Sun released Java 5. It’s the new numbering system they will use from now on, since it is basically 1.5.0. You can read about the new and enhanced features here, or go straight to the download page.
Oct 112004
Oct 042004
Recently, I found some little flyers in my mailbox (postal mail), coming from spiritual media, claiming to be able to tell the future. I always wondered why they use such a method, since dropping a flyer in my mailbox is proof that they can’t see into the future. I will not use their service. They could have known that if they were good….
Oct 032004
Members of the Fuji SLR Forum mentioned it a couple of times, but I ignored it, since I didn’t think it would be of any use to me. But having about 2750 pictures from my holiday in Morocco, I did need a good tool for sorting out the pictures. What is good, what is not, what is worth editing, what not, etc. Pixort is the thing. Download it, install it, and try it. I’m sure you’ll love it. The interface is simple, the response is fast and it has all the features you want when sorting out lots of pictures. Trust me. I tried Windows Explorer, several catalog programs (CompuPic and ACDSee amongst others), several album programs (Jasc Album and Adobe Photoshop Album), but for sorting out lots of pictures, Pixort is the thing to have.
Sep 282004
Adobe created a new fileformat to support a range RAW-formats of digital camera in one fileformat. It’s called DNG, and it is based on the Digital Negative Specification. There is a RAW to DNG converter available, and the new format will be recognized by PhotoShop CS. Good stuff.
Sep 272004
Hello gang! I’m back from my holiday in Morocco. It is a pleasant country to visit, with very friendly people and a beautiful scenery. I still have to delete the technically failed pictures, but if I count these in, I took about 3000 pictures in 23 days… Next time I will bring an image-tank, because a laptop is large and heavy.
The S2 Pro survived the sand-storm in the desert, but only because it was stowed away in my camera bag that I protected with my own body (that felt a little sour after the sand that scraped my bare arms). A not-to-forget experience.
If you visit Morocco, be sure to bring a power-connecter-changer to fit North-Africa AND Southern-Europe, since a part of Morocco has French walloutlets. I was in the fortunate position to be able to lend the latter one from a fellow travaller a couple of times.
Sep 022004
The IP-address 12.163.72.13 is accessing this blog not once a minute, not once a second, but several times a second. This IP-address WILL BE BANNED when I get back home.
Thanks for listening.
Sep 022004
Yesterday I installed PHPSurveyor, a MySQL+PHP based piece of software that enables you to create online questionnairies.
It took me some time to get the software working, but that was basically because the configationfile is not too obvious with its remarks/documentation what to supply as rootdir and as rooturl. The documentation says it should basically be the same, but I found that this is not correct. There is also a reference to the rootdir-variable that should have been rooturl. Having sorted that out, things went very smooth.
With PHPSurveyor, you can create online interviews, and as in all good interview-software, questions can be of different types, they can be conditional (branching) and there’s a bunch of pages to view the results and statistics. The interface is very neat and straightforward.
I will create a survey soon, to act as a proof-of-concept for my perhaps future employee. They want to conduct surveys with potential clients on paper (finding suspects/prospects and sending them the survey via postal mail), but I think having a survey online could lead to “automatic” suspect/prospect generation. One never knows who stops by…
Aug 312004
Because Perry blogged about DataAbstract, I dug a little deeper into it, and to RemObjects other product “RemObjects SDK 3.0”.
RO SDK is basically a collection of components to create multi-tier solutions, and it can be clients or servers. There are other products that can help you with that. Think of Midas, or Borlands new DataSnap. But the RO SDK is more than that. With it you can not only create multi-tier applications, but you can also choose whether the application will use the SOAP protocol, or a binary version without the overhead of XML. And you can create ISAPI modules, but also standalone SOAP-servers. Or…a whatever server.
So, that got me thinking. I emailed Perry, and asked him if it was possible to create a normal Win32-server, like a mailserver. His answer was positive, so I read some more about RO SDK. RO SDK gives you the tools to create a server, that can communicate in standardized protocols or in a protocol that you like. On the standard firewall-save HTTP-port, or on any port you like. And on top of that: the SDK is expandable. So if TCP is not what you’re looking for, you can implement your own transport-drivers and use them in RO SDK.
Wow!
I already downloaded the trial version of the SDK and I will give it a try when I get back from my holiday in Morocco (4-26th of September). I was planning to create a mailserver with a RDBMS-backend. By choosing a RDBMS that is scalable the the mailserver itself will be scalable. By making it multi-tier the user has even more freedom in distributing the load.
Aug 302004
The makers of Daemon-Tools released version 3.47 of their world-famous CD- and DVD-drive emulation software. This will be the latest version until the release of V4, as that is what the new software is called internally.
Aug 272004
Finally SQL Server (version 2005) is catching up with Oracle in the area of transactions. Eric blogs about it. It is funny how a feature that should have been in their product a long time ago is now emphasized as something great. The success of Microsoft is definitely caused by their marketing strategies.
Hey, wake up: locking as a transaction-mechanism is something from the eighties. Oracle switched from table-locking to row-locking when they went from version 5 to version 6. But in version 5 they already had versioning: the bi and ai journals. Oracle is now at version 10g…