Netherlands defeat Romania: Italy goes to quarter finals

In a pretty much uninspiring match, mostly due to Romania refusing to do anything about their future, Holland defeated Romania with 2-0. I find it strange that when the goal of Romania should be to actually win the match to survive in the tournament, they resorted to playing defense.

This strategy turned out to be very unfortunate for Romania and my enjoyment. Romania’s offence didn’t create any problems for the Dutch defense and as a result lost with 2-0.

Given the uninspired performance of the Romanians I’d love the Italians and the French to continue in the tournament. But only one of them could go through. The winner of their match would be the one to progress in the tournament, so there was a significant incentive to win for both teams. Their match showed a crippled France trying to defeat the Italian forces. The Italians did their job well and defeated the french rightfully with 2-0.

Based on the performance against the Dutch, I found the french to be stronger, but apparently they were still tired from the last match and couldn’t put up much of a fight against the Italians. In any case, they had a bad day already with their bus driver unable to make a corner without crashing two cars and a fence. Their defeat will not be too good for their mood.

That said, I think Holland has done great: three wins out of three, and 9(!) goals. I can’t wait for the quarter finals to take place. Basel here we come!

Euro 2008: Netherlands beat France 4-1

Even though I’m not a very big football fan (soccer for you Yanks :) ), I do enjoy a good football match. This night’s soccer match between the Netherlands and France was a great match with good football coming from both sides. The french did put up a good fight but weren’t as fortunate as the Dutchies. Anyway, getting kicked in the ball by us dutchies must feel like punishment. 4-1 and 3-0 to the number 1 and 2 of the WORLD. That must count for something.

Anyway thanks to France for a great match. Fortune has mistreated you. Kudos to the dutch guys as well. You’ve been marvelous.

Google Mail hates and loves

I’m an avid user of gmail and since I have started using it I think it is the best thing since sliced bread. As with all webbased mail services the best part is also its weakest part: the mail is always available, provided that you are online. Last week I had to stay in a holiday vilage without internet access inside the appartment, and that made reading and sending mail quite troublesome, not to mention it showed how much dependent we (I?) have gotten on being online.

IMAP is a much better protocol, but the problem is that I find email clients quirky at best compared to the gmail reader where you can read a discussion (which happen a lot on the @wicket-user and @wicket-dev lists) in one go. The Google mail interface shows the whole discussion without threading. It took a while to get used to, but when I noticed that keeping up with the mailinglists was considerable less effort than before (somewhere around one quarter of the effort and time before gmail), I was hooked.

The likes of gmail:

  • always available – just start up any browser and voila
  • zero configuration – no need to do any configuration of mail clients
  • quick – depends on the internet connection and browser (safari load times can be long)
  • reading discussions – read all 19 messages in a dicsussion in one go, no clicks required
  • massive storage – 2.5Gig’s of mail storage is a lot

Dislikes of gmail:

  • not available offline – you can’t respond to messages in your inbox without being online
  • claiming of browser tab – when you open gmail and other tabs to start your online day, gmail focusses its browser tab

What is scary but often also very funny are the google ads displayed next to heated discussions on developer forums. I often saw ads for communication consultancy firms, process improvement etc.

GMail is probably the biggest reason why Wicket’s user and development list is highly regarded as fast, quick and friendly. The core developers are able to keep responding to the onslaught of messages by using this web mail service.