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)

Every day I think about writing a post for this blog(only a few seconds ). But every day I conclude there is nothing to write about. Not that my life is boring but I didn’t do anything interesting today or this week. You can say of course I can write about my job because creating computer games is the most coolest thing in the world! however I had to sign an NDA(It’s less interesting than it sounds), so that is off the table. But today in my few seconds of thought about this, I decided to write something…anything. But again I had nothing to write about. So I entered the search keywords “What to blog about” in google and I ended up at the Blog Herald which has the exact article I needed. After reading this I still knew nothing. Stupid blogs!

In another really short thought I remembered a blog post I once wrote about Starbucks and why it is successful (I never published that post) So, I did a search for that post but It disappeared I found an interesting fact though: “I was born January 14th 1982. The year when the diet coke also came to life”. I think I’ll use this line for my about page.

But I’ll tell you what I did today. I played some more Red Alert 3. Yes, it still didn’t finish the game. I read a chapter of a book I’m reading and after that I picked up another book to read afain a chapter. I am actually trying to read 4 books at once. This might not be the smartest thing to do but lately my brain is hungry for input and although youtube it really nice, nothing can capture my imagination as well as some good lines of code…I mean text! Lately for my job I’ve been writing code a lot and it made know how much I love doing this. I am turning back into a full time computer geek

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.