tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-917752010-05-13T19:00:55.352+02:00Anne's rambling on what he feels lies Beyond the Net and keeps him busy. Feel free to ignoreAnnenoreply@blogger.comBlogger284125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-66298898155564929552010-05-13T19:00:00.001+02:002010-05-13T19:00:55.398+02:00

This blog is now located at http://weblog.beyondtrees.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://weblog.beyondtrees.com/feeds/posts/default.

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-19055106663711335312010-03-12T12:33:00.002+01:002010-03-12T12:39:38.865+01:00

For a project I wanted to make optimal use of the significant server resources I had: 16 cpus and 24Gb of RAM. I implemented a custom HttpHandler that spawns a lot of requests, and used Apache Ant to request images rendered in 25 parallel threads.This took quite some time, and I noticed that the server was not actually doing anything; mostly using 1-2 cpu's a little bit during this process. Why

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-5900079261727481122010-03-05T11:19:00.003+01:002010-03-05T12:50:33.175+01:00

Everybody is twittering nowadays, and too many still use it only to broadcast messages about what they are doing; the "i am eating a banana" tweets. No problem with that, and in fact, I like to know when my friends eat bananas, especially when I'm bored waiting in line or in a train. So, please my friends, keep posting all the strange and stupid things you are doing, and let me be the judge of

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-9698865899580668502010-03-03T19:46:00.005+01:002010-03-03T20:18:12.557+01:00

I'm working on a web application to create a large set of tiled images based on an immense data collection. For that really great project (can't show you what it is though until it's live) I had to refresh my image processing skills again, after I've done several image sites before.I chose to use ASP.NET as the application, with a virtual immense canvas, working with C# 3.5, and still staying

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-42979238085634496492010-02-10T11:57:00.003+01:002010-02-10T12:12:44.597+01:00

I'm not sure how common this is outside of The Netherlands, but here all supermarkets have carts that require a coin to operate. The carts are locked together in a long line, and you need a coin of 50 euro cents to free it from the line. Fortunately you get it back after you're ready shopping. Here's what it looks like:Well, the main idea is of course to ensure that more people actually return

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-79670721435369763922010-02-02T16:48:00.008+01:002010-02-05T13:32:07.994+01:00

If I have something that you want, you can give me money for it. So if you're hungry, and I have an apple, I may give you that apple for some money. I'm more likely to do that when I have a lot of apples, or have cheap access to apples (or other forms of nutrition) and I want something else that I do not have and this money may help me get that from someone else.This is easy when the things are

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-84806118984262263602010-01-23T21:20:00.002+01:002010-01-23T21:42:41.480+01:00

I like watching movies, and as I'm blessed with no long-term memory, I can easily enjoy a good movie over and over again. The past weeks my 11 year old daughter and I are watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy; one of the classics I believe should be a central part in the education of all children.We did have an issue last night with the DVD menu; we could not get it to set to Dutch subtitles

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-78982964411399425202009-12-23T22:33:00.003+01:002009-12-23T22:36:32.343+01:00

Wondering whether I really need the Archos 7 portable video player to watch movies on boring plane and train rides... still not sure

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-271438141990213862009-11-06T20:08:00.002+01:002009-11-06T20:46:17.392+01:00

Tomorrow is my birthday and I'm glad to say that my bold statement some months ago about loosing weight has paid off.It is quite normal for men over their thirties to gradually gain weight. This is caused partly because of physical changes in how the adult body consumes energy, and partly because of the eating and exercising habit of men with busy families and a demanding job. The weight gain

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-74968760181449706492009-10-06T09:29:00.002+02:002009-10-06T09:39:09.682+02:00

Ever since the early days of the computer mouse (that was seen initially as only a kids toy, not to do actual serious business with), we've been interacting with our computer in the exact same way. Sure, we have a webcam, a microphone, but nothing really changed the way we tell our computers what we want to do.That is, until the iPhone changed all that and gave us the touch screen, and of course:

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-1636225156147232722009-09-10T14:07:00.002+02:002009-09-10T14:20:03.567+02:00

All programmers are religious zealots. So when it comes to the question of which Javascript framework to use, they will attack and defend furiously.I've been using Prototype a lot, but recently the jQuery framework has become famous too. When one customer asked another customer recently why they insisted on using jQuery, they answered: "well, jQuery is the de facto standard":-) a really

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-11319079582135541822009-09-07T09:20:00.002+02:002009-09-07T09:30:20.417+02:00

The bad guys are disguising themselves as the good guys. Interesting and dangerous.Monday morning means coffee and visiting news sites and weblogs. When I visited one of them, my browser redirected to a page that, after some animation, looks like this:A perfect copy of a windows explorer with evidence of viruses and trojans. The popup looks so real, I had to drag it to see it could not get

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-39533812826085998602009-09-03T16:43:00.003+02:002009-09-03T16:52:08.560+02:00

Sometimes even typing an entire query in Google is too much work. And then, you have to press search, and then... oh terrible you have to press the link of the results too.Now that is no longer necessary with BeyondTrees LazyLucky(tm). If you are lazy (like all good programmers are) and you're searching for something that others are searching for too, you can just type in the first letters, and

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-66210435372365618022009-09-01T12:33:00.002+02:002009-09-01T12:41:42.775+02:00

Google and Bing are both playing around with new search APIs that will allow for a much more responsive search experience than the old fashioned edit-search-viewresults-clickresult paradigm: ajax search.You can play around with one simple example of what it feels like using the Bing Ajax API here. A bit useless to start searching for all prefixes of the query you're after, but still fun to see

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-68098723832944001912009-08-25T19:41:00.004+02:002009-08-25T20:15:32.621+02:00

Image you're a president leading a couple of million people, all with a voice of their own, and want to boldly go where no president has gone before: reform the Healthcare system of the United States. Of course you have a Twitter account @whitehouse and occasionally tweet about what #obama is doing, who he is meeting, and post pictures of his dog Bo.Well, that is all normal, though somewhat

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-64940464782334603292009-08-21T16:07:00.003+02:002009-08-21T17:08:06.431+02:00

Often we get calls by people trying to sell lottery tickets. These call agents are often students who follow a pre defined script to lure people into their business by relating to their fear of loosing. The students themselves (and most people) have no idea on statistics, and (like all people) have no good understanding of low probabilities. This is why we feel afraid to get on airplanes, while

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-5068104825689225592009-08-20T13:14:00.003+02:002009-08-20T13:20:48.343+02:00

The new hype of 2009 is augmented reality: live video enhancing; see Layar. If you've never seen it work on your computer, do the followingprint out this PDF stargo to http://sodiuminteractive.com/dropbox/flar/allow Flash to open your webcamhold the printed paper in front of the camera and move itMake sure you have your speakers on; the Flash script will generate a 3D sound animation on top of

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-79728654037999109612009-08-18T14:21:00.004+02:002009-08-18T16:21:42.856+02:00

Back from vacation and back to work. Today has been a day of error messages. Well, a day in which I was reminded that having good error messages and safeguarding mechanisms in your code is imperative.I was installing a latest Shindig release on Tomcat. Followed instructions, the service was starting up correctly, but I got 404 errors on the sample URL. On any sample URL from the shindig web-app,

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-34076982703547180022009-07-23T11:03:00.003+02:002009-07-23T12:10:57.122+02:00

How does the Expires HTTP header work together with browser cache settings? I did some tests today because I thought I was going crazy. A customer of mine questioned my advice on installing mod_expires on their central server to avoid long load times on static content on high latency times. I tried to find a weblog on the subject, but could not find it. Most people seem to simply explain how

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-5555456759354972212009-07-21T20:51:00.002+02:002009-07-21T21:00:41.957+02:00

Eliza is still alive! Turns out my little quick fix yesterday was not good enough. I mentioned I used a static singleton and recognized there was an issue if the server restarted? Well, it turns out this is just what happens on AppEngine; Google decides to restart the VM, probably once every 24 hours, so using VM statics for persistency is not very good. Yes, I know, I know. But I had very little

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-88437705405253669762009-07-20T13:22:00.003+02:002009-07-20T13:27:53.287+02:00

Ha! Something happened that I had not anticipated. Remember I told you about the Eliza shrink robot I created a few weeks ago for the Google Wave?Well, she is still alive, and used every day. However, because in the beta release of Wave it is not yet possible to remove participants from a Wave, a single funny user who adds Eliza to a public wave, will cause enormous amount of Shrink Spam in a

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-62470579933285799462009-07-19T12:47:00.002+02:002009-07-19T13:11:59.040+02:00

One of the things I wanted to try out was programming for the Android platform... to see how easy it is to create native applications for my new HTC Magic smartphone. The SDK is based on Java, and with a nice Eclipse integration.I decided to create a Flickr application, similar to my successful Flickr Wallpaper program. It allows you to set a tag or term (or series of tags), and it will use the

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-15761980568149504872009-07-17T11:49:00.002+02:002009-07-17T11:55:17.970+02:00

I created a small little program called Monkeys a few months ago, that can generate nonsensical documents based on word ngrams. It requires some sample text as input, and will generate new texts based on the word by word transition frequencies so the text looks like normal text. It works best on large English business type documents, but this morning I tried to use some Blof lyrics as input. I've

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-57754387187960564522009-07-16T20:34:00.002+02:002009-07-16T20:50:23.150+02:00

besides the little and big endian dispute in computer land, one of the largest problems with computers that have to cooperate over the world (i.e. the Atlantic): is the date format problem.Americans have a completely stupid system of saying it is 7/3/2009 meaning July 3rd, so they use MM/DD/YYYY. This is stupid because it does not make sense as the faster changing day-of-the-month is now in

Annenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91775.post-52720014928329442192009-07-14T14:59:00.002+02:002009-07-14T15:16:34.353+02:00

I'm currently working on optimizing my Linx scalable network engine based on Lucene. I believe it has some interesting features that no other engine has, and may be helpful ifyou have a large (>1M nodes) networkthat changes continuouslyyou have many queries that are more complex than just asking "who are your 1st level connections"Anyway, I'm having great fun in implementing this. Now I am

Annenoreply@blogger.com