipulation layer yet and so using Hibernate for the management tool is not a problem.

A last nice feature we're using is a ServletFilter that validates the HTML that we're generating. Not really rocket-science, but a strong and certain way to make sure that the HTML we're creating is standard compliant and valid.

Combined Hibernate and Struts make for a nice and very productive application framework. One of the things I would like to do next time is to look into something to deal with the boiler-plate code that's sometimes necessary for Hibernate. A colleague is looking into Hibernate Synchronizer, but my initial feeling is that a more well known tool such as XDoclet might be a better investment. It's a bit too risky for my taste to build an application on a tool created by single person. His website has been down for a couple of days too -- not a good sign, either.

Erika and Daniël stayed in our apartment the last two days. They are leaving to Amsterdam now, where they'll take the international train to Italy for the second part of their holiday.

Today we make a walk through Haarlem, as Erika had never seen the city before. We went in the St. Bavo Church at the Grote Markt. Later with had a drink with Jelly at an outside café; the weather is very nice today.

It's nice that it's weekend. There were a lot of things to be arranged last week but things are going well.

A simple but beautiful animation.

My friend Jerry is doing research this summer in Ecuador. He's a biologist and is researching various kinds of vegetation.

He keeps us updated on his journey by e-mail, as well as by his website with pictures of lama's, horses and Gentianelle cernua.

Yesterday I cooked dinner for Daniël, Erika and Jelly.

It was great fun; we had a very nice evening.

Sunday we went to the beach. Together with Jelly I travelled to Leiden in the morning, and when we arrived we the weather didn't look too well and we actually felt some rain.

However, Rob and Kirsten picked us up from the station, and when we travelled to the beach, the sky became more and more bright, and when we arrived the weather was beautiful.

Daniël, Ellen, Erika, Evert and Gerlof were already there and had installed the volleybal-net. We played many games of beach volleybal: 4 to 4, 2 to 2... it was great fun.

In the evening we had pancakes together.

Saturday we had our yearly 99 tournament. Ninety-nine is a short card-game for three players.

My friends Daniël and Gerlof organized this tournament, which consisted of 12 players and had four rounds.

It was a very pleasant day, and I enjoyed the game and seeing my friends very much. The result of the tournament itself was disappointing as I ended last. The weather was very good. Gerlof and Ellen's apartment has two balconies, so we could play the game in the sun, which was excellent.

When I went home there a huge thunderstorm started. Luckily enough I was just at the trainstation. For about an hour it was storming like crazy but in the evening the weather came nice and fresh again.

I went running for 4,5 kilometers.