A little history...

Someday I had to write about it... especially because I lost all of the sources of the publishing engine. Just a few of the things remain; a server with broken harddiscs and a domain name which I bought back. SpotlightMedia was interesting... just too bad I resigned and the product SpotSnel failed. The company itself disappeared, just like their websites. Just the idea remains...

Mono and MonoDevelop

At the moment I use a VMware virtual machine for .NET development on the Mac. It is a openSuSE 10.2 installation as originally provided by the mono project. The mono installation is a new compilation from the Olive development branch. As the editor I do use MonoDevelop... although I could have sticked with emacs. At the moment I think the support for .NET on Mac OS X is quite meager. You need to use fink (or macports/darwinports) to recompile GTK and a lot more essentials to get MonoDevelop running. It is a Gnome application?! And same argument here, I could have sticked with emacs... but general development towards fellow workers is easier if done in an IDE. Below is a screenshot of an unmodified project from work in MonoDevelop. Most parts compile without any difficulty, while some might still need some minor adjustments.



It shows how mature Linux is for .NET development. In some places I even think it is a little ahead of the rest. The Silverlight implementation on Linux, called Moonlight, already can run desklets. These are small widgets for the desktop. The code can be found in the Olive trunk. Normally I would have used fedora or ubuntu as my main distro, but I got it working :-D. It opens a lot of opportunities for new applications I was not able to make on the Windows platform. There are a lot of application on Gnome which are mono applications. These are Banshee, Tomboy, gtwitter, Landell and a lot more. I would also like to see our internal application for profile editing to be ported to Un*x/Linux... and have it included in this list.

A very good example of a true crossplatform utility is Tangerine. It is a DAAP server written in Mono which utilizes Avahi to respond to mDNS (or Bonjour) requests. It works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. I use it daily for distributing music between my vm's who can not use the shared folders.

At the moment I am investigating the usage of D-Bus and a similar idea as mopen.exe to connect services to an active domain. Details will follow...

Who translated YouTube to Dutch?!?

The Dutch translation of YouTube is REALLY terrible. Dutch will know what I mean... but perhaps English can also get the general idea if I translate it using the same level of intelligence they used

The marital status says:
Relationstate with the options: Single (probably they forgot they to translate it), Screwed, To open.

Did they use Altavista's Babelfish to translate it?!?!? I don't think my wife would appreciate to hear I got screwed when I married her :-o. To verify, try it yourself!

Conclusion; do not hire an intern to translate a website.

Source: profile page, screenshot

MythBusters - Do Pretty Girls Fart?

Unaired Mythbusters episode.

It had to happen...

First we had the Star Wars incarnations... and now a new movie of our all time favourite hero is being shot. So, it was bound to happen: Lego Indiana Jones on Kotaku. The official website can be found here.

What if Star Trek discovered camelot...

This has been done years ago in Lego and can probably be found on YouTube as 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego'. I just wanted t publish it, since it does show the silliness of some of the episodes of The Old Series of Star Trek :P.

Welcome to GPLv3

I am a member of the FSF and FSFe. So... I want to make you aware of the following. This information is about the release of the GPL version 3 which happened a few weeks ago. More details can be found at: http://gplv3.fsf.org/

New website for Sogyo

Last friday I finished the last edits of the CSS for the website of Sogyo. The site had some minor issues with IE6. This might not sound weird... BUT, if I told you the English version of IE6 worked correct, while the Dutch version wasn't?!?!?!? So awkward! I was able to fix it using a forced layout using a zoom: 1; statement. Argh! To see the final result, go to www.sogyo.nl or here for a screenshot.

Robots at GUADEC

Too bad I couldn't go to GUADEC, since it was very nearby this time. But here you can see something funny... :P... It might wobble more than a Aibo, but who cares... the 'wobble' is a Linux feature! The PDA used is a Nokia N800.

More photos from this GUADEC robot can be found here.