Contents tagged with Personal
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Wanted: Friends!
Today I'm going to tell you a little story about me. I think of myself as your typical description of a geek.
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Party Game Guitar Hero for PC
Ever heard of the very popular game for the PlayStation 2, called Guitar Hero? Until recently, I only vaguely picked it up here and there, but not being a big PlayStation gamer, I never payed much attention. That is, until today. A friend of mine gave me a link to Frets On Fire, which claims to be the PC variant of Guitar Hero. Seeing it was free, I downloaded it and gave it a try, and I have to admit, it's addictive!
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Personal space: Nucleus, DokuWiki, POP3, ..
It's been silent for a while again, mostly due to a lot of time going to my new job.
One of the things I've come up with lately is a new personal blog to share some of my consultant experiences. It's written in Dutch however, since it's less technical and more personal :)
Technical posts will still come up here, and here is a small one:
Becoming a consultant, I had the idea to set up a dedicated server to manage everything abroad.
Stuff like subversion, blog, wiki, imap, smtp, pop3, ...
But due to a cost issue, I stepped away from that idea, although it remains quite nice ;)
However, most of the above ideas can be solved on only shared webhosting space!
- Nucleus CMS as a personal blogging engine.
- DokuWiki as a personal wiki.
- And I'll code something in PHP to check my pop3 boxes and make them available through a centralised site, since apparently most solutions are either IMAP-only, or looking ugly.
Dokuwiki is quite nice, I'm sold for the idea of keeping a personal wiki. Documenting everything work related in a nice, presentable way. Easy to access, and only one place, instead of storing everything scattered through my filesystem, emails, papers, ...
I'll also try to use it to document all my future public projects, to complement this blog.
Currently, there's not much public information on it yet, but you can check out the blog and wiki at:
- Blog: consultants-life.be
- Wiki: consultants-life.be/wiki
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Changed Job - Financial Architects
Well, what have I done during the last year? First of all, I graduated from school with highest distinction and got a job as a webdeveloper, creating ASP.NET sites. Actually, I helped to come up with and create a rather generic cms-like framework that is being used for all future sites, cutting back on development time when administration sections have to be made, and when a lot of re-occurring things have to be implemented in a site. That's about the only vague description I can give, since it's "top secret" ;)
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Return from a long absence
After not having blogged for about a year on this site, I decided to play with the new Community Server 2.0 on weblogs.asp.net once ;)
Things surely changed a lot with the old site, most of all the look and the nice layout I managed to tweak is lost.
But the admin section is so much more extended now, and well, it sparked my interest again =)
So, expect some posts from me later this week, I'm back :)
Update:
After playing a bit with the skins, I found one I'll settle with for now. Made some tweaks to it, to use more screen-estate, and changed the Tags display to a list like all other lists on the site (although there's a problem due to the nested ul's on weblogs.asp.net apparently) -
Blizzard Screws Up - World Of Warcraft
I strongly advise everbody NOT to buy World Of Warcraft!
My brother bought the game today, I installed it, and then I wanted to create an account for him. And that's when the trouble began...
It seems Blizzard does not care about money, since all it's account creation pages are unavailable, throwing errors everywhere.
Or wait, they get the money from you at the shop, and then make it unable for you to use what you bought an hour ago!
Judging from their own forums (which I cannot post on because I don't have an account, and cannot create either) this problem is going on for some days.
First a normal 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' error, indicating their servers can't handle it. Which is really very bad for their image, a company like Blizzard, which can't keep their main billing pages up and running? Normally it's the other way around, the 'we want your money'-pages always work
And then everything is just falling appart, have some errors:- [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp] /WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp(86,18) Unable to load tag handler class "org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.el.fmt.MessageTag" for tag "fmt:message"'
- [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/agreementView.jsp] File "/WEB-INF/jsp/base/language.jsp" not found' [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/base/footer.jsp] Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler'
- org.apache.jasper.JasperException: Unable to compile class for JSP
- Error running /usr/local/java/bin/javac compiler
Slow poke! You took too long to complete the Account Creation process and your session has timed out. You will have to start again from the beginning. Sorry!
If you are persistent and can get through, to step 4, you notice you can select a game-card as a paying option. (After that, it dropped out again) But if you want to use the guest-account that comes with the box, that option is gone... It's a guest account to play 10 days, but they want your credit card info for that...
Don't expect any response from Blizzard either...
I'm really disappointed, 45 EUR for the game and then you can't play it!
Best thing, even their contact form is throwing errors. And nothing is mentioned on the main site, everybody has to figure it out themselves.
I'm going to start calling them starting from Monday untill I can create the account, otherwise they can give my money back and take their game back untill they get their crap together.
Good game, terrible service...
If anyone from Blizzard reads this: Try to turn this negative publicity into something positive... - [ServletException in:/WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp] /WEB-INF/jsp/authkeyView.jsp(86,18) Unable to load tag handler class "org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.el.fmt.MessageTag" for tag "fmt:message"'
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Presentation: eID in .NET
Yesterday I gave a presentation about eID in .NET, if somebody is interested I have uploaded the presentation together with some sample code to my personal website: Cumps.be
The purpose of this session is to give an idea about what's possible with the eID card in .NET and what is needed to get it working.
Some background information about eID is provided, after which four possible usage scenarios are described and what is needed to build them.
Note: The code are just technical tryouts, not ment to go straight into production :) Provided "AS IS". -
A day in Paris - Visual Gaming Finals
Yesterday I got invited by Microsoft France to Paris, to the Wax Club, to see the French Visual Gaming Finals.
My team mate, ZogStriP, participated in the High School competition there, so it was very exiting!
It was also a very good experience to learn french ;) And to get to know Paris, where the people are really crazy in traffic. Apparently, stop signs are just for decoration... Green or red, it all means the same :p
They played the games before and played the replay files on big screen, which were also recorded by a french television station. The station is on sattelite and is called GameOne, I don't know yet when they will broadcast it. I'll have to find someone who can digitally record it, because they interviewed me as well :p
So, the High School competition: there were 2 pools, one with 3 games and one with 6. Our best competitor was Z² who lost with a very little difference each time.
In the end, our dll won the High School competition! Resulting in a PDA for my team mate (I'm too old for High School ;p).
But here is where something special happened, he gave me the PDA!
He recently became MVS in France and just received one as well. Isn't it a nice gesture? Microsoft France made a very good choice making him MVS, he really deserves it with this kind of attitude, a real teamplayer. (So, for all French companies reading my blog, go to his blog and check it out, he would be a great asset for your company!)
After this, it was time for the Open Division.
There, our bot had a hard time. We lost the quarter finals by 1 point, due to a bug causing the AI to stop :/ So, chances for 1st and 2nd were gone. Finally we ended up at the fourth place, because the same bug occured again in the next game, which is really a shame.
One thing is sure, being 4th already is good, especially in France, the country of Visual Gaming, now we only have to fix this bug :p Result of ending on 4th place: A fingerprint reader and I also got interviewed, in English :p This is really a nice example of "dissolving boundaries" :)
And to finish, here's a picture of ZogStriP and me (ZogStriP right, me left):
To ZogStriP: Thanks! -
Internship at Microsoft
As some of you might now, I'll be doing my internship at Microsoft.
One of the things I'm supposed to do, is blog about my time there.
So, because of this, there is now an MS Internship category on my blog.
Ofcourse not everything I do will be posted, but I'm sure there will be enough :)
I'm really looking forward working there! -
DevDays 2005 Day 2 - Exams & Internship
The Developer & IT Pro Days 2005 are over, as well are my exams.
During day 2 we saw what is going to come with the next .NET version (partial files, generics, ClickOnce, ...) and what mistakes an admin can make in his IT setup and how to fix them.
The last one was really funny, but sadly enough those mistakes are often made, running SQL Server as SYSTEM, SQL Injection, simple passwords, no defense in depth, logging on as domain admin, ...
My exams are also over now, the last one of my current education, coming up next is a 3-month internship at Microsoft.
And just like Tom's doing, here is a picture of the Channel 9 guy, sitting together with the Azlan mascotte on the tower of stuff I had to learn these last 3 weeks for my exams :)