Monthly Archives: April 2005

I’ve been playing with Ruby a little and there’s one feature in Ruby that I particularly like: the ability to extend existing classes. For example, for as long as I’ve been programming using objects I wanted to add a method to integers called “timesSayZef”. So you could do this: 100.timesSayZef() And it would print “Zef”Continue reading “Shining Ruby: Extending Classes”

I’ll be spending the next ten weeks doing a full-time research internship at my university (University of Groningen). In the software engineering research group they work on a so-called Architecture Description Language (ADL) based on Java called “Archium”:http://www.archium.net. This language is based on the idea that the design process of software actually consists of aContinue reading “Research Internship”

I think I’ll be looking into Ruby a little more, frameworks like Ruby on Rails and features like “modules”:http://www.rubycentral.com/book/tut_modules.html make it quite appealing. For the occasion I collected a couple of Python vs Ruby links: * “Python Vs Ruby”:http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PythonVsRuby: an extensive C2 Wiki page about the subject.* “A comparison of object oriented scripting languages: PythonContinue reading “Some Ruby vs. Python Links”

A new project just popped up on “Google’s Open Source website”:http://code.google.com: “Google mMaim”:http://goog-mmaim.sourceforge.net. mMaim is, according to the website: mMAIM stands for MySQL Monitoring And Investigation Module mMAIM’s purpose is to make a it easy to monitor and analyze MySQL servers and to easily integrate itself into any environment. It can show Master/Slave sync stats,Continue reading “Google and MySQL?”

Today I, and three friends, went to TINE, The Internet and Networking Event, Holland’s biggest IT event (supposedly) and to MacExpo. On the TINE website it says that TINE would take up two of the three halls of the RAI, a huge event hall, and MacExpo would take up one hall. I and a coupleContinue reading “TINE and MacExpo”

Well, since a couple of minutes we have a new pope. His name is Joseph Ratzinger, a German cardinal. He’ll be named Benedict the 16th. Being a Roman Catholic myself, I have no reason to be happy about this. Ratzinger is said to be very conservative, very against gays and in general: bad news. MuchContinue reading “New Pope”

Ever since I’ve started using Unix systems I always asked myself one question: if this Unix stuff is so great, why are all your applications scattered around the whole system and not put neatly into one directory per application? This question became stronger when I first met Mac OS X. They’re doing exactly that: allContinue reading “GoboLinux”

Only about three weeks to go until Mac OS 10.4, code named “Tiger”, is released. Tiger contains some substantional new features, my favourites are as follows: “*Spotlight*”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/Most useful is Spotlight, Apple’s OS-integrated desktop search. Spotlight will index all your data such as PDF documents, Word documents, text documents, MP3 files, movie files etc. etc. andContinue reading “OS X “Tiger” released April 29th”

When you dive real deep into a programming language, like “Martin Bravenboer”:http://mbravenboer.blogspot.com does, you’ll find some weird behaviour in there. Martin is posting a series of such unexpected behaviours in Java on his weblog. For you to understand the part that I’m going to quote, you need to know what boxing is. If you knowContinue reading “Unexpected Java Behaviour”

The trick of starting successful products is finding things that people need and don’t already exist; or to find things that do exist, but can be improved a lot. Take search engines for example. Before Google, search engines weren’t great. The best there was was “Altavista”:http://www.altavista.com, which, as you may remember, returned a big pileContinue reading “Is Google the Next Netscape?”