April 28, 2003
Arrived!
Finally arrived in Melbourne, Australia!
After 22 hours of flying, an interesting stopover in Singapore and countless airplane breakfasts and dinners, Michael and I arrived in Melbourne, at 4.45am, Saturday morning.
It's great to be back in Australia! :)
April 24, 2003
Off to Australia!
So, tonight at 11.55pm I'm off to Australia on Qantas QF6/10.! Really looking forward to spending a few weeks in the home country, catching up with friends, getting back out into the surf, and hearing english on the streets again :)
Australia really is a long way away from Europe, I'm departing here in Frankfurt on a thursday night, and arriving in Melbourne on the following saturday morning (including time difference of 8 hours). Total time door to door should be about 22-24 hours.
Will write back once I've arrived :)
April 23, 2003
10 Years of Browsing!
Yesterday marked the 10th Anniversary since Mosiac was released to the public. What a change that has made to the Internet!
I think I still have a Mosiac binary somewhere too :)
April 22, 2003
Happy Easter!
Hope everyone had a wonderful easter break! Last night I returned from Usedom where I spent Easter with my girlfriend and some good friends from my Uni days.
Above is a picture (taken yesterday) of one of the 2 cottages we stayed in, right along the beach. Tickets for my next trip (Frankfurt to Melbourne this thursday) are already on my desk so it's going to be a busy week!
Welcome Michael!
Fellow Cocoon committer and work colleague Michael Melhem now has his own weblog. Welcome mate! :)
April 16, 2003
Upcoming Travel!
Tommorow I'll be heading off to Usedom for the easter break, a small Island in the north of Germany near the Polish border. Will be without Net access while I'm there (!)
Then, the week after next I'll be flying back to Melbourne, Australia again for 2-3 weeks for work which will be great.
Busy times ahead! :)
April 14, 2003
crafterm@apache!
Finally got the first version of my Apache home page up and running. At the moment it includes a few photos and a brief description of yours truly! :) and a small history of how I came across and started to use Cocoon at work.
You might notice the use of Forrest for the website. Kudos to the Forrest team for building such a cool product! :)
Inspiron Time!
It's finally arrived! This morning I took delivery of my brand new Dell Inspiron 8500 (larger image), and I've been playing with it non-stop all day! :)
Its a Pentium 4M, 2.2 Ghz system with 512 mb DDR-RAM, 60 gb HDD, 15.4" WUXGA display, NVidia GeForce 4200 Go 64 mb, Bluetooth, plus more. The WUXGA display is particularly awesome, currently it's running at a resolution of 1920x1200 and it's unbelievably sharp and clear.
Many thanks to Jens at Dell! :)
As you can probably see, Windows XP is currently installed, but I'm looking forward to putting Debian GNU/Linux on it too :)
April 13, 2003
Lagavulin!
I attended a Whisky Tasting friday night which was really enjoyable! We tried 6 different single malt Scottish Whiskies during the evening, all from different regions in Scottland.
I also found out that my favourite Whisky Lagavulin 16J is now in low supply! Prices have already increased, so it looks like I'll have to invest fast! :)
April 12, 2003
Gnome 2.3.0 Snapshots!
Gnome 2.3.0 development is well underway with the release of the development series snapshots. Lots of updated applications in this release which is great.
The Linux/UNIX desktop has certainly come a long way from the old days of twm and mwm :)
Matrix Reloaded!
The trailer for the Matrix Reloaded has been released!. If you can handle the 100mb download, it's well worth the watch! *drool*.. :)
April 10, 2003
More Ruby!
Some more funky Ruby language tricks:
a = 10
b = 20
puts "a = #{a}, b = #{b}"
a, b = b, a
puts "a = #{a}, b = #{b}"
results in the following being printed:
a = 10, b = 20
a = 20, b = 10
ie. parallel assignments are allowed :)
The following:
0.upto(9) { |x| print x, " " }
prints:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Ruby!
At the moment I'm currently investigating the use of Ruby for a new project that's starting up at work.
It's a bit mind-boggling after coming from the Java/C++ world, but so far it looks quite neat. It has many similarities from several languages including Java, Perl, Smalltalk, C++, plus some unique features of its own. Have a look at this:
a = %w( ford holden mazda ferrari )
a.each { | car | puts car }
This iterates over the defined array printing out the contents using a feature called 'blocks'.
Well, once I've finished reading about it I'll report back again :)
April 09, 2003
Welcome Torsten!
Fellow Cocoon committer Torsten Curdt has also just entered the world of weblogging! Welcome mate! :)
Welcome Christian!
Christian Schmitt, one of my former colleagues and general Cocoon guru, has started blogging! Welcome mate! :)
April 08, 2003
Water Rockets!
Cliff, one of the senior engineers at our company is an avid Water Rocket launcher. I still remember firing one of his Guppy water rockets before coming to work over here in Germany. It was so much fun, and it travelled an immense amount of distance for a small Pepsi bottle with some compressed air.
Now, Cliff has a page set up explaining how anyone can do it - as soon as I find a spare weekend... :)
Open Source Report
LinuxPlanet has an interesting report about the analysis of open source vs. closed source code with some inspections tools.
The last line of the article "Still, when all is said and done, the bottom line is quite simple. Open source code is much cleaner than proprietary source code. What more need be said?".
Excellent :)
April 06, 2003
ICQ!
Finally got around to registering myself with ICQ, my ICQ number is 193826770 - I'm just chatting with Torsten Curdt at the moment :)
Feel free to send me a message!
April 05, 2003
Spring Time!
Spring has definitely hit Frankfurt, the weather is finally starting to warm up and the trees are becoming green again. This is a small picture I just took of the Frankfurt skyline from my apartment (larger version).
The buildings from left to right are the European Central Bank, Dresdner Bank, Commerzbank, Japan Tower, Heleba Tower, Deka Investment, Deutsche Bank, and the Messe Tower.
JDK 1.4.2 Beta Released
Sun have just made their 1.4.2 beta available for download! This version hosts a bunch of fixes and new features like support for IA-64 Itanium systems, Swing XP and GTK+ themes, improved performance and startup times, plus more. Full details are available here.
April 04, 2003
Garnome - Gnome from source!
I've just discovered and built Garnome, known as the "bleeding edge GNOME distribution". Garnome provides a framework for downloading and building the latest and greatest Gnome source packages - and it looks really great! You can build your own Gnome desktop with one command 'make install' :)
One great advantage I find is that it also lets you develop and work on Gnome itself without having to touch the release code that may already be installed on your system.
Awaiting my new notebook!
I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my new notebook. Last week I ordered a Dell Inspiron 8500 with all the bells and whistles on it you can imagine. The system specifications look really great, it even has a 15,4" WUXGA display on it (16:10 aspect ratio!).
I'm really quite excited about getting Debian GNU/Linux and Cocoon up and running on it so I can work and play completely mobile!
Hopefully it arrives soon :)
April 03, 2003
Linux on an Apple iPod
A good friend of mine Bernard Leach has got Linux up and running on the Apple iPod. Brilliant stuff, way to go Bern!
Perhaps when one of the JDK's work on the iPod we can get Cocoon onto one of these :)
Birthday Time!
A special thanks to everyone that came to my birthday party over the weekend. Saturday was quite a wild night, made for a very quiet Sunday! Photos from the party are up at Zoltan's image library, http://www.pbase.com/ztank (thanks for taking the photos mate!). If you look closely you might also recognize some familiar Cocooner's there too :-)
Thanks!
Wow, thanks everyone for your support and cross-weblog linking! I didn't realise blogging was so popular! :)