Saturday, October 19th, 2002
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2:34 pm - Gem of the month
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Been a while since I last pushed a piece of software. Finally though I found a new program that I'm really happy with. Phoenix. This is a reworked version of Mozilla, like Galleon or Chimera. The difference is that where those browsers just use Mozilla's layout-engine (Gecko) and do the interface using native methods (Win32 or Cocoa) Phoenix uses Mozilla's XUL just like the Mozilla browser itself. However the GUI is has been significantly reworked and speeded up creating a very sleek browser indeed. Some of the cool features:
- Starts way faster then Mozilla
- New windows pop into existance faster then the drop of a hat (well almost, don't have a hat to test with)
- The UI is very small so it leave more space for content
- Tabbed browser is improved. You can now set new tabs to load in the background instead of popping to the front on creation. Great for read news-sites with lots of stories. Just create a tab by CTRL clicking or using the menu for each article you are interested in and continue looking for more until done. Then read all the articles you opened. This is the way I've been wanted to work for a long time but couldn't because new tabs/windows would always pop to the front and take focus.
- There is a single combined search gadget for searching the page as well as your favourite search engine.
- Improved pop-up blocking. Once a page tries to open a popup a small icon appears that when clicked allows you to select which pops should be displayed. If you don't click, nothing opens up.
- The tabs look better then those for Mozilla.
- The download manager is now a sidepanel
- The whole UI can be modified ala MacOS X apps (dragging and dropping icons, flexible space etc.)
- much more...I keep finding new stuff.
So basically if you have half a braincell you will at least try this one!
Update
Just found out that there is also a radial context menu available for Phoenix! Neat! Wow...browsing all of a sudden becomes so much better with all this.
current mood:  ecstatic
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(comment on this)
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Thursday, October 17th, 2002
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5:01 pm - Yesssss!!!!
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Sunday, September 29th, 2002
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10:50 pm
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Looking at the pictures of the new Nokia 6650 has made me realize that people with large hands are all of a sudden hot property to the marketing departments of mobile-phone companies.
current mood: amused
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(comment on this)
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Friday, June 7th, 2002
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7:36 pm - Got a house!
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Our final offer for the house we wanted has been accepted today! We will move in december 16th (can I wait that long?). Such a strange feeling. I mean I'm happy we finally got it but at the same time I'm not jumping up and down shouting like you would expect. I guess that's what happens when you spend so much time working towards goal and gradually reaching it (I remember it was the same when Virtu closed its initial round of financing).
Still its very good to know that the search is over and that we'll be rid of having a landlord!
current mood: happy
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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Wednesday, June 5th, 2002
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6:00 pm - Real estate blues
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Lately Karine and me have found ourselves in a Shacker-like position. We want to buy a house in Utrecht, which is well known for being the most expensive and generally hardest city in Holland to buy in house in.
We look at several places already, very often finding out that there are already 3 people that made an offer for it when we arrive there early afternoon on the day they start with the tours there.
It is apparently customary to start negotiations with the first person to make an offer and only after it becomes clear that it is not going to work they will move to next one.
The prices are outrageous! Compared to Enschede, where I lived before moving to the rented house in Utrecht I now live in the prices are between 2 and 3 times higher. I could buy a small villa in Enschede for the amount we are likely to end up spending.
Still we are now in negotiations for this house. It seems to be going alright but if it actually comes to a deal we won't be able to move there until mid december :(.
As an added "problem" we visited another house today. This one is part of a new development on the outskirts of Utrecht. We had already driven through the area and decided it was not something we would be interested in because of the remote location (remote in the dutch sense anyway) and the fact that the whole are is a new development, so per definition less "cozy" (very important for dutch people in general).
Still we went for a tour of this house today and we were absolutely amazed by it. It's large, has an interesting layout, all the features you could want etc.
But the location is still a big issue. Karine won't be able to walk to the train-station to get to work (in Amsterdam) every morning. So bidding for this house automatically means buying a second car.
Still at least there are some options available for us now and I think we'll manage in the end. I can however understand how Shacker must feel a bit better now :).
current mood:  tired
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Friday, May 24th, 2002
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2:37 pm - Deeply Impressed
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Since I got my holiday allowance this month I allowed myself a new gadget.
In the end I settled for an iPod and again Apple has managed to impress me deeply with the way their products are designed and the way they work together.
Using it is simplicity itself and the way the synchronization works (through iTunes) is really good. Add to that the fact that synchronizing MP3 via Firewire is FAAAAAST.
I had burned my whole MP3 collection to CD (data CD) to move them over to the Mac (my network is still not set up). After copying all CD to my HD it only took minutes (as in 2 or 3) to copy it all over to the iPod. That is 2.something GB (!) of data.
Cool features?
- You can set a different equalizer preset for each song (haven't tried this yet though)
- The sound is stellar!
- Battery lasts 10 hours
- It has a breakout-clone as an easter-egg!
- You can use it as a portable firewire harddisk.
- It allows you to scrub through the track that is being played.
- Classification of the music works through standard ID3 tags.
Apple has used the possibilities well. For instance the latest version of iTunes not is only delivered on CDROM but also on the device itself!
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Tuesday, May 14th, 2002
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7:29 pm - Gem of the week, month, year...
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What else can it be, but Morrowind?
Whether you're a hard-core gamer or just happen to play games once in a while this is one you really can't miss. If you liked Deus Ex or Baldurs' Gate or anything even vaguely RPG-y this thing is the bomb! The depth of play is incredible and even though I've been playing almost non-stop for the past two weeks I still find new things every day! Don't pass this one up eventhough it is a bit unstable at times.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Thursday, May 2nd, 2002
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10:52 am - Cop-out
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I've managed to miss this until today: Amazon now keeps track of which countries it is allowed to ship products to. I somehow seem to remember that this wasn't always the case. Right now it means that I can't buy something that hast been released in US but not yet in Europe, like DVDs, games etc. Bugger!
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(comment on this)
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Friday, April 5th, 2002
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3:02 pm - Feed the fires of nationalism!
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Like this!
What's next? Americans-that-died-of-foreign-diseases-while-on-holiday-day?
Or how about a day of vigilance called deserter-day, whereby each year anger and rage are expressed about those "americans" that chickened out by moving abroad.
That would be the day before little-american-hero-day where all children that had to miss their father for the 2 weeks of the Panama Invasion are celebrated.
While we're at it lets bring back golden oldies like "careless talk costs lives" and start teaching preschoolers important lessons like "Never talk to foreigners!".
That'll show 'm!
current mood:  pissed off
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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Wednesday, April 3rd, 2002
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5:58 pm - Remember Digital Harbor?
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Back in november or so last year I forced everyone I knew to look at Digital Harbor. Now it seems they are ready to release their PiiE software in 'a matter of days' (quote from email I got from them). It might not be the biggest thing since sliced bread but at least it is the biggest thing since people thought up a way to wrap sliced bread in plastic and sell it at petrol stations.
Keep your eyes peeled.
current mood: happy
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(comment on this)
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Tuesday, March 19th, 2002
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5:07 pm - Very cool!
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Got accepted as a Kenamea developer today. After downloading the development tools it only took 5 minutes to write two little apps, one that sends messages to a "topic" (a kind of broadcast to applications that are subscribed to it) and one that receives them and displays them on the page with reloading.
It's so easy it feels like cheating.
For those that want to try it out (its really nothing fancy at the moment but still :)), download the Kenamea Desktop connector and point IE to http://www.taospace.com/TestTopicsReceiver.htk and http://www.taospace.com/TestTopicsSender.htk.
The former will wait for messages to a certain topic (dev.Tao.test in this case). The latter allows you to send messages to this topic. If I happened to be running the receiver when you try this I'll get whatever you send too (small chance of that actually happening but still). Tried this together with Oliver and it worked perfectly.
Besides the HTML the actual code for the sender is maybe 3 lines Javascript versus 1 line for the receiver.
current mood: impressed
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(comment on this)
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2:58 pm - BlueTooth
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Well I promised a follow up to my enthousiastic I-m-getting-bluetooth posting. Here goes:
First off: the BT card is SMALL. The pictures online don't do it justice. Its about the size of a stick of gum, possibly a bit thinner even. Think Sony memorystick but smaller (at least from what I can remember of those sticks). Installation is simple. Sync the software and pop in the card.
A nice bleep tells you the Palm has recognised it properly and that's that.
So far so good. Now for the hard part: getting it to do stuff.
This has proven to be horrible eventhough it starts off so well.
The bluetooth software that has been synced to the Palm looks well designed and friendly and has a nice wizard for helping you set up Bluetooth connections and pairing with devices.
It starts off by holding your breath while it scans for devices, follow by a sigh of relief as it find my mobile phone without any difficulty. Next it asks if you want to pair with this device, which is Bluetooths way of saying that both device will store the other's name and password so that future connections are easily set up. The trouble starts here.
First off it asked for the password. How the hell should I know? There isn't a setting for it on the phone anywhere. OK, I thought, maybe its a password you can choose yourself and the phone has to repeat it. Filling in "1" showed "Do you want to pair with..." on the mobile phone. Thumbing accept will briefly flash something like "enter password" on the phone before it announced "device has closed the connection" accompanied be a loud beep.
Basically it gives you no time whatsoever to enter it before the Palm disconnects. I have no idea whether this is a Palm or a Nokia problem.
After a lot of fiddling about I got it to work. Can't even remember exactly how but it involved setting up the connection sneakily via one of the bluetooth user-applications which seem to use a slightly different method of setting up bluetooth connections then the wizard. OK so the two were paired. All should be fine right?
Wrong!
It took several hours of manhandling before I got the phone to obey. Sort of, anyway. At the end of the afternoon I was able to send SMS messages from the Palm via the bluetooth link. No way to read incoming SMSes though. Apparently I'm going to need a driver specific for my phone before it'll work. No idea when or if that'll get released. Palm says Nokia will have to produce it and I'm not surprised if Nokia will just say that that is up to Palm to provide. We'll see.
To be honest I was already quite happy at this point. Sending SMSes using the Palm with my phone in my pocket somewhere is really quite neat and I find I'm not actually using SMS whereas before I didn't because I hated the fiddling with the tiny numeric keys that is needed to compose a message. But getting the phone to dail into my internet account eluded me. No amount of cajoling, thumbing, pondering, tinkering or bashing made it work.
That was 2 weeks ago. Today I happened to check the Nokia bluetooth forum that I had used to post a cry for help.
Someone had responded and told me that I should set up the connection as "Bluetooth to modem" instead of "Bluetooth to phone". Funnily enough I had tried this before and it didn't work, probably because one of the various other settings was wrong. Now I changed it and presto! The phone started dailing out...
(Would it really work this time? Adrenaline-rush!)
...only to come up with "number unreachable".
Finally a problem that wasn't related to bluetooth or one of the two devices. After digging through some of the FAQs of the provider I found the correct number for mobiles (the others were VPOP numbers which apparently don't work for mobilephones) and click!
Within seconds I was walking across the room doing Google searches and writing comments to LiveJournal entries. Sans wires.
With my phone on my desk several meters away.
Now all that's left is to get it to work via GPRS...
current mood: accomplished
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(comment on this)
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Thursday, March 14th, 2002
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6:45 pm - Finally...
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...a bookmark to remember: Epitonic.com. These guys have put loads of modern music online as mp3s, especially the lesser know but more interesting stuff.
From Nathaniel Merriweather to UFO, from ambient to jazz.
WELL worth checking out, especially if you have no idea what CD to buy next :).
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(comment on this)
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Thursday, March 7th, 2002
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10:43 am - Finally...(Gem of the week)
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Lately I've been complaining a lot about how nothing new seems to happen on the internet front. Because of that I was more then pleasantly surprised by a company called Kenamea yesterday.
What they have done is to create what they call "a layer above the existing Internet infrastructure". Basically this layer allows for guaranteed delivery of (encrypted) messages over the Internet even when the receiver goes offline etc.
Using DHTML and Javascript you use this to create interactive "net applications" which can update in realtime (no more "reload" button) and do all sorts of cool things.
What sets this apart from other, at first sight similar, initiatives is that the whole thing is terribly well thought out. Not only does it "support" the most recent buzzwords (SOAP, XML, etc.) it also needs very little on the client side to run. To make full use of the stuff you need a "desktop connector" which weighs in at around 600K. That's it.
If you don't want to use that or can't use that (because your platform isn't supported) they provide a "web adaptor" (server side) which can used to build traditional web applications using the same messaging as input. Mobile use is also hinted at (although I have yet to see it appear...).
This stuff is well worth checking out as it seems to be a rather elegant solution.
Go and try it. Next to the main demos check out the samples in the Developer section.
current mood: hopeful
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(comment on this)
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Wednesday, March 6th, 2002
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12:44 pm - Familiar...
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Monday, March 4th, 2002
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5:07 pm - Big experiment
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OK, one needs a little project of ones own once in a while.
Here's mine:
Today I ordered this little gadget, which techncially should turn my Palm into a bluetooth enabled wireless platform (</pressrelease>). Together with my Nokia 6310's Bluetooth and GPRS features this spells wireless heaven.
That of course if it all works as advertised. If it does I'll be able to browse the web and read my latest emails any time any where without cables or dailing in or even taking my phone out of my pocket.
Big unanswered question of course is: WILL IT WORK?!?
Stay tuned!
current mood: geeky
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(comment on this)
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2002
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12:41 pm - Interesting read
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Found this article on The Guardian's site today. I think it neatly sums up the whole US vs. Europe issue there seems to be at the moment. The link at the bottom (George Bush's America) has more articles on the things European have problems with regarding Dubya.
current mood: amused
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(comment on this)
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Sunday, February 10th, 2002
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12:05 am - Upgrade-a-rooney
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Athlon 850 -> Athlon XP 1800+
PC133 -> DDR 266
30 GB / U66 -> 40 GB / U100
Win2K -> WinXP
Don't you just love the number game?
current mood: happy
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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12:03 am - Hacker alert!
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Hehehe. Just hacked my ADSL modem! Instead of thinking it is a (built for the masses) "home" model it is now under the distinct impression it is a (luxury) "pro" model.
Feel a bit giddy still...the instructions on how to do it kept saying "don't! it'll ruin your modem! don't blame me if your house blows up! the cops will get you!", but it turned out just fine. Its a bit like flashing your BIOS in a way. Once you've seen a bungled BIOS flash take out a motherboard you'll always think twice before pressing "Yes, I'm sure I want to flash the BIOS". Same here.
Basically it involved getting a password via a script, then using it to log on to the modem using telnet.
Then changing some value somewhere and rebooting the modem. And voila!
The upshot of it? The ADSL connection usually works through PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol). This is handled by the operating system. That is if the OS in question supports it (MacOS X doesn't!).
It turns out however that the modem can handle the PPTP for you in Pro mode. This means you can talk straight TCP/IP over Ethernet with it which simplified a lot on the OS side. Now I'll finally be able to connect my Mac to the internet again (There is a program out there which can do PPTP for MacOS X but it relies on having a built in modem which my Mac doesn't have).
Actually the best part is that next to handling the PPTP stuff the modem also does masquerading! This should make it possible for me to hook up both computers at the same time via a hub. Nice!
current mood: happy
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(comment on this)
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Friday, February 8th, 2002
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3:26 pm - w00t!
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