C Hees . info

On the way back home after seeing the movie Blindness, I realized how much it is like Children of Men. In Children of Men people can’t get pregnant anymore which results in a big chaos in the world. In Blindness lots of people suddenly start getting blind. What results in both movies is that we see the main characters living in a small group of people where some people get violent and a big conflict occurs. After that, both movies move to a different setting where the main characters move out into a bigger world with more chaos and problems on a different scale. Finally the movies end with some kind of hope for the future. And of course Julianne Moore plays in both movies :P

Anyway, I liked Children of Men so, not surprisingly, I also liked Blindness although it was slightly messy in some places. Oh and the surround sound in some blind scenes was pretty cool so it’s worth watching/hearing =)

Ah yes, so I’m officially a Sun Certified Java Programmer now since I passed my SCJP exam with 87% :)

And Sinterklaas was really nice this year (got a new Mp3 player from Aniasint) :)

Oh and I think I might be addicted to Johnny Q.

Amstel

Happy birthday Ania!

Getting distracted is very easy. Let me show you how I do it:

1. Try to look up an article on Wikipedia
2. Notice that Wikipedia is down
3. Gasp in astonishment that it’s even possible while you wait for it to start working again
4. Try to find the reason why it went down
5. Click some random links
6. End up finding out that horses have 9 legs

And now you are distracted. See, it’s that easy.

I’ve been searching for companies and ideas for my thesis and I ran into cloud computing again. It caught my attention before so it would be cool if I could do something with it for my graduation project. While I was reading up on the subject I couldn’t resist to check out the new browser by Google which is supposed to be good for applications running completely online (as in.. it’s sortof related to cloud computing :P).

I wanted to know if it was just a Mozilla ripoff or that it is actually something new. If I’m to believe the Google Chrome comic/book they really used a lot of new interesting technologies. One of them being another rendering engine (WebKit which is also used in Safari and which came from KHTML which is used in Konqueror which I really loved). I wonder if websites in Chrome look the same as in Safari. Either way, Chrome seems to be really fast. It starts up fast, shows pages quickly and executes Javascript quickly (see some benchmarks at scriptNode). What I also love is that one slow site doesn’t hang your whole browser. For example if you run this raytracer in one tab, your other tabs will get very slow in Firefox while in Chrome you don’t even notice the difference. I think this should also work for slow or hanging plugins like Flash which would be great.

So far Chrome seems to be nice, except for one bug I noticed:

When you hover over the title bar while it’s not maximized, the tooltips for the close, maximize and minimize buttons show up in the wrong places. It’s of course a very minor bug but it reminds me that it’s just a first release and probably still contains many other bugs. I guess I’ll see in the coming days if I actually like Chrome or not.

Last week Ania came to the Netherlands. We had a great time hanging out and doing touristy stuff. She posted the pics on Picasa. At the end of the week she went to her au pair family in Amstelveen and right after that I got sick. But last night she came over for a surprise visit to bring me food, drinks, medicine and some other things. It was so sweet :)

She warned me I shouldn’t write only about her or I’d lose all the thousands of loyal readers of this blog so here’s some mandatory non-Ania random stuff :P

It’s time for me to finally start with my graduation project so I’m reading in on some possible subjects and making plans. Currently I’m learning and playing with the Spring Framework and I updated Lumino Code to make it usable as a portfolio.

Oh and I noticed something weird about Dutch people speaking English. It seems that the moment they start speaking English they also start pronouncing certain names of people and cities like they’re English. Even though they know perfectly well how to pronounce it the real (Dutch) way. I think I do it too in some situations.

Anyway, Mario Kart for the Wii just arrived from Amazon so I’m gonna give it a spin =) I was thinking… maybe we can organize a Wii party sometime or something :P

Ha, my vacation in Poland with Ania was great. It was kinda tricky to get there with the rental car without a decent/working navigation system but it was all worth it. Also, the rental car reminded me that I suck with a stick shift :P

I tried some Polish food like Gofry (waffle with a Lot of whipped cream and fruit on top) and some sort of potato pancake with goulash on top and of course more Pierogi (it’s Goood).

It’s actually been only the second week(ish) that I’ve seen Ania irl but she’s coming to nl in 15 days! /me bounces around.

Oh and I finally got a Picasa account so I don’t have to mess around with making my own galleries anymore. Picasa is actually pretty nice =) Anyway, here are ze pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/christiaanhees/PoddabieWithAnia

I’m off to Poland again :) My train to Berlin leaves in about 2 hours and there I’ll rent a car to drive the last part to Poland. I hope everything will go well since I’ve never rented a car before and never driven in Poland and the last part will be in the dark with small roads, so wish me luck =) I’m looking forward to it though cause I’m gonna see Ania again!

/ania/

De foto’s en de video van het afscheid van Jan Hees.