For a while now I’ve been thinking about updating this design to give it a more web 2.0 feel. I updated the header and the footer to do exactly that. Al it is still work in progress I pushed this new design out already. This are the things that are changed:

• New header/footer look & feel
• Changed the width of the content to fit into a 960px grid
• Reduced the size of this WordPress theme
• Did some code improvement by removing not used code

Things that are still on the drawing board are:

• Make this design xhtml 1.1 strict compliant
• Move the graphics to sprites
• Increase the speed of the site
• Enable caching

That is it for the new stuff. A while back I found out about the way back machine. This website indexes(copies) websites and stores them in a huge archive. Of course I directly checked this url and since 2000 I have a presence there. Check out how my site used to look. Actually the design of the site is really nice.

I also found some really old pascal code. It is funny to see how programmers do things when they don’t know how to use arrays(this is almost 15 years back). I would store the data in a file and then would read it back line by line. I solved this issue of not having(knowing about) arrays by reading and writing in a file line by line How cool is that! Wow 15 years… A lot has happened since then:

• Got several diplomas, degrees and thank you’s
• Owned several cars
• Spent time in Indonesia, Suriname, Singapore, Malaysia
• Visited even more countries
• Used up a lot of girlfriends
• Had dinner over 5000 times
• Went about 45000 times to the toilet

For the next 15 years. What I’ll do I don’t know, yet. Here is a Youtube video which is inspiring.

I wonder what will happen in the next 15 years(I’ll be really old then)… One thing that will happen soon is my graduating. For the rest it is up to life!

For a while now I’ve been blogging a bit and while I am not a professional in this, I discovered some useful tricks which I want to share with you. I will not discuss obvious things like use a spellchecker, on the other hand some things I describe will sound obvious but will need effort to get it done right and therefor is often neglected. Also I will not focus on content that much and focus this list on structure because half of the time I don’t know what to write about and I am not experienced enough to give tips on content writing.

Don’t publish – What are your insane? blogs are all about publishing! What I meant was that when writing your post don’t hit the publish button but instead save your post first as a draft to review it the day after(a few hours is also ok). Of course you just spend some time writing the post and are anxious to publish but when you wait one day you will reflect on what you have written the day before in a more fair way. Therefor don’t publish (directly) and also try previewing your post on your site before publishing.

People love structure – So use this! Paragraph your text to make it more readable. This will also structure your text in such a way people can skip it when they find it boring. Also be not afraid to use lists of any kind because somehow people like reading lists.

Extend your content – You can only make up so much crap therefor try to involve other peoples information as well. Link to other blogs that share or disagree on your opinion, make use of media like youtube and wikipedia. Also include a link to anything you reference in that text itself.

Summarize – Add the end of your blog post ask the readers a question, state the moral of the post, Reflect or express your opinion in one short sentence. This will bring a good ending to the story and might even invite people to post comments on your blog. But never ever end with a question to asks your readers to drop you a comment if you liked this piece of creative(read crap) writing. Comments should be about content. The title & introduction of your post should also give an explanation of what the post is about. The title should be one catchy sentence and the introduction should be one paragraph.

Improve – There will be times when you posted a story which contains errors. The first thing you should do is fix them. There is no need to put update tags on a post where you only fixed some minor spelling errors. If you change the content of your post dramatically you might want to consider this and inform the users of the update in the beginning of the post and at the end.

Of course I often make mistakes myself and do not follow this 100% but it is a good guide to measure your posts. I try to always hit at least four out of five points before publishing my post. This way I make sure the blog post lives up to at least some degree of expectation.

Currently I am working with four programming languages/scripts at the same time and while this sometimes frustrates me I am also loving it. It frustrates me because sometimes I mess up really simple things which don’t give an error in one compiler but will do in the other. Also there is a huge difference in how some development environments handle bad code. For example I am working with ActionScript in Adobe Flash and the errors are displayed in the most useless way. This makes bug tracking a bitch. In Java or PHP a line where the fault might have occurred is given. Al though the latter one is not always right it makes diving into it a lot easier.

The good side about it is that I get to do more stuff and I can dive into anything I like doing. A lot of programmers only stick to one language cause it is a b!^<h switching between languages sometimes. The upside is that I know more of what is going on and I can take ideas from one project to the other. There are still a lot of languages I haven’t touched yet and some more I want to rediscover.

One script I am currently working with is JavaScript and this is the biggest mess I’ve ever seen. What will work under one browser won’t work under another and even though there are some really good libraries out there your code will be ugly. The thing that I hate with JavaScript is that you can’t go without it. It is the only script available (badly)supported by the major browsers. This keeps me wondering: why isn’t there an alternative available to JavaScript.

Every browser has 10 ways of markup. You can do HTML formatting, XML formatting, XHTML formatting any many more. Every browser has support for Flash, Silverlight and many other cool technologies. But no matter what there is always only one script available and that is the messy JavaScript. Why is this, and why do all the browsers support it poorly. Maybe in the future their will be alternatives for JavaScript.

Currently I am reading the book Death Star which is set in Star Wars galaxy. This made me to get back in the mood of this classic and wanting to watch the two trilogies again. Here is a Youtube movie to get you in the mood.

Enlightenment for Eric is Bali, enlightenment for Sammy is life it self. For a part enlightenment for me are these epic stories because they always lift my spirit…

Alfred you should blog. I am left wondering(and I guess we all are) to what enlightens you It seems like The blog virus is still going strong but Alfred is not infected yet

Since everyone is doing a top 10 list of greatest things here is my cut. If you don’t know about the tipping point:”It is the moment things get momentum or die out (something like that anyway)”.

My tipping point top 10:

1. Learning Mandarin. After a few months with Chinese people I am starting distinguishing and perceive more sounds. When I first arrived at this place I never had a clue what they were talking about, nowadays nothing has changed except: I hear more, A lot more… Somehow before I was deaf for this Chinese language. I did not experience this with German and Bahasa Indonesia.

2. Dropbox, Twitter and Jaiku for being great services but with lousy business model. Don’t get me wrong these are all great services and they should be cheap. But they have no way to get paid… Almost nobody minds paying for something good but these services have almost none or no payment plans at all.

3. Digsby and Google Chrome for almost being great applications. You guys will be great when you are available for OSX(and Linux). How can you expect to bring something revolutionary when you bring it only to windows? Hurry up with the versions on OSX…

4. My fellow blogger Saiful Rizal with his plan to inspire us all. He is a bit late with the twitter thing but this also tells us twitter still has momentum. He made a list of youtube videos that I found motivating, this made me check his blog once in a while.

5. The book Reality Check of Guy Kawasaki. It is the book I am reading now and it is really good so far and if all the books were this interesting and fun to read at the same time the next point won’t be a problem at all.

6. My plan to read one book a week. My New Year’s resolution, it’s HiDef

7. Arie.nl werkkleding & werkschoenen, Poetsplaza.nl, Baliday.com and some other projects I am working on.

8. Inscorta is the name of an open source project I am starting. It is actually the code behind Arie.nl & Poetsplaza.nl. Until now the development has been done solely by me. It turns out to be a great software package but further development is slow and difficult since I am do it all. That is why I decided a long time ago to make this software public so everyone can use it and help to improve it.

9. Me turning into something usually named blogger. This is not a New Year’s resolution, I just enjoy it. 

10. Me turning into an Apple Fanboy! Like the attack some M*$*&*F*#^%*rs did on my villages in Tribalwars, I am afraid there is no stopping to this Bill and Steve.

Ok, this is not exactly a tipping point list.

“Whaddaya gonna do, life goes on” (My favorite quote from The Sopranos)

Seems Solace is a popular word now-a-days. I’ve read a couple of blog post using that word so I thought let’s follow a trend Of course this is all because the movie Quantam of Solace. Supposed to be a good movie. But I wrote Bali Solace because Bali was once a great. I met up with Eric, Alfred, Sammy and Shanti. I also met a view people I hung around with before which is always fun to do… It was only for 5 days I was in Bali which is better than nothing but just too damn short.

All though I only had a couple of days in Bali I wasn’t busy doing trips and seeing cultural things. I spend my time enjoying the nightlife. During the day we also celebrated doing nothing and Eric was always there to support me with doing nothing. Alfred, Sammy and Shanti did go see some cultural things and enjoy the beautifull Bali sunset but I just enjoyed the beautifull Bali Bintang(means star in Bahasa) which is the biggest Indonesian beer brand.

My air carrier was Airasia and I was surprised how ok it was. It sure isn’t as good as some people make you want to believe but it isn’t bad. They just bring you from one location to the other and you have to pay for all the things on flight. But come on, it’s only a three hour flight! There were people eating, drinking and complaining about the prices and I was just sitting there reading my book and having a meal four times as cheap and many times better, on the ground… In flight food is only good with the really expensive airlines anyway.

Well it’s no fun without any pictures so you can find them on my photo site. And here is another youtube videos I found recently which is really funny (sorry, Dutch only…)

Sammy mentioned in his blog post, he is looking forward to his weekend in Bali. I am also looking forward to Bali and meeting up with Eric, Alfred(who are already in Bali for their well deserved Holidays), Sammy and Shanti. Only one more day to go at the office. My carrier will be Airasia and the hotel we will stay in is Sorga. I did a youtube search and for sure there were two videos(al though short) showing Hotel Sorga. What people post on the internet!

Since I don’t have television here and there is not much activity going on except my housemates playing computer games, I’ve been “youtubing” a lot lately. This includes watching episodes of “De Lama’s” but also a lot of other sketches. This particular sketch just made me laugh out loud.

That there is not a lot of activity, is not entirely true. On November 27 I’ll go to Bali for the weekend and meet up with Erotic Eric, Awesome Alfred and Sexy Sammy. This is something I’m really looking forward to.

Next month in Singapore is Siggraph Asia which I plan on visiting. But for now I’ll just keep playing computer games. Currently I am playing Red Alert 3 which I bought two weeks ago. It was the first game I bought this year and my expectations were high! My disappointment was also that… Why do they keep reinventing themselfs when they had it exactly right, the first time.

From my favorite youtube channel.