Ferry Boender
Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.
Friday, September 17th, 2004
Lately I’ve been working on a new project called MetaCoding. MetaCoding is a Meta Newssite which gathers programming-related news from around the internet and offers it in a central location. Meta News for coders.
The backend code for the project is done, and is in need of testing. If you are interested in helping me out, please read this post.
More information on MetaCoding can be found on the About page.
Wednesday, September 15th, 2004
“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
— Oscar Wilde
“First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure.”
— Mark Twain
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
“Then there was the man who drowned crossing a stream with an average depth of six inches.”
— W. I. E. Gates
(From W3schools’s Browser statistics page)
I don’t like statistics. They’re misleading.
Sunday, September 12th, 2004
Yesterday I set a new personal record concerning heavy-duty coding. I produced 200 kilobyte of code in one day. Worked non-stop from 08:30 to 20:35. That’s almost 17 kilobyte per hour.
Now of course you’re probably wondering on what exactelly I’ve been coding so frantically. That’ll be revealed in a couple of days hopefully. Right now there are still two or three unimplemented features that have to be completed. After that I’ll be doing a bughunt and making a big list of things left to do. Fix those and then clean up the code a bit, and the new project is done and will be revealed.
Friday, September 10th, 2004
I’ve created some more different level formats for the Nethack Sokoban levelsets. Sokoban++ seems to have an import/export function and I decided to abuse it.
Why are there a gazilion different formats for such a simple game?
Friday, September 10th, 2004
Here’s a map on which I quickly drew the route we took during our holiday. The purple is how we drove (approx.). The blue dots along the way are places where we stayed. The numbers indicate on which day we stayed there.
Day 1: We drove from the Netherlands (Utrecht) to Luxemburg. I can’t recall the name of the town we camped in because we found the campsite by coincidence. The difference between Belgium and Luxemburg are quite enormous by the way. In Belgium all the buildings and roads are in pretty bad shape, but when you enter Luxemburg everything suddenly looks well maintained. It’s like you enter an amusement park or something. The food’s pretty good there too and pretty cheap.
Day 2: It had rained in Luxemburg all night and morning, so we were covered in mud. The tent was a complete disaster, and we couldn’t dry it before we stashed it away. The car already looked like it had been caught in a mudstream. That’s when we decided to go south towards warmer, sunnier places. So we took off in the general direction of Lyon. About halfway there, the sun started shining. A bit above Lyon on the map, we started looking for a campsite. Instead we ended up in a vineyard. Better ask directions. After a long long search, we ended up in Neuville Se Sur, where we decided to stay for two days. The weather was good and the campsite was four stars. Not a lot of beatiful woman though. :( At the local disco we decided to introduce some culture-shock, so we requested “Machine Head – Davidian” and started headbanging. That drew some pretty confused looks and a lot of fun. We met some french guys (Fred and another guy who’s name it can’t remember) who were locals. They invited us to their house for some beers. We had a pretty good time.
Day 4: After deciding to move even further south we set our sights on Montpellier, at the advice of Fred and his friend. Once in Montpellier we looked for a campsite, but couldn’t find one. So we decided to go further to the coast to a place called Le Grande Motte. Le Grand Motte, it turns out, is a small village which was built specifically for tourisme. There are no normal citizens there, no houses, nothing.. just hotels (lots and lots of hotels), campsites and tourists. We stayed there for two days and visited the beach. We also searched for this club that was supposedly pretty good, but after about an hour walking we discovered that it was closed. We were pretty pissed.
Day 6: In the mood for another country we set our sights on Germany. We plotted our course on the map and were underway. Once at the French-German border, we were pulled over and we had to pay road-taxes. This was weird, because they don’t do that in Germany. Turns out we mistook Switserland for Germany. Hey, easy mistake! The’re, like, right next to eachother. (The map was of France and only showed a very small ammount of Switserland without the country name, which partly explains our mistake). We deciced to travel all the way through Der Schweiss and entered Germany at the very south border. Locals told us that there weren’t any campsites there, so we took a hotel in a small city called Bad Sackingen instead.
Day 7: The next day we made our destination Mannheim. When we left Bad Sackingen, we couldn’t find the highway, so that took some time. Since there aren’t any speedlimits on the German highway, we got to Mannheim pretty fast once we got on the highway. Mannheim looked pretty boring though and since it was still early we drove to Frankfurt instead. There we went to the local *german accent* “tourist information center” and they booked us a hotel. After a little searching we found the hotel and settled in.
We asked some punker if he knew any good metal-clubs, and he directed us to one. It turns out, by the way, that every punker and alternatively dressed person in Frankfurt are usually considered the outcast of society. So when we asked some random stranger what time it was, he said “Is that all?” expecting us to beg him for a cigarette or something. Tough luck man, we’re rich. ;-)
We found the metal-club, which was called ‘The Cave’. It was a slow night, and there weren’t a lot of people there. Of course it was a weekday, so everybody had to work. The next day it would be the weekend and Marcus (a local we met in The Cave) told us it would be more crowded in the weekend. So we stayed another day. And he was right. Beer, good music and lots of woman. The best day of our vacation yet.
Day 9: After two days in Frankfurt we went back to the Netherlands. Still one day left in our vacation, we dropped all our stuff off at home and then went to Wouter’s place in Utrecht. There we ended our vacation boozing in the Stairway, a local pub annex hardrock cafe. The strangest thing was that we saw more beautiful women in the Netherlands in one day than we had seen during our entire vacation. Home sweet home. :)
Day 10: When we woke up in the morning we suddenly realised we had to wash the car (it was a rental) before returning it. It was already 12:30 and the car had to be returned by 14:00. We hurried to the carwash and wouter worked up a nice sweat while cleaning the car. Pretty shitty way to close of the vacation, but what can you do?
After returning the car I packed up all my stuff and went to the trainstation. There I missed both trains going in the direction of Barneveld (where I live), so I located myself a BurgerKing and got a Double Whopper with Cheese. Sitting in the sun I ate my burger, drank a beer, enjoyed the sun and waited a whole hour for the next train. Oh well, I wasn’t in a hurry or anything.
When I got home the first thing I did was take a nice hot long shower and put on some fresh clothes. All in all we had a pretty nice vacation.
Thursday, September 9th, 2004
It should speak for itself because, you know, who doesn’t.. but still:
I HATE Javascript. Really. I bloody hate it. I’m not even going to explain why I hate it. If you don’t know, you should try working with it some time. It’s hilarious, truely! I mean.. even location.href=…. has undocumented behaviour. Such a simple piece of code. Same goes for location.replace() and location.reload().
I hate it.
Sunday, September 5th, 2004
Well, we’re back from our vacation. We had a great time. Great weather too.
Visited The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France (Middle and south), Switserland and Germany. We accidentally mistook Switserland for Germany, so that wasn’t completely planned. Almost got rejected at the swiss border because my passport wasn’t in such good shape. I left it in my pants when I washed it one time, so it’s pretty beat up. But the guy checked my identity on the computer and let us pass after that.
We’ve seen some pretty strange stuff (in germany there are special parking places for woman), talked in some pretty strange languages (Entschuldigen, tu parlez engels, manneke?) and met some pretty strange people (a bald crossdressing skinny punker). It was fun.
Now I’m off to hit the showers and put on some clean clothes.
Thursday, August 26th, 2004
From tomorrow (Aug 26) until Sept 7th, I’ll be on vacation. We (Wouter and me) will be traveling around Europe for 10 days by car. We have no idea where we’re going. No initial direction planned, no accomodations planned, nothing. We’ll just have to see where we end up.
So, until I return I will not be available. Out of office. I won’t respond to e-mail, irc, msn, yahoo, jabber, icq or my cellphone. See ya!
Wednesday, August 18th, 2004
Uche Ogbuji (remember that name. If you ever run into anything having to do with XML you’ll see his name popping up everywhere) writes on his O’Reilly developers weblog:
“I think the most pervasive problem in XML adoption is ingorance and even wilful sabotage of the international foundation on which XML is built. In several recent incidents, both in my consulting work and in my OSS/community work I have come across systems that ignore or break XML’s Unicode character model.
I’ve almost grown tired of saying it, but it is worth saying until I’ve worked through my very last nerve: the single most important aspect of XML is its character model. Ditch XML and use something else before you mess with that. A tremendous amount of damage is done by people who can’t see past the pointy brackets as the point of XML.”
Then he points us to this article, which is quite an interesting read. I haven’t learned anything new that can be applied by me straight away, but the article is a nice introduction into internationalisation (i18n) nonetheless.
A reintroduction to XML with an emphasis on character encoding
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
Just the other day I realised something: CVS Sucks. I mean, you can’t even move a file around in the repository! How dumb is that? It also has all kinds of problems with empty directories and other file problems in general. So I decided to do some research into Subversion.
And it just so happens that today there’s an article on MacDevCenter about Subversion. The article’s title is “Making the jump to Subversion”, but it’s not really about converting, just about Subversion usage.
For a little info on converting from CVS to Subversion check out this page.
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