Judgement Day in Sydney
Wednesday morning, the entire city of Sydney, Australia, appeared to be basking in an orange glow. This phenomenon, caused by a gigantic dust cloud, lead to the following pictures: beautiful, yet strange and eerie at the same time.
Can't Live In A Living Room
Every morning my alarm clock sounds at seven o'clock precise, which gives me just enough time to catch the highlights on the news, and snooze through one-song-and-a-half before it's really time to get out of bed.
Today I was awoken by a pleasant surprise: Can't Live In A Living Room by Red Zebra, one of my all time favourite tracks. One of the greatest Belgian punk/new-wave songs of it's time, and once it's stuck inside your head, very hard to get rid off. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you :)
How to save the HTML source from a website
Whether you need to programmatically check the source code from a website for data scraping purposes or otherwise, it is a very easy process - all you need is the following piece of code.
N'oubliez Pas Les Paroles!
While I was watching Ax-Men the other day, one-too-many commercial came on so I decided to switch channels to find something else to watch. It was then that I suddenly stumbled upon a program called "N'oubliez pas les paroles" (the literal counterpart of Don't forget the lyrics") on France 2.
I had never heard of this game show, but basically the object of the game is to sing a song, and add the correct lyrics once the music stops. Each time you get the words right, you get a certain amount of money, which increases with each level or song you need to sing. The maximum amount of money one can win, is a total of 100.000 euros - nice!!
A small rant about code snippets
Normally, I'm not the person to rant about subjects, nor am I one to look a gift horse in the mouth. However, there's something that's been bothering me for a while...
Using inclusion guards
One of the things that struck me as really odd, ever since I first started learning C++, was the fact that it wasn't (and still isn't) allowed to include the same header file more than once. Luckily though, there is a very easy solution for this, which I'd like to show you today.
Optimization for the sake of optimization...
I haven't had the time to post anything new lately, mostly because I've been very busy on an old project that regained my interest. I've also had a two week vacation, during which I have started to revive my C++ knowledge, also in light of the same project (more about it later).
While doing some small C++ exercises and examples to get my feeling for the language back, I fell for an age-old trap: over-optimization...
Brundle fly!
Even though I've had numerous opportunities to do so, I've never seen the movie "The Fly". Nor did I ever see its successor "The Fly II", but after seeing both of them this week I wished I had seen them earlier.
Not that the storyline or the acting were that great, but it would have cleared something up for me a long time ago.
How to create a borderless JButton
Sometimes you want to use a JButton that does not look like a button. The most common example is probably the link to the company homepage, to be embedded somewhere in your application.
We've all seen them: a button that does not resemble a traditional button, but looks more like a hyperlink you encounter on the internet.
It's a nice-to-have feature, and it's easily achieved by using the JButton class which is already present in Java.
A visit from Steve
A few days ago I noticed we had a new resident in our backyard: a little frog, sitting on the edge of our modest pond.
When I noticed him again, yesterday, I ran back into the house to get my digital camera and I snapped a few pictures of him - enjoy!
A letter to the Bonny Eagle High School
When I wanted to check my Yahoo! email account this evening, one of the headlines on the frontpage caught my eye: "A kiss costs student diploma". Wow, must've been some kiss.
As curiosity got the better of me, I opened the link and read the article. Apparently some superintendent of the Bonny Eagle High School denied a student his diploma, because he "walked on the stage and blew a kiss to his family".
Versuz - First Floor Finest volume 13
It has taken Mediadis a while due to some problems with their suppliers, but today my Versuz Volume 13 double-CD finally arrived at my local Kiala pickup point!
For those who don't know Versuz, it's a Belgian club situated in Hasselt. The club was previously known as Dockside, and has operated under that name for a good 13 years, until they finally closed their doors. In 2002 however, the doors went wide open again, and Versuz was born.
A lot of clubs here release their own compilation, giving an impression of the music that's played there and the atmosphere and ambiance one can experience at the club. Together with the Illusion compilation CDs, the Versuz compilations are a series of compilations I follow religiously.
Another deathstar bites the dust!
A few days ago I had some good news to report: my faulty power button was finally replaced with a shiny new example. Skip forwards a few days, and today's news is not so good: the second hard drive of that very same computer refuses to work any longer.
When I first put in the hard drive, an IBM Deskstar of 40Gb, it already refused to cooperate with the Samsung master drive, and it took me a long time to get both devices to become friends with eachother. They've been working for several years now, so I assumed it would be no big problem to get the IBM going again...
Power to the 'puter!
One of my computers is housed in what can be called a design case. The case in itself is very nice and I like it very much, but it has one big flaw: the power button.
If you press the button the right way, the computer starts and all is well. Press it the wrong way, and not only does the computer refuse to boot, the button also sticks behind the design panel so you can't press it again.
A few days ago, when the power button decided to stay hidden again, I finally had enough and decided to swap the button for another one. A simple task - at first sight...
Limburg students create miniature submarine
About two months ago, I was telling my colleagues at lunchtime about a new hardware project I wanted to start working on. For a while now, I've been figuring out how to create a remote-controlled miniature submarine, but I haven't quite gotten round to actually starting the project.
Time passed, until all of a sudden this week someone sent me a mail with the subject "They beat him to it!", and a link to a newspaper item. And indeed they have...