Monthly Archives: September 2004

The moment is here. The moment that everybody I know has been waiting for ages. No, it’s not world peace, it’s not the end of world hunger, it’s… Java 5.0 Hell yeah. I just wanted to let you know. I think I’ve already given enough of my opinion about it in previous posts like “WhyContinue reading “Java 5 Released”

If you think, “Oh no, not another blog about blogging!”, don’t worry. I know how you feel. A couple of months ago I chose to break out of being yet another news-mirroring-service as the traditional weblogs are: “You gotta read Dan’s opinion about this blog post somebody wrote about an article about blogging in theContinue reading “Blog Advocacy”

There’s a chance that I might be teaching PHP in Eritrea, Africa. It’s a small chance, but it’s there. Apparantly there’s a project running from our University to help a University at Eritrea. The initial idea was that my dad (who teaches at university) would go to teach them to use Frontpage and develop aContinue reading “Teaching PHP In Africa?”

There are two things which are particulary not fun about developing software: testing and documenting. The advantage of developing open source software is that finding volunteer testers often isn’t a problem. And although you probably could get away with no documentation at all, it would be nice if there was some of that too. “Oh,Continue reading “Wikis And Open Source”

It has been a while since Browser Wars, Episode I took place on an IT planet near you. To refresh your memory, what happened again? In the early days of the internet, Netscape was the main provider of browser software. There was little competition. That changed when Microsoft started shipping its own browser, Internet Explorer,Continue reading “Browser Wars, Episode II”

When I walk through the computer lab of our university, I often see students using editors like Pico and other plain notepad-like editors writing C and Java code. “Why don’t you just use an editor that at least supports colour highlighting, or even a Java IDE like Eclipse?” — “Nah, real programmers don’t need no fancy stuff.”Continue reading “Tools, Tools, Tools!”

Alright, obviously, I have been Scobleized. The articled I published two days ago, entitled Why Microsoft Can’t Hire Great Programmers hit a string. Robert Scoble noticed the article and posted a link + response on his weblog. As Robert has thousands of readers, you can be sure that the news spreads quickly. And indeed, aContinue reading “More On Identifying Programming Talent”

When you start with programming, everything you do is challenging. Putting a window on screen, reading a file, obtaining data from a database, storing data in a database, it’s all new. But once you’ve been doing it for a couple of years you start noticing that a large part of what you do shows patterns.Continue reading “Data In, Data Out”

Alright, you must either have been living underground or even worse: have been offline for over a year, if you haven’t heard of Skype by now. Skype is software to call via the internet. That’s nothing new, though. You could do that before. The major difference that Skype makes is the following: It just works.Continue reading “Skype And Firewalls”

I was thinking, as long as the WYSIWYG editors in browsers still, well, aren’t ideal, and we have to keep using plain text boxes to type our stuff in, what would be the best way to do mark-up stuff? Stuff like making text bold, adding links and create headings. When you look at the bulletinContinue reading “Post Formatting”