Today is Queen's Day in the Netherlands and this means that I have a day off from work. The good thing with public holidays of this kind is that you cannot really do anything else so you can focus on the things you wanted to do for a while. In fact what I did was updating the technical back-end of my blog. Most visible is that M$ Internet Explorer is now supported for the front-end. The other new features is that the entire system uses a real REST approach for client-server interactions, some CSS enhancements, a more nicely behaving XSLT Frontend and minor fixes in the Wiki engine.

When it comes to publishing everybody was keen on my latest submission to EC-TEL 2007. I uploaded to our document repository and the paper is now available at http://dspace.ou.nl. Furthermore, the last version of my research proposal can be found there as well. Before submitting my proposal, I skimmed through it and now I feel I really have to adjust at least the project planning according to my latest findings and developments.

On Friday afternoon I presented the results I brought from server-hell. We had an apecage meeting regarding to our no-so-brand new but long awaited development infrastructure. I had the feeling that almost everybody is happy that it is there, but not everybody has really a need for it. At least the discussion showed that my fellow apecagers have some requirements and ideas on how to proceed with our joint research.

Although, I finished the second iteration of my technical paper, Marcus kept me busy with proposal-related (and thus off-topic) tasks. It took me quite a bit of my week to gather all the information and develop some ideas how all the bits and pieces relate to my work. Finally, I came up with a task-achievement scenario, that fits well with my research on smart indicators. This scenario is in contrast to the engagement approach I use for my literature review and the technical paper and focuses on the relation of user activities and process descriptions. I think I will elaborate the scenario and publish it soon.

This week had its focus on Scientific Writing. On Thursday, there was a course on scientific writing in English for the OTEC PhDs. Of course, there were some pre-course assignments which had to submitted. So one of the apecage's main questions this week was "did you submit anything for the course?" I did on Monday and found a piece of my work being the first bad example. At least I managed to have only one error per sentence.

This is the first entry on this web-log. I figured that almost everybody is into this game, today. Thus, I decided to run a blog myself. I plan to have at least one message per week to report on the things I am working on (e.g. the tools behind this blog).