I am a Ringo Star

A couple of months ago I filled in a questionair, called are you a Lennon or a Ringo Starr. The questionair contained questions about my job and how I think I behave in a team and this is what came out of it.

Style: Helping

You come to the rescue where necessary and assist others through simple and ordinary actions. You're always prepared to lend a helping hand. You help other people spontaneously and without being asked.

Focus: Organiser

Divinity is in the details and in that sense you do have a touch of the divine because you make sure that things proceed without a hitch. You believe in preparation and you loathe last-minute improvisation. You are a perfectionist with an eye for detail.

Incredible, but this profile fits me very well! Cheers Ringo, you are my kind of guy!

Merry Christmas

We would like to wish the whole world a merry Christmas!

World's best app

A couple of months ago Microsoft started a competition for creating activity programs for MSN messenger called World's best app.

There are some cute applications already available from several contestants which you can try out. But beware if you try it out you vote for the application.

The ones I love the most are:

• Live Translator: It automatically translates all instant messages you receive. It works with nine different languages. Live Translator can even identify the language of the messages you receive.


• Code Talk: This application allows multiple software developers to communicate about a piece of structured text such as software code or HTML. All code is automatically formated. Each users mouse movements can be seen by the other users and the view is automatically scrolled as necessary to keep all developers looking at the same code at the same time. All mouse locations are ratioed to factor out differences of messanger window size, activity splitter location, and screen resolution. Users can identify themselves by a name/nick-name and a color. This name/color show up under the users pointer so everyone can see who is moving each pointer. Code highlighted on one users screen is highlighted on all users screens. Code pasted into the view is saved in a clipboard for all users to recall without having to resend the code. Code can be copied out of the view. The Selection Search feature shows a Top 10 matches list for any word highlighted in the code view.

So if you are eager to win some nice prices like really cool laptops from Allienware and stuff create an activity app, you only need to know DHTML and Javascript. The competition ends at the end of December. Have fun and let the source be with you!

Google Moon

It seems that besides Google Earth there also exists a Google Moon.

It's not that impressive as Google Earth because they rely on Nasa to provide them with the imagery. So this means that you cannot zoom in that far... you'll end up in a cheese if you do.

.NET, the future Java platform?

Last week I followed a course on the .NET framework and I was really impressed! The first day we got an explanation about what the framework is and is not, and I must admit I was one of those guys saying, it's Java they stole it. So the first day was a bit like know this, been there already.

The second day we started working with "Visual Studio 2005" programming some C# webservices. Oh man I wish we could have something like this for Java programming. Ok, we have Eclispe which is wonderfull (and for free), but if you look at it's commercial brother from IBM, "Websphere Studio" I think, which is really crap. It's just not comparable with VS 2005. I was even able to run more than one VS 2005 program, in the past I wasn't even able to run one instance of WS decently. So SUN, please if you don't want Java to loose it's developers create a VS 2005 for Java... or let your friend MS do it for you they know how to create an IDE.

Furthermore since I've been programming Java since University, which has been a while now, I really like the C# (C-sharp) language because it has much resemblance to the Java language. I only find it hard to use Microsoft's way of using upper- and lowercase which is definitly not the same as in Java. But since I am planning to use it more it will grow on me, like Java did.

Creating Webservices is also very easy to do, it's actually a matter of creating a class with methods that you call/annotate webmethods. Well it's a bit more complicated, but not much. I know I once created webservices in Java, which was really hard, don't know how it evolved since then... .

We also saw some ADO.NET and ASP.NET (web pages) which was also kind of nice but have to look deeper into it because we only had time to scratch the surface. But again I remember how I created web applications with Java, it wasn't not as easy as with ASP.NET.

I'm not saying that Java is bad, I really love it. But I really think we need better tools to support Java, come on SUN take a look at VS 2005 and do something with it. Make programming Java as easy as programming .NET applications.

By the way, on saturday evening I created a picture slide show application for my I-mate SP3i it was so easy to do, I could even deploy the app on my phone and saw what was happening in VS 2005 running on my laptop. Thank you Microsoft for .NET and VS 2005!

Bill, maybe you could give a little help to those Mono guys that would really make my day!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'New mammal' seen in Borneo woods

Wow, this is really cool finding new species when they are still alive!

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'New mammal' seen in Borneo woods