New screenshots for Proms and RSSMerger

Friday, June 17th, 2005

I added some new screenshots to the PROMS and RSSMerger projects.

Optical illusion

Friday, June 10th, 2005

I’m normally not too impressed with optical illusions, but this one’s pretty cool.

The cool thing here is how the magenta spots disappear when you ~~stare~~ focus on the cross in the center and all you see is a moving green spot. I’m not sure how it works, but it seems to me the brain is filtering out the magenta spots because it believes they are nothing more than overexposed spots on the retina. Fascinating. Who knows what kind of things our brains filter out without us knowing it?

_{Via J-walk blog}

Tight job market, my foot.

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005

When I graduated from the HAN university with my bachelors degree in hand, I was informed that it was a tight job market at the moment. Many of my friends with the same educational background as me where having a really hard time landing a good job.

During my first internship I worked at ZXFactory, and had stayed working there on and off, while I finished the rest of my education. When I graduated I immediatelly informed if they had an opening for me, which they did. “Happy me,” I thought, “I won’t have to jump through hoops in order to get me a job!”

Turns out though that the job market for my line of work (software engineer) is actually pretty good. How can I tell? No, no, not by reading reports, studies, polls or any of that other nonsense.. I can tell by the fact that in less than one and a half years, I’ve been approached by no less than four companies, all offering me a position. Mind you that they initiated the first contact, not me.

Apparently, there are a lot more Software Engineering jobs out there than you’d suspect. Companies are actually prowling the Web, looking for suitable employees by checking out their homepages.

Me? I’m sticking with ZX Factory for a while. There’s some really neat projects coming up, and I’m having a lot of fun with the projects I’m currently working on.

Playground: Mozilla style sidebar

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

Here’s a little Mozilla styled sidebar. It does auto-hiding (move the mouse cursor over it and then off) and has multiple sidebars built in to a single sidebar. Not tested for IE.

Sidebar II – The Revenge

Python documentation

Monday, May 30th, 2005

I’ve been doing some Python programming for the last couple of days. Now, Python is a pretty cool language, but its main problem is, in my oppinion at least, the absolutely terrible documentation. I can’t find anything in there.

Thankfully, there’s always the Python Quick Reference (v2.4, v2.3) and the alternative Python Reference (It’s a bit out-dated, but still very useful).

Also check out the page of Python Cotchas for some pointers on non-obvious Pythonic behaviour. Very useful for Python n00bs (like myself)

And finally, there’s the PDB (Python DeBugger) module.

Learn XUL

Monday, May 30th, 2005

XUL is an XML dialect that describes user interfaces and it is what Mozilla and Firefox are built upon. You can use XUL to build an interface and then use Javascript to control the application. There’s a very interesting introduction to XUL over at DevShed

I can’t believe how easy it is. Pretty cool stuff.

Domain back up

Monday, May 30th, 2005

www.electricmonk.nl has been down for the last couple of days. Since I run this server on my cable internet connection, I sometimes get a change of IP. This time I got three on a single day, which was last friday. Unfortunatelly, I can’t change the DNS records during the weekend, since the office where I work is closed at that time and I can’t reach the intranet without my current IP in the firewall. So the DNS update had to wait until today.

Some DNSes still need to update their records, but www.electricmonk.nl should be available everywhere again some time tomorrow.

Sorry for the inconvience.

Playground: Table column drag’n’drop resize

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

I write web applications at my work and in them I frequently make use of tables displaying information. Unfortunatelly, everybody always keeps asking ‘Can you increase the size of this or that limited table column?’. Normally, we use tooltips to display contents that has been cut off, but that often requires some users to mouse-over all rows just to be able to see the full contents.

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be possible to use javascript to dynamically resize table columns? Here’s a little Proof-of-concept. It only works in Firefox and is still rather clunky. That’s because it started out as a general page element dragger, and was then rebuilt (or rather, adapted) to also resize table columns. Still, this is proof that it can be done.

Now I just need:

Removable columns
Editable cell contens
database fields that can be dragged into the table on-the-fly without having to do a reload
etc, etc.

Network topology

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

Removed the network topology from the Miscellaneous page. It didn’t work in the new layout.

MSN Migration

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005

When my previous domainname ‘nihilist.nl’ expired, some company immediatelly aquired it and started hosting a porn site on there. They do this so they can get the visitors that come to the domain for the old site for free without having to advertise.

Since my old MSN account still was at nihilist.nl, namely msn@nihilist.nl, I decided to aquire a new MSN account at the electricmonk.nl domainname. Unfortunatelly, Microsoft Noetwork screwed up the registration process and I had to manually contact Microsoft to get them to reinitialize the registration process. (Talk about userfriendly. I had to use google to find some obscure entry in their knowledgebase just to find out how to do something that other sites offer right there on their ‘Register account’ page).

Anyway. I’ve migrated all my contacts (that have been online in the last 2 weeks) to my new MSN account. The old one will be offline from now on. If I haven’t updated your contact, please add msn@nihilist.nl to your MSN list.

Recap:
Dead MSN account: msn@nihilist.nl
New MSN account: msn@electricmonk.nl

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