David Cumps : Community News

Wanted: Friends!

CumpsD — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:12:00 GMT

Today I'm going to tell you a little story about me. I think of myself as your typical description of a geek.

Passionate about all things technological, eager to find out how the inner details work together, a movie and music lover, and spending too much time behind a computer.

Having all those feats, over the course of twenty years, result in getting out of touch with the what interests the large part of the population.

I don't care about soccer, drinking, going out or making a complete fool out of myself. I can talk for hours about some architecture however, or about techy pranks.

But you know what? My surroundings don't have a clue what I'm talking about, usually ending up in me not bothering anymore. Same for taste of humor, I love the dry British kind, and everyone I know hates it.

This isn't some sort of self-pity post however. I'm fine with making conversation, but most of the time it's forced, and I constantly have to fight the analytical part of my mind to not interfere and kill the conversation.

That being said, I'd like to meet some other geeks from around the world to have a chat with, the international developer community.

Do you sometimes have the same feelings? Would you like to meet someone new? Talk about some random IT thing, or just about your life to a fellow geek?

Contact me! Tell me something about you, where are you from, how old are you, what do you do, some story. Please? :)

Writing all these articles is fun, but having dialogues is a lot more stimulating.

I hope to hear from you! :)

(Yeah, non-geeks can mail too, if you have some interest in IT or aren't bored by someone talking about it :))

The Bits & Bytes Religion

CumpsD — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:05:00 GMT

Time for some Monday morning fun... These days we got so many religions, why not add another one? I give you the Bits & Bytes Religion!

allTunes/Mp3Sparks/AllOfMp3 Business model

CumpsD — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Everyone knows them, the controversial Russian-based online music store.

This won't be another post questioning the legality of the company, there are plenty of those around. What I do want to have a look at however, is it's technological business model and compare it to the mainstream alternative.

WebDD 2007 Is Over

CumpsD — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 02:43:00 GMT

Hello there!

The day is finally over. After being up from 5 o' clock this morning, I arrived back home at 1 o' clock this night.

A bit of Coca Cola, a Snickers and sitting behind a PC and I'm awake again :)

Public transportation in London has the remarkable ability to take hours over very short distances, for ridiculously high prices. It took me 2 hours to get to Reading this morning.

But luckily, the day ended good. I found a radio station which broadcasts Armin van Buren - A State Of Trance, apparently the only non-British DJ to play weekly on Kiss FM.

Photo's will follow later since it was forbidden to take pictures if you didn't mention it in front, which I ofcourse forgot ;)

Started the day with a session about Microformats (Glenn Jones), which are basically nothing more then HTML elements with specific classes assigned to functional data. This makes it able for search engines and other machine code to interpret the page and easily retrieve the functional data to process. I'll give this a try in a next project, it seems very nice.

More info: microformats.org

The second session I attended was about CSS (Patrick Lauke) and how you use it to separate content from lay-out. Which was pretty basic stuff in my opinion, but I still picked up some tricks. It seems very nice to use CSS to provide a printer friendly version of a page.

Then I watched a session about Ruby On Rails (Dave Verwer), which gave an overview of possibilities combined with some demo's.

Lastly there was a session about Unobtrusive Javascript (Dave Verwer) which provides a very clean way to provide fall-back functionality to clients which have Javascript disabled. It was good to listen to this to hear another point of view, not that much about how the technology works. I'm currently using this on my personal (Dutch) blog to display special effects on images :)

Slides will be available from webdd.org.uk soon.

Afterwards we went for a drink with some people and some food in Pizza Express where I got to know some other people who are working in the financial world as well, and got some more information about gatherings in London about .NET development. This was the most important part of the day for me, since it was quite special as a foreigner to be among such a bunch of English people, without knowing anyone and making new contacts.

WebDD was a very nice event, with gave me a break from all my day to day development work and brought me back in touch with the technologies I love, around web development.

Visiting WebDD - Reading

CumpsD — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 23:38:00 GMT

Today I got a letter from Microsoft UK personally confirming my registration for the WebDD event for next weekend.

Attached with a security badge to enter the Microsoft Campus.

I must say I'm pretty impressed about the effort put into this, since it's a free event after all. Especially since they had to send it abroad and everything :)

When it comes to logistics, I'm always impressed at Microsoft. Receiving stuff from them coming from the US, Ireland, Germany and other places, without any problems.