::Knopper.TK::

Hi all!

I'm very aware that it's been quite some time since my last post, but I just don't feel like blogging about every day stuff all the time. Sorry for that...

Anyway, today has been quite interesting since I took my first motorcycle lesson and I very much liked it! So I'm definitely going to continue with it and hopefully have my license soon. For those interested, I've driven a Honda CBF 500, but obviously I can't really put up an opinion about it since I've nothing to compare it with...

On the more computer side of things, there are some nice things too. Mostly related to QtMPC though. Roeland has been working on integrating last.fm support (context information and scrobbling) into QtMPC and I've been working to get KDE support in. KDE 4 support that is... I must say, everything is turning out quite nicely. If you want to see what it looks like, grab the latest svn checkout, since the screenshots on the website are heavily outdated.

I could talk about Qt being available under LGPL and all that stuff, but other people have already done that, so I'll leave it at this

Hi all,

So, everything school-related is really finished now and thus I can move on to my vacation. Which isn't a bad thing, obviously... This year I'm going to Florence for 6 weeks and make an attempt at learning Italian (mostly speaking). I'm staying at a host family and have 4 hours of class in the morning every day except for the weekend. That hopefully is enough to at least start and follow a basic conversation and leaves me enough time to do other things.

I'm not completely sure yet, but I think I'll blog in Dutch during my time in Florence since that gives me better options to express myself the way I want to. Considering it'll also serve as some sort of diary/log for myself that's probably a good idea.

So what am I doing now? Nothing serious, just waiting to go to the airport... Today I received the remaining information, mostly addresses, so I'm ready to go. I'm leaving Sunday so it's getting close. In the meantime I'm trying to get some minor work done and listen to some music...

Have a great holiday everyone!

The last week of the project at university has passed. It consisted of writing a parallel application using MPI. Which was nice to do because you really have to think about your application in a different way. For this particular assignment we had to write a simulation of a vibrating string which we had done earlier, sequential though.

The second (and last) part of the project consisted of writing a distributed application. We came up with an auctioning system. Providing functionality for both the client and server side of an auction. Since a friend and myself already had some experience with Qt we chose to use that for this project. The two other members of the team were also quite happy with this decision. After 2 weeks (!) designing and coding we had a working system which supported the English variant of auctions. But our design made it possible to extend the application and support a Dutch auction (for instance) as well. The demonstration went pretty well and we're quite happy with the results, especially when taking into consideration that we only had 2 weeks.

So, what's next? Well, next week I've a resit on Thursday and then I'm done for this year. I bought myself a nice digital camera (Canon PowerShot A710 IS) so I can at least take some nice pictures when going on vacation the 15th of July. More about that later though...

I'm a bit late, but for those who have 2 days in which they're allowed to celebrate Christmas, as myself, instead of 1. I still want to wish you a Merry Christmas!

So what's going on here? Nothing that interesting, had dinner with family (of my mom's side) on Sunday and yesterday and today with our own family. So I guess it's true, Christmas *is* about eating. Well, at least the sport gyms won't mind...

For Christmas I gave myself 2 presents: G3 live in Denver and G3 live in Tokyo, both DVD's. Both of them are just really good. If you're into electric guitar music, go get 'em.

This break I hope to be able to try Gentoo/FreeBSD, which sounds at least very interesting to me. I wish I had a spare computer or something, but unfortunately I don't.

Hi all,

Yesterday I went to "Bodies" together with Roeland and his girlfriend. I can only say that it was very interesting. The only things I know from the human body I've learned at high school with biology class. Fortunately things are explained very clearly, even for people with no experience in the medical field.

You might still be wondering: "what is he talking about?". So to give you an idea what it's like (we weren't allowed to take any pictures), you can look here http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/ I went to the exhibition in Amsterdam. It's really strange and funny at the same time to see al these bodies in several poses. For instance, there was a body serving (tennis), playing soccer, volleyball etc. They also had several organs and some items where only the vains were visible. I found that really interesting, never could have guessed the human body consists of so many veins.

There was also a seperate room in which they exhibited several stadia of a foetus. That was very impressive, especially when you realize everything is real, everything exhibited there comes from a real body. I didn't feel sick though, it definitely looks much more real than 100% plastic models, but it doesn't look completely lifelike either, luckily...

Anyway, if you have a chance to to visit the exhibition, definitely go there.

So, it's been a while since my last post and certain interesting things have happened. I'm currently having a week off of school so we can prepare for the exams next week. I've to make exams for "Operating Systems and Networks" and "Computer Graphics and Lineair Algebra". The latter one basically involves a lot of matrix calculations... Not really something I like doing but the results (the graphics in this case) are pretty cool which makes up for it.

Further I've been looking for an apartment in Amsterdam the last couple of weeks and had a look at some. There are currently 2 favorites which we'll probably look at again, but this time with my Dad. A friend from university wants to stay in the apartment as well so it's going to be pretty nice. I save about 3 hours a day travelling, so I guess it's worth it.

And if this wasn't enough, I'm also involved in a pretty nice web application project. Essentially it's an online learning environment. It's already written by another company but they didn't deliver what they promised. I'm not going to give away any details, but trust me, the code (php) looks horrible. This is one of those applications which makes PHP look like a language for amateurs, while in fact it depends on the programmer. Anyway, I'm very satisfied with the work I did so far. One part in particular was making the database consistent again. I can assure you, that sucks... But after some scripting it was quite straight forward, just checking for non-existing foreign keys. Those references now have been made explicit by converting the tables to InnoDB which makes things a little easier to manage. There's still a lot to do though, which is good!

At first sight you probably won't notice since the design is completely the same but the way things go in the back-end has changed completely. I started porting this website to cakephp just a couple of days before I went on vacation to Sicily and now, after being back for exactly a week, it's finished.

There are some minor things different, especially involving the commenting. Without a doubt there a lots of things I can improve and actually I'm planning to do quite a bit. The most important is that everything works (or should work) just the way like it did before. If there's something not working as expected, please let me know by using the contact form.

Tomorrow I'm off to Ireland for a couple of days, see ya'll later!

Things are still going great with CakePHP, I'm converting my current code to it and everything seems to go smooth. It really saves you a lot of code and the way of developing (MVC pattern) makes things look a lot more organised.

Of course there are some things you'll have to get used to, but that's natural.

Just to give you some idea, I've currently ported the whole website (within 2 days!!) but I'm still holding back a little. Mostly because I'm still not sure what anti spam methods I'll be using. I'm not too fond of the CAPTCHA stuff anymore, it still seems to work for this site though it's obviously a bad thing for the visually impaired. I've looked at akismet, but that's just way too complicated for this relatively simple website of mine... Other options are to only let registered members place comment, put some hidden (by using css) input fields (which a spammer/spambot will actually fill in and thus reveal itself) and we could also just make a user fill in a word which can be read as normal text (not within an image). I'll just have to think about it, so maybe I won't even finish it before I'm leaving for Sicily...

Hi all,

Just had my last resit today and so it's now officially summer break for me as well...

So what am I going to do this summer? Well, first we're (we = our family) going to Sicily (Italy) for 2 weeks which we've been looking forward to for a long time. Though I actually am not allowed to complain since I had my 4 weeks trip to China last year, the other family members didn't though. I hope I'm able to finally make some dives again.

We're leaving this Thursday (13th of July) and the 3rd of August I'm leaving for a short trip to Ireland by myself.

Something different, of course I've noticed all the hassle about Ruby on Rails and the "framework hype" in general. I searched for some nice PHP frameworks and it didn't take long to discover CakePHP which at the moment seems to fit all my needs. I've also looked at the Zend Framework but it doesn't seem really mature at this moment. I went trough the manual and ported my own blog scripts to CakePHP which went very smoothly and easily. Of course that made me very happy... Not all features are ported yet though, so this is basically going to be my project for this summer when I'm not away from home: get experienced in developing with CakePHP... And this site is victim number 1

I wish you all a very nice summer and a great holiday if you're leaving your own country for warmer places.

Today I got a cd I ordered a long time ago but which seems to be very hard to get. It's the album "Remedy Lane" from "Pain Of Salvation" and it's pretty much one of the best albums I've heard from them. The album as a whole is very good, though I personally find "Second love" a very emotional song (it's a more calmer number) which just makes the album perfect.