Have a look a the at the winners of this Boekenweektest...

Anybody we know?

When I started working here a month ago I wasn't the only Net.Footworker starting that day. Manuel and Edo -- two ex-collegues from Net.Footworks -- joined Chess the same day.


Yesterday Tibor e-mailed us: he made up his mind and per July 1st he'll start at Chess.


So slowly but surely the old crew is getting back together... very nice!

In the daily spam (Dutch joke):

A noisy bird woke me up at 7.00 o'clock. An early bird or in Bulgarian 'rano buden sam'.

Yesterday evening I submitted my third exercise of Internet Programming. It's a nice but strange feeling to be done with an assignment. Since Thursday evening I've been working on it almost full-time, and now it's over.

Picture on CNN.com just now:




It would be great if the war is really going as 'easy' at it seems to be going now. Let's hope that Saddam Hussein can be kicked out quickly.

Well, that was a wonderful weekend... I'm pretty much ready with the programs. There are always things that can be more beautiful etc, but it does what it should do and a bit more.

Tomorrow evening I'll work on the documentation, the deadline is Tuesday.

The person who said he likes C better than Java will have a very hard time convincing me now :)

Yesterday evening I implemented the RMI part of the assignment. The goal is to transfer an 'advertisement' (a jpg picture usually) from one computer to another one using RMI, and in another part using RPC.

It's a nice exercise. There are many different technologies involved and altogether I'm writing about 9 programs that all have to work together (in different languages). I hope the next exercise doesn't get any bigger than this though -- it takes a lot of time. I think I'll make it but it's good I took a day off yesterday.

Now I'm integrating yesterday's programs with my "bank server" -- placing advertisements isn't free of course so there are also electronic payments. Some results, just to get an idea:

Guus>> java BankExperiment
Wrote.
Server: HELLO BankServer 1.0
Server: BANK_PAY_RESULT -3

The server (written in C):

Guus>> ./bankd 
Database initialized.
Accepted connection from 127.0.0.1:40184.
Received: HELLO Expertiment 1.0
BANK_PAY 123 123 50.50
Scanf: 2; version 1.000000, hello string: BankExperiment
Start of response: 22
------- To execute: BANK_PAY 123 123 50.50
Scanf BANK_PAY: 3.
Tranfer_money(123, 123, 50.500000) = -3
Writing back to client: HELLO BankServer 1.0
BANK_PAY_RESULT -3 (I am pid=26071).
Closed socket 127.0.0.1:40184.

Today is the first day off at Chess I took. My collegues will likely be surprised to read this because I'm working in the Chess office.

I'm doing the 3rd assignment of Internet Programming. It is quite some work and I'm afraid a weekend wouldn't be enough.


Today is for the Java part of the exercise... it's so much nicer to do than the first part (which had to be written in old-fashioned C).

Perhaps not very new but nice: Your Coffee Cup Holder.


Internet Explorer only.

(through Retecool)

I almost forgot. It's April 1st today.

A very old Internet April 1st joke that is quite funny is RFC 1149 - A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. It's from 1990, this year there's RFC 3514: The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header.