Serge's World

Over the last few months, I have been tinkering around with a genealogy app for Java - which you can find at https://github.com/sjmeunier/arbor-familiae.

One of the features I implemented was a list of recently viewed individuals, and while implementing that I discovered a few useful methods in Java’s list classes, which made this a piece of cake.

The principle of a recent list is a simple list, constrained by a maximum size, where new items are added to the front of the list (index 0), and any items exceeding the max length are removed.

One tricky thing that popped up, is that when adding an item to the list, it should check that the item is not already in the list. If so, the item should be moved to the front of the list, and only one instance of that value should ever be in the list.

In the code below, almost all the magic happens in the addItem() method. This method, as described above, removes an existing item, if it already occurs, adds the item at position 0, and finally removes the last item if the size exceeds the maximum.

This can all be implemented using arrays, instead of a list, but the extra methods of being able to add or remove items at certain positions without having to update the rest of the list independantly makes lists a very clean implementation.
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Recently, I visited my mother and brother in Ireland for a few days, with my sister joining us as well. My sister brought 5 mini bottles of whisky with her, so we had a little family tasting session, over two nights, supplemented by one of my brothers Irish whiskies.

All of the whiskies we tried were enjoyable but each had its own, very different, profile.

Glen Scotia Double Cask Single Malt

The first whisky we tried, the Glen Scotia was a pleasant whisky without any hint of peat or smoke. It is first aged in American oak, and then Pedro Ximenez sherry casks. The slightly spicy flavour profile was good, but despite being a really good whisky, was my least favourite of the tasting.

The Balvenie Triple Cask 12 Year Old Single Malt

The Balvenie ranked as one of my favourites of the evening. It was soft, sweet and fruity with a nice level of peatiness, followed by a very smooth finish. It has notes of apricots, plums and vanilla. The complexity and smoothness combined to make a whisky that went down well. It is matured in Oloroso, first-fill Bourbon and, finally, refill Bourbon casks.

Edradour 10 Year Old Single Malt

This one from Perthshire was velvety smooth with a sweet honey taste profile. It was not very complex but thoroughly enjoyable.

Bowmore Islay 12 Year Old Single Malt

The last whisky we had on the first night of tasting was the Bowmore Islay. It had some good complexity with dominant smoke and honey, with a slight hit of lemon. It was followed by a lovely mellow finish.

Glen Garioch 1797 Founders Reserve Single Malt

For our second evening, we started with this whisky, which really packs a punch. The initial sip will put hair on your chest. Despite the strengh, the sweet flavours of vanilla and butterscotch came through nicely, trailing to a long soft finish. There was a slight peatiness added to the mix. This, along with the Balvenie, ranked as my favourites, although would consider this one more as a drink for a special occassion.

Redbreast 12 Year Old Single Pot Still

Having tried Scotch up to this point, we now tried an Irish whiskey. It would not be fair to compare this one to any of the others we had tasted, since the character of the whiskey was so completely different. The Redbreast is one of only a few Irish single pot still whiskies, making it somewhat unique. Sweet fruity sherry flavours combined with a grassiness mingle to give a great warm feeling. It has great complexity with a great long finish, making this one of the best Irish whiskeys I have tasted to date.

Yesterday, I was giving my in-laws a tour of Rotterdam, and while waiting for the harbour cruise, around 10 to 10 in the morning, I was treated to a sun dog peaking out between two of the skyscrapers on the Rotterdam skyline. The sun dog is the large bright spot between the two right-most skyscrapers in the image. The shot was taken from the quai, alongside the Erasmus bridge, looking across the Nieuwe Mass river. The weather was alternating between sunny skies and rain all day, and the sun dog lasted less than a minute before disappearing with the rapidly changing weather conditions.

Due to the short duration of the sun dog, I did not have time to get more than a quick snap of the event with my Samsung S7.

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Topping off a rather destructive hurricane season, Hurricane Ophelia, at its height a category 3 hurricane, made a beeline for Ireland.

Upon making landfall on October 16, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm, but still brought with it huge winds and rain to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Moreover, it brought some other side effects as well.

On 16 October, large parts of the UK had escaped the storm but got treated to an eerie orange sky with a faint reddish Sun. This was caused by warm air filled with Saharan sand mixed with smoke from wild fires on the Iberian peninsula, which got pulled along by the storm.
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A few days ago, my wife and one of her friends spent the afternoon catching up over a drink. After work, I joined them for a bit, and, without much convincing, thought I would get a whisky. This time I tried a Talisker Skye.

Talisker is the only distillery on the Isle of Skye, from which this whisky gets its name. The name of the distillery comes from the old Norse name Thalas Gair, meaning Sloping Rock. The wild and rugged, Isle of Skye, is the largest island in the Inner Hebrides.

Taking a sip, I got a strong initial bite - a little fruity, but predominated by a sweet and peppery taste, followed by a velvety smooth feel and lingering smoke. The smokiness is a good balance - not too subtle and certainly not overpowering.

Overall, I thought it was an easy-drinking whisky. It lacks the complexity of some of my favourites, but is something I can kick back and enjoy.

NGC 1763, also known as LHA 120-N 11B and ESO 85-EN20, is an an emission nebula with an associated cluster of stars in the Large Megallanic Cloud, in the constellation of Dorado.

For the image below, I used two sets of SuperMosaic images from the Spitzer Infrared space observatory.

A SuperMosaic is one of the types of products made available by the Spitzer Legacy Archive, consisting of a composite of various individual images taken directly by Spizter and stitched together into one large image. A set of SuperMosaics, will contain composite images of each of the bandwidths taken.

Each SuperMosaic set comprised of four images, taken with the IRAC instrument, with filters in the 3.5, 4.5, 5.7 and 7.8 μm bands.

After applying artificial colouring to each image corresponding to a wavelength band, I then stiched the two resulting images into one large final picture.

The image does not include the entire nebula, but does include a few interesting features.

Last night, Claudia and I were celebrating our 10 year anniversary of when we started dating on the Marktplein in Hilversum. With the sun angling down in the sky behind some wispy clouds, we were having an ice-cream for dessert, when I spotted a prominent sun dog to the right of the sun. Afterwards, I noticed the slightly dimmer sun dog to the left of the sun, and took a picture using my mobile camera.

I processed the image a bit in Gimp to bring out the details of the sun dogs more.
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As I have previously posted, my maternal great-great-great-grandparents where Frederick Bender and Annie Truter. Despite my best efforts, I have not found much more information regarding these two ancestors, except for the fact that I am fairly certain that they were of mixed race.

The searching begins

This led me on a little detective journey to try and uncover as much as I could about them, following all Bender or Truter leads I could, especially centering around the period 1800-1840, which would be the era in which they were born. Around this time, the Truter and Bender surnames were particularly rare in South Africa, especially Bender, as the root ancestor of the main branch of Bender’s in South Africa only arrived in the country aorund the 1820’s, and are unrelated to my ancestry. Before that there were a few Benders who arrived in South Africa, but the records are sketchy, and they did not leave very many descendants. The Truters arrived a bit before that, but where not all that numerous yet at that stage. The fact that my ancestors were of mixed race means that the records are even more scarce, since they would most likely be illegitimate children of a European settler and a local Khoisan or slave woman (especially Annie Truter, since that is the only way I could have Khoisan mt-DNA).

Let’s start with what we know for sure. The family of Frederick Bender is as follows:

• Frederick Bender (c1831 - 1898) = Annie Truter
  
  • Sarah Elizabeth (c1860 - 1919) = James Reid
  • John D
  • Abraham Andreas (c1870 - ?)
  • Charlotte Maria (1874 - 1953) = ?? Herbert
  • Aletta Frederika (? - 1952) = Edward William Steele
  • Frederika Maria (1879 - 1940) = Frederick John Gietzman
  • Maria Frederika (1866 - 1940) = Henry Charles Jackson

One thing that I did uncover is that the family is very much centered around Somerset West, Stellenbosch and Cape Town. Previously I covered the above individuals and their descendants, now I started trying to uncover the more distant and murkier past.

Some Benders and Truters of interest

In the baptism records of the Dutch Reformed Church in Stellenbosch, I found a few interesting baptisms.

• Jemima Charlotte Truter, baptisted 1836-4-13 at Stellenbosch, was the illegitimate daughter of the apprentice (maidservant), Carolina, in the service of Maria Sophia van der Riet, the widow of Rynhard Porreyn. The baptism was witnessed by Maria Sophia van der Riet, Petronella Sophia Faure and Francina Maria Greeff.
• Johan Frederik Bender, born on 1835-8-8, and baptisted 1835-10-11 at Stellenbosch, was the illegitimate son of Aletta Frederica Bender and Charles, a foreigner with an unknown surname. It was witnessed by Francina Maria Greeff and Sara Catharina Bedelstond
• Aletta Frederica Theunisse, born on 1832-12-24, and baptisted 1835-10-11 at Stellenbosch, was the daughter of Sara Catharina Bedelstond and Frederik, who was a former slave of Frederik Bender. The witnesses were Adonis Muller and Frederica Bender.

It has been a while since I did some image processing from the Hubble Legacy Archive, and while searching around a bit, I found this little gem.

NGC 2713 is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Grus, with some rather prominent dust lanes visible. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.7, and apparent size of 3.1’ x 2.8’.

The image is a composite of two raw images taken in the 555 (green) and 814 (infrared) wavelengths taken with the WFPC2 camera.

I found a few more gems in the Spitzer archives.

Using the same procedure as I did for my previous images, I, once again used IRAC Map images, with images filtered at the 3.6μm, 4.5μm, 5.8μm and 8.0μm wavelength bands.

I used the same artificial colouring as my previous images, which were then merged.

NGC 2903

• Barred spiral in Leo
• Apparent magnitude: 9.7
• Apparent size: 12.6’ x 6.0’

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