Monthly Archives: January 2005

I’ll be kind of busy in the next few days. Today and tomorrow the 2005 student colloquium is taking place. It’s a small conference where CS students present academic papers they have written. Tomorrow I’ll be presenting ours, entitled “Assembling Classes at Runtime”. Once the conference is over I’ll probably post it here, for thoseContinue reading “Kind of Busy”

It was 10 p.m. at a wednesday night when Emma was working on an essay for her English class. She used her laptop, because she wouldn’t let her handwriting ruin her grades more than it already did. “Aargh! Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Emma screamed.“Writing an essay? I know, it sucks.” Artie said while leaning on theContinue reading “Buttons, Scroll-bars, Drawers and Windows”

Math? Beauty? Ahuh. Yep, math has beauty, whether you want to admit it or not. I know you’re excited to hear this, so I won’t wait to tell you why: math is pure and all about perfection and elegance. The world of mathematics is a perfect world. It’s not bound by any rules of nature.Continue reading “The Beauty of Math”

aent is ranting about why he doesn’t like Apple users. He has expressed his unhappiness with the company earlier, now it’s the Apple user’s bashing time. You can read his “rant here”:http://aent.blogspot.com/2005/01/why-i-hate-apple-users-who-dont-preach.html. I’ll skip the part about Linux and GUIs which, for as far as I can see, doesn’t have to do anything with this.Continue reading “Bad, Bad Apple Users”

Since I decided to apply for placement at Trinity college I’ve been thinking about the education system we have here in the Netherlands, and how it compares to the ones in countries like the USA, England and Ireland. This is just yet another attempt to write things down as a way to figure things out.Continue reading “Competitive Education Systems: Good or Bad?”

Until now, when developing web applications we’ve been doing this from the server side. The server does the processing and sends HTML output to the user. Sometimes some validation is done on the client-side, like checks whether the e-mail address was filled in. The actual work takes place on the server. Can’t we move moreContinue reading “Moving the Web Application to the Browser”

Well, it’s here: the peer to peer file sharing software that uses BitTorrent for the actual file distribution. It’s called “eXeem”:http://www.exeem.com and it said to be loaded with crap and spyware. I didn’t know that, so I installed it. There’s a clean version now as well called “eXeem Lite”:http://www.exlite.net. It works quite well. There areContinue reading “eXeem”

About two years ago, Lawrence Lessig gave one of his talks on OSCON (the Open Source Convention) about the free culture. I never heard of it until a couple of days ago. You can find a flash movie “here”:http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html (8MB) that shows the slides and lets you hear him talk. As you may know, I’mContinue reading “Free Culture”

Since I last talked about Skype and that it solved the firewall problem in peer to peer networks, a couple of people have been discussing it with me and asking me about it. Luckily, Jeffrey Gelens pointed me to a “paper”:http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~library/TR-repository/reports/reports-2004/cucs-039-04.pdf by two guys of Columbia University who took the liberty of disecting the SkypeContinue reading “Skype and Firewalls, the Answer”

Two days ago DevX published a three-page rant from Richard Mansfield about how OOP has failed. It’s amazing how much words Richard needs to actually say nothing, or at least not much more than what the title already told. OOP sucks, because, because, it does! You can find the “rant here”:http://www.devx.com/DevX/Article/26776/0/page/1, read it and goContinue reading ““OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice””