Dominiek Dierickx

If you’d be intrested in buying a new desktop, be sure to look at the new Dell XPS 420’s series, it offers an Intel QuadCore Extreme processor for just a few nickles, a real bargain as you can see:

Just 1270 euros, that’s about double the price you’d pay for the entire system with ‘just’ the standard Quad Core Processor. Seems like Dell is focusing less on the middle class customer and more on the ‘nutcase millionaire’ customer.

While scattering the very edges of the web I came across this site that indexes all Lego catalogs and sets. Nostalgia struck me as I could still smell these little plastics parts as if I was ten years old. Here are a few I owned

This must be the first one I had (or can remember). I usually built them and then combined all the parts of my sets to make this big town or something , I actually knew some people who glued their Lego’s and then just put them on their closets, that’s sad!

I know for sure every kid has had its “pirate-period”, obsessed by coins and pirate boats, it was such a good time . I remember these well, especially the monkeys that came with the sets!

That cannon alone must have given me hours of fun (it could actually shoot stuff!).

I remember dreaming about this set when I was about 8 years old, a beautiful pirate ship! I just had to have it! But, unfortunately, I never got it , oh well, no harm done, I still got enough Lego’s!

I hold alot of memories to this one! When I had to go in for surgery, my dad got me this boat. It came with a small engine so I often played with it in the bathtub! Really cool this one!

The grade school I went to was that close to our home you could actually see our living room a bit, and every 6th of december I remember trying to peek over the wall, from school into our living room, to see if my parents had set up me and my brother’s presents! I remember I was so happy when I came home that friday and saw this Lego set on our table with a whole armada of candy! God I miss those days

Halfway the nineties, space was the big theme in Lego’s, and especially the Space Shuttle! This was definetely the coolest set I had!

I got this set on my twelveth birthday. My mom invited my nieces over for pancakes and I remember we were fighting over it

All of these images are from http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory (orginally from the Lego company …), on that site you can find plans and offcourse all of those catalogs full of beautiful colours !

To export all my data to my new hosting is used phpmyadmin’s feature to export an entire database to SQL. This worked rather well if it weren’ for the fact that phpmyadmin didn’t save auto increment fields to the SQL file. This means that I manually had to set all ID fields to auto increment. I noticed this while adding the first entry to my blog, the following message appeared:

Versions : this occured with phpmyadmin version 2.9 on a mysql 4 database.

So if you encounter this problem, there’s someting wrong with the auto increment of your index fields!

If you’re reading this you’ve succesfully reached my new home @ dominiek.eu! I first considered moving to a .be domain but turns out it was already taken, so here are the links to my name-colleagues pages (because we need to support one-another ):

www.dominiek.BE (Dutch)

Fun blog to read and what a cool header picture! I’m sorry dominiek.be but unlike you I REALLY HATE Eva de Roovere

and

www.dominiek.COM

This guy is an international Ruby On Rails consultant, an interesting blog. Especially the post on China’s “Great wall of fire” (which now also blocks RSS feeds btw).

Seems we do have one other thing in common, and that’s our shared interest in computers , be sure to check ‘em out!

I have to say I’m a very satisfied Windows Vista user (and I know there are others out there!), but just this morning I had some trouble adding a network printer (”Not enough memory available…”). Seems this is a common problem on Vista so luckily a solution has been found, which is formulated here.

December 2008 update: I was forced to return to Windows XP since my USB TV-tuner card was not working well with Vista. Working in XP now, I can’t think of another OS I would rather use…

After finally founding affordable ASP.NET (and AJAX) hosting, I’m moving to a new webhost. Domain name is also changing, to www.dominiek.eu so don’t forget to update those bookmarks . The hosting has been confirmed but the domain name is still pending so it’ll be up & running in the next couple of days!

Building up the routine of getting out of bed early and stuffing my brains full of (in this case) interesting but complicated study material, the new school year has kicked in. As you may know I’ve obtained my bachelor degree in applied computer science last year (Hogeschool Gent) and I’m now continuing my studies at the VUB. Some of the courses I’ll have this semester are artificial intelligence (neural networks, agents, genetic algorithms, …), Scheme (which is called ‘Interpretation of computer programs’, logics and offcourse a bunch of good old mathematics to glue it all together. No more Java, Oracle or C#. While it’s a weird step going from functional to academic programming (using Scheme and LISP), it really pushes you into building more robust, performant code, perhaps I’ll post some of my Scheme code snippets here later!