#English

The first two posts on this weblog already stated the question: post in Dutch, or in English? The last English post is already 1.5 years old. The last few months I’m more and more posting on my personal live, and I didn’t really wanted an English (technical) post intervene. I thought about splitting the weblog into two, but I realized that I don’t have enough content to justify that. So, this weekend, I installed the plugin Polyglot. [Read More]

Although I use Firefox for quite a while now, now and then you still learn useful things. For example, the usage of the middle-mouse-button (or more commonly: clicking the scroll wheel). Not long after I started using Firefox 1.5 and I couldn’t use the Tabbrowser Preferences extension anymore I learned that clicking on a tab with your scroll wheel closes it. A very nice feature indeed (before that, I right clicked on the tab to close it). [Read More]

Today, I learned a new word: Hackpology. Google doesn’t seem to know the word (at least, not yet :)), but that doesn’t matter: I like the term. Although the hack on The Daily WTF is a very nasty one, I think that the usage of a hackpology isn’t a bad thing. At least, you explain why you’ve done something the way you did it (and the hack was needed anyway, otherwise it wouldn’t be there in the first place). [Read More]

After our monthly meeting at work I was tricked (after a beer of course :)) to play a game of Antigrav. To those who don’t know: Antigrav is a game that uses EyeToy: a camera that is connected to a playstation 2, so you have to to behave as an idiot in front of the TV in order to move your in-game character. I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t even able to complete the tutorial. [Read More]

While I was eating today, I was watching ‘Ready Steady Cook‘ on the BBC. During their 10 minutes session they create absolutely astonishing meals, the cooks also answered a question from a viewer. A Dutch viewer. She stated that as everyone knows one should never reheat spinach, but she asked whether it was ok to reheat spinach soup? Paul Rankin, Antony Worrall Thompson, and Ainsley Harriott were all three very surprised by the statement that one should never reheat spinach. [Read More]

About a year ago I wrote a small piece over using VOIP and UMTS, stating that that might be a cheap alternative over calling, but it wouldn’t probably work because of high delay (and jitter). Apperantly, it does work. And apperantly, other people have been using it: Vodafone has announced (although I can’t find it on the original german page) on friday that using VOIP on their UMTS network will be made technically impossible. [Read More]

Yesterday, I downloaded, installed and played with Google Earth, just like half of the internet population. I then found it a very nice toy. Exceptionally cool. The streaming technology is so beautifully implemented. But still, a toy. I couldn’t really see the real usefulness. As a technical person, I really have deep respect for the way the program works, but hey, unfortunally in the real world, you also need to have a business case in order to make things happen, and at that moment I didn’t see it. [Read More]

Frans wrote a piece about using an I as a prefix when using interfaces. I agree to him that differentiating between classes and interfaces by a naming convention is a useful thing. But instead of using a prefixed I for the interface, one can also use a postfixed Impl for the implementing class. Because normally you program to an interface, the code that uses the interface becomes much more clean: [Read More]

Today it is 5 years ago that a firework factory in Enschede exploded. At that time I lived in Enschede, about 2 km from the scene. Although no one I knew was injured or killed, I know some people who lost all their possessions. It is a weird feeling. These things happen every month, but only because this accident occured nearby it had a much larger impact on me than all these other sadly recurring accidents. [Read More]

I bought (the Dutch translation) this book almost a year ago at the local supermarket (hey, it was cheap, and it looked better than the other cheap books, and it was next to the waiting line for the cash register :)), but until recently I’ve never read it. Only on the trip to Prague I started to read it (I also took ‘Managing Software Requirements’ [Leffingwell, Widrig] with me, but that book was a bit too heavy for a holiday). [Read More]