Programmers are lazy. We all are. I think Rails programmers are lazier than others. I mean, Rails is an opinionated software, that’s why we all love it. It has made many choices for us, so we can think about our problems. | Continue reading
PHP has been thrashed a lot over the last years. While many critics are doubtlessly true, it is still the most used server-side language to create the web we use today and it is an easy to learn language to get started w… | Continue reading
For one of my recent projects I looked for simple icons, that are free to use. Well, to put it in a nutshell, I didn’t find, what I was looking for. So I fired up Inkscape and created a set that fits my need. Here it is, simple, plain, monochrome and free to use (a.k.a. in public … | Continue reading
This book doesn’t need an introduction. Obie Fernandez has done an incredibly awesome work with this book, many of us already knew it. Generally, my reviews start with a tiny description of the reviewed book, then go on with considerations grouped by chapter and finish with a gen … | Continue reading
The HTML5 specification lists default CSS rules. The article describes how to revert these. | Continue reading
The article describes a way to mark up syntax highlighted source code with a simple pre element while retaining the advantages of other solutions. | Continue reading
A selection of related background publications by members of the CHESS consortium. Read More... | Continue reading
CHESS is a STREP within the 7th Framework Programme, ICT-2009.4.1: Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation, 'Adaptive cultural experiences'. Read More... | Continue reading
Cultural heritage institutions nowadays face the important challenge of making their collections more engaging to visitors, especially the young ‘digital natives’, while exploiting, in new forms of cultural interactive experiences, the recently developed digital libraries. An app … | Continue reading
Due to the earthquake in Japan Lufthansa sent one of their A380 planes to New York instead of Tokyo. Apparently it's too expensive to keep these planes grounded, so they get rerouted across the world in cases like these. It's a very spacious plane, and surprisingly quiet during t … | Continue reading
The EPUB standard is based on several other, well-established technologies. This makes it easy to generate simple ebooks in this format with the standard libraries of many modern languages. I’ll show here a way to do it … | Continue reading
Here is a small introduction to the new Quartz Where feature that was just released as part of the Terracotta 3.5 Enterprise Edition. I’ll be posting another screencast with some demo application benefiting from the feature, including the couple of steps required to migrate the a … | Continue reading
Bart Vander Sanden Freelance app and web developer in Leuven, Belgium Home Web Development Photography Blog English Nederlands Home › Blog › Times Square, New York City in 2011 Times Square, New York City in 2011 Posted on 27 March 2011. About me Hi, I'm Bart, a freelance web dev … | Continue reading
The presentation I gave at the BeJUG a couple of weeks back is now available on parleys.com. Here is part 1: You can also find the code to the Raffle application I used to demo a couple features on github.com. For more information, downloads and full documentation on ehcache plea … | Continue reading
A common pattern to offloading the database is to use a cache in front of it. Yet, generally, it’s still application code that goes to the underlying system of records for writes. It also then becomes responsible for invalidating or updating cached entries.Using cache writers can … | Continue reading
Sergio Bossa and myself gave this presentation at jFokus (Stockholm, Sweden) and Codemotion (Rome, Italy). Here’s the slidedeck For more information: www.ehcache.org www.terracotta.org code.google.com/p/terrastore/ | Continue reading
Many web services allow access to their APIs via JSONP nowadays. This allows client-side JavaScript to access ressources via domain boundaries. However, for several reasons caching ressources locally (on the same server … | Continue reading
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Last May, I spent a day in Fallbrook at Emerald Forest Bird Gardens, the very source of our Toucan beak and feather specimens (NB: No birds are harmed in this research!). The special occasion was a NOVA filming event for the “Making Stuff” series, the first part of which aired la … | Continue reading
While I was laying the groundwork for a new datastore client library with support for asynchronous requests, I added some low-level support... | Continue reading
As you may have noticed, I have had to take a break from regular posts on this blog, as we mobilize communities against our utility in California, PG&E, who are attempting to force ‘smart’ gas and electric meters on everyone’s … Continue reading → | Continue reading
This post is primarily intended for App Engine users (and of those, only Python users :-). Over the past months I've been working on a new ... | Continue reading
One week ago we released the first beta of our Fremantle release, which includes Ehcache 2.4, Terracotta Enterprise Suite 3.5 and at last but not least Quartz 2.0. You have been able to cluster your Quartz Scheduler instances using Terracotta for a while already. Yet, as with a J … | Continue reading
Bart Vander Sanden Freelance app and web developer in Leuven, Belgium Home Web Development Photography Blog English Nederlands Home › Blog › Strzebonsky Noizescene & DEViNE Soundsystem at Torres (Leuven) on 17 November 2010 Strzebonsky Noizescene & DEViNE Soundsystem at Torres (L … | Continue reading
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There have been a great number of articles and opinons about Instagram lately (if you missed them, try google), but Rands’ “The Art of Not” — as usual — comes out near the top and is definitely worth sharing. On a sidenote, Instagram has done two things to me. It has managed to r … | Continue reading
The new Make Magazine is out on the streets, and with it, my article on cargo bicycles, entitled Cargo Bike Power: Car-Free Carrying Makes a Comeback. In the course of my research, I interviewed innovators and relatively new entrants into … Continue reading → | Continue reading
It’s incredible to me how so many of my friends- even those who know the risks- still hold small microwave ovens (cause that’s what they are) up to their heads and keep them on their bodies. Watch this video if … Continue reading → | Continue reading
This is a peak under the hood of an ongoing project. Encouraged by the widespread enthusiasm regarding CSS3 and its adoption across all browsers and platforms we encountered during this year's fronteers conference, we decided to especially put rgba to work for us. The following s … | Continue reading
I’m devastated and heartsick to hear that the pregnant blue whale who washed up at Bean Hollow beach this last weekend was the victim of a ship strike off the coast. This follows another recent whale killing where a cargo … Continue reading → | Continue reading
@UK PLC new cloud email system is brilliant and orders of magnitude faster than exchange at dealing with hundreds of thousands of messages. | Continue reading
Go Mark Ronson! This is one cool video 🙂 | Continue reading
More and more websites are popping up toolbars when you scroll down a certain distance on a page. I can't stand these annoying bars, some of which are powered by Apture.com I think Annoy. should be added to that list. If you want to block the Apture bar, simply add 127.0.0.1 ww … | Continue reading
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I have to confess my profound consternation over the fact that one of the top search engine terms leading to my blog includes the word “panties” And it serves as no consolation that the number one (by grand margin) search term on the list reveals what lies beneath the panties. It … | Continue reading
On Saturday morning, I was roused from slumber before 7:00 AM by the unnerving machine gun style alarm calls of the Bulbuls (of which there are now four free-flying in my living room). I stumbled off of the sofa, peered out of the window, and looked for a cat. I did not see one, … | Continue reading
Just finished up hacking on my submission for the Wufoo API contest. VoiceForms 4000 takes any existing Wufoo form and turns it into a phone survey. The app is written in Python, runs on App Engine, and uses Twilio for all the phone magic. https://voiceforms4000.appspot.com/ Go a … | Continue reading
Duncan Conjecture that the original Big Bang black hole had a high speed evaporation phase via quantum tunnelling of a postulated high energy escape particle. | Continue reading
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I read this article in the Chronicle about a month ago, and its been festering in the back of my mind since then. I didn’t want to let it pass without mentioning it on my blog. Essentially- if you haven’t … Continue reading → | Continue reading