Monthly Archives: May 2004

As many of you know, “I don’t enjoy actual programming as much as I used to”:/archives/2004/03/13/the-change. As I suggested back when I talked about that, I already suggested we’d be selling “KeyTopic”:http://www.keytopic.com, and we will be. Currently KeyTopic is owned by a company I set up with two friends a year ago or so, calledContinue reading “KeyTopic for Sale”

My dad is the word processing expert at our university. Until a couple of years ago everybody there used Wordperfect, later they switched to Microsoft Word (’97 at that time). The whole university? No, there’s a little departement heroicly fighting against Microsoft domination: The Mathematics and Computing Science department (eek!). They use the technically superiourContinue reading “Perfect Word Processing”

About a month ago I payed a quite larger amount of money for an Apple than I’m used to. Why? It’s white, you can’t eat it, but sure, it’s fruity and Unix flavoured. Was it worth it? So far, yes, it certainly was. *Think different*When it arrived I was looking at the box. It’s white,Continue reading “Juicy Apples Served with a Unix Flavour”

I’ve moved my blog to “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org. This makes maintaining my blog easier and allows me to do blogging via my desktop as WordPress supports the Blogger and other XMLRPC(eXtensible Markup Language Remote Procedure Calls) interfaces. Also, this tool automatically does archiving, so you don’t have to browse the 800+ items counting list when looking forContinue reading “Moved to WordPress”

Tom is working on a little Mono application called gtkRanker. An application that can check your current ranking using a certain search term. The thing that makes it interesting (to me, anyway) is that it’s written in C# on Mono and uses Gtk# and Gecko# (a wrapper library to embed the Mozilla Gecko engine intoContinue reading “gtkRanker”

Phil asks what I think of Groovy. There are a couple of reasons to use a language: It allows you to write code real quick (Perl, Ruby, Python) It detects many errors upfront, by using static typing (Java, C#) It has great IDE support (Java, C#) The code you get is readable and self-explaining (Python,Continue reading “Groovy”

Cringely about the upcoming Apple reorganization.

PEAR contains an XML_Serializer and XML_Unserializer class. These classes allow you to convert an aribritrary PHP datastructure to XML and back. As PHP is dynamically typed this XML has to contain type (classes) information. SitePoint: These days, XML has become part of landscape in most all areas of software development — none more so than on theContinue reading “PHP XML Serializer”

SitePoint: MySQL has long been known as the Web developers’ database platform. In fact, for many years, it was considered the stepchild of “real” relational database systems such as IBM’s DB2, Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server. However, in recent years, MySQL has grown in leaps and bounds both from the development side as well asContinue reading “The MySQL roadmap”

I looked at Ruby yesterday and it’s a bit Python meets Perl and likes Perl too much. What I like about Python is it’s cleanness, it’s lack of incredibly-many-ways-to-do-it (syntactically). When a non-python programmer reads python code he/she will get what it says (most of the time). It’s a sort of working pseudo-code. But withContinue reading “First look at Ruby”