Dominiek Dierickx

Examens examens…

Gelukkig is er nog youtube om de peinzende geest te kneden met wat belspelhumor!

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Apple’s new flagship, the Ipod Touch. Now before urging to the closest store to buy one, I did some reading on it and immediately discovered some flaws. The biggest fallback was the simple fact the the Touch hasn’t got any support what so-ever for Adobe Flash, and looks like this might be a very hard feature to implement.

This is where Microsoft could kick in and take advantage: Silverlight (Microsoft’s Flash ‘killer’) is already running fine on Linux and MAC and with some serious man hours of the Microsoft developement team, I have no doubt they could port Silverlight to the Apple Touch. If Microsoft would actually do this (if legal? ), this could launch Silverlight into a broader audience and convert a whole bunch of none believers to take a closer look at Microsoft technology, eventually using it to construct other (non Touch) websites. It’s clear Microsoft’s Zune(2) can’t beat the Apple competition (or rather dominance), so why not try this approach?

You just have to see this!

Source: freeloveforum.com

I spent the weekend in Oudenaarde, at the Donkvijvers, where me and my lovely girlfriend attended the “Feest in het Park” music festival! Here’s what we saw and what I thought of it!

Friday

After pitching our tent, we headed for the festival grounds to watch Mintzkov, a Belgian softrock band (Mimosa, Push the faders high) who’ve just released their new album. This was a rather doll concert, quite less than I’ve expected of them actually. The female singer obviously didn’t feel like singing that much… After that we checked out Cosy Mosy who was playing a DJ set. Nice beats and a nice location! After Cosy Mosy we went to see Chicks on Speed (Wordy rappinghood, Fashion rules, …). I have to say those gals are about the craziest I’ve ever seen. Weird dancing and ever weirder songs like “My space”, “Art Rules” and much much more. Loads of fun and catchy tunes. Respect for the ladies!

On friday night we watched as Coldcut took over the Grand Mix room with it’s “Journey through sound” mix. This was a really stunning blend of both crowdpleasers (Sweet dreams) and some more underground tracks (Assasin de la police!). Also the DJ had this nifty turntable which allowed him to scratch both sound and video, really nice!

Saturday

After a nice breakfast with some bacon & eggs and a nice barbeque lunch (which isn’t a sure thing at a festival), we headed out to the festival grounds to see Soapstarter. I hadn’t heard of the band before but they were really, really good. Easy listening funky rock. Absolutely one of the revelations of Fihp! After Soapstarter we checked out Buscemi. When you go and see Buscemi, you kinda know what to expect: funky exotic (Balkan) sounds. If you hear one song by Buscemi, you’ve kinda heard them all and I SWEAR I can hear that woman say “Henin” (as in Justine Henin) in the song “Sahib Balkan”.
After Buscemi I wanted to see Admiral Freebie, not because I’m a fan of his music but just because I wanted to see him live. I have to say I enjoyed his concert, great music and a great guy !

Sunday

Off to the festival grounds for the last day with some known and unknown names to see! First thing we saw was Jerboa. I already saw him perform a set last year at the Pukkelpop festival where it was just him, his turntables and an EFX box or two -) . For a while now he’s taken his music to the next level. Percussion, guitars and synths included, his (or their, now) beats were smoother than honey, another really great concert!
After Jerboa we saw the Puppetmastaz, which was a superfun concert! As the name suggest, they perform a kind of puppetry act in which the puppets rap some delicious lines and drop some bomb beats, really fun to watch and a nice sound. Calvin Harris (”acceptable in the eighties…”) was next on the list, fun rock with an electronic touch. Quite good, altough not really my thing…
After Harris Ladytron perfomed their usual sterile set which lacked the fun and enthousiasm we received from other bands, a bit dissapointing… Since we had more than an hour before Chromeo kicked in, we went to see Flip Kowlier (who’s going solo nowadays). If he’d worn a cowboy hat, I would have sworn he was a country singer (Jihaaaa!). I like their sound but I really HATE it that he only sings in that Western Flemish accent, only one tenth of Belgium understand, that’s just a pitty…
Down to the last one, Chromeo, which to my surprise is just a two member band, blew the roof of with an amazing, funky set! Really nice! Sexy time!

While I feel I’m getting old for these kind of festivals, I had a great time with my girlfriend. Saw some great bands and spoiled ourselves gastronomically (do you know anyone else that brings passion fruit to a festival? ), maybe hopefully till next year Donkvijvers!

Here are some goofy clips I stumbled upon. It would be kinda nerdy to dedicate this site to programming alone so here are some funny streaming vids!

• Making light with a pencil!
• Sun’s Blackbox Project earthquake test
• What happens when you drink diet Coke + Mentos
• Coke + chicken = Cochicken!

Web 2.0, is probably the the biggest IT buzzword in the past year. Since definitions for Web 2.0 are hardly around, let’s just call it a nice mixture of both technology and content tinted with a blend of interactivity that is sure to (at least I think so) be the future of the internet.

Sceptisists are always around, here’s a nifty site that laughs at the way some webdevelopers implement Web 2.0 techniques in their own webpages. You can have your own webpage rated and it’ll be added to the site database (that’s good marketing!).

This site seems to be only 25% Web 2.0 compliant, looks like I’ve got someting to work on

Classic story. You’re just done formatting and you want everything to stay nice and tidy, especially your desktop. Just after a few weeks, things start getting all messed up and you can hardly see a glimpse of your nifty background. What I used to do is create a folder named ‘junk’ on my desktop and drag all the unused items into it. I thought I was the only one that was this lazy but I caught some friends of mine doing the exact same thing. Anyways, I came across a website that offers some handy wallpapers that’ll help organize your desktop icons, now check out my new desktop

This way I can order my icons by type, for instance applications, documents, images, folders, … Now let’s see if I can maintain this

More of these wallpapers can be found here (http://antbag.com/desktops/)!

Microsoft’s Adobe Flashkiller has left it’s cradle: Silverlight, previously known as WPF/E (part of the .NET 3.0 Framework) is amongst us! I agree that this release couldn’t have come at a worse time, some time ago Sun released JavaFX and Adobe has launched Flex 2. Although Silverlight will probably have a tough time converting the non-(msft.)believers to the platform, but one has to admit Silverlight’s features look most promising. Msft. has even guaranteed that they’d make work of cross platform plugins for Silverlight (A MACOSX plugin is already available).

What makes Silverlight different from any other rich client-side application is that all markup is actualy stored in a nice and nifty XML format called XAML. The XAML format can be consired like a kind of nextgen HTML. Because these rich & interactive documents are stored in a textual format (XML), the applications can be searched through by a search engine. This is something no competitor of Silverlight is able to do. And because searchability is especially important for websites (think of an online store), this might be what will lift Silverlight of it’s cradle and will motivate it’s insertion into the WWW.

Yet another thing which suggest the future dominance of Silverlight as the future technology for rich-media websites is Expression Blend (2). Expression Blend supports the design of Silverlight application (using XAML offcourse) in both a graphic and programmatic setting. Together with future Silverlight support of the Visual Studio IDE, this makes design and development of these next-gen webapplications a whole lot easier as oppose to JavaFX, for which you should have installed a couple of programs and framework for it to launch.

I’ve checked out the alpha version and it took me about 5 minutes to have my first Silverlight app up and running. I’m impressed! If your not, you should definitely check out some of the Silverlight reference sites:

• http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/
• http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

I was really BLOWN away after seeing some examples of the technology, there’s a real chemistry between both presentation and content. This IS the future of the web…

After reading a review on Battlestar Galactica in Knack magazine (at my girlfriends house, I don’t actually read it ) in which they stated: “If there’s one series you most definetly need to watch, it’s Battlestar Galactica“. So taking their advice, I started watching the series and I have to say I’m blown away by it’s outrageously facinating storyline. I can’t believe it took me this long before discovering the series but I’m glad I’ve now got over 30 episodes left to watch! If you want to start watching I suggest you watch the 2 pilot episodes first, our local tv-station (VT4) jumped directly into the series and I think some events and characters aren’t really cleared out properly, just my 2 cents!

Maybe a tip for those rainy summerevenings, enjoy!