May 2005 - Posts

You'll never walk alone

Last night I probably saw the most exciting soccer game I have ever seen in my entire life. It was, of course, the Champions League final between Liverpool and AC Milan. What made it so exciting was that Liverpool were down 3-0 at half time against the strongest defence in the Champions League. Even if they scored 3 goals, they had to go to penalties and have a uneasy looking Jerzy Dudek make some saves. Well guess what, they scored 3 goals and they went through to penalties. Liverpool took the penalties 3-2 with Dudek making two saves (the first AC Milan kick completely missed).

This game beats the comeback that Arsenal made against AC Milan in the Champion's League group stages last year, where they were in a tight group and goal difference were counting against them. They were also bottom of their group and 1-0 down against AC Milan up till the 80th minute. Then in the final ten minutes, Arsenal came back to score 5 goals and move right to the top of the group. That single game transformed that group. Unfortunately, as is Arsenal's pedigree, they bowed out of the Champion's League in the knockout stages.

Anyway - a few more months before it all starts again.

Posted by trumpi | 3 comment(s)

TiddyWiki

I thought AJAX was pretty ok, until I saw TiddlyWiki. Now I think that it is amazing.

Posted by trumpi | 1 comment(s)

Google Content Blocker

Google have released a beta of their new content blocker. Well, it is not really Google's product, but I thought that it was pretty funny.

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A new perspective (for me) on exception handling

I was going through my normal routine of reading other people's blog posts, and I came across a very interesting post by Julia Lerman's blog about exception handling. The post can be found here.

Now I've read this perspective before, but when I thought about code that I've written recently, I reckon I haven't applied the perspectives that she advocates.

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SharpPDF

This will probably be my shortest post ever. For a while now, I've been looking for a decent PDF library for .NET. Now I think that I've found one in SharpPDF.

Here is the code that is needed to create a Hello World PDF document:

sharpPDF.pdfDocument myDoc = new sharpPDF.pdfDocument("Hello World TTF Application", "Me", false);
sharpPDF.pdfPage myPage = myDoc.addPage(sharpPDF.Enumerators.predefinedPageSize.csA4Page);
myDoc.addTrueTypeFont(@"c:\Fonts\arial.ttf","arial");
myPage.addText("Hello World", 100, 300, myDoc.getFontReference("arial"), 20);
myDoc.createPDF(@"c:\HelloWorld_TTF.pdf");
myPage = 
null;
myDoc = 
null;

I'm going to start playing around with it.

One thing that I'm interested to know is what PDF creators/editors/libraries are being used in the industry at the moment. If you're reading this, the perhaps you can post a comment telling us about what PDF tool(s) you use (with link) and what sort of licensing it requires.

Posted by trumpi | 6 comment(s)
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Google Web Accelerator

Google have released a beta of their web accelerator tool.

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

  • Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
  • Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
  • Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
  • Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
  • Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
  • Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Unfortunately, the major benefit will only be felt by users in North America and Europe where the beta servers are located.

Posted by trumpi | 1 comment(s)

Open Document Format

A user on Slashdot reports: “The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable.”

See the original thread here.

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Acronyms

One thing that characterises computer geeks is the excessive use of acronyms. There are all sorts of varieties of acronyms, from you plain vanilla to your three letter acronym (appropriately acronymed to TLA) to your recursive acronym (LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder). So many things are being acronymised that I can't even keep up. Some of them are so common that I don't even know what they stand for anymore. (We all know what an IDE cable is and what it is used for, but does anyone know what IDE stands for?) Here are a few that I have recently discovered:

IANAL = I am not a lawyer (usually followed by the word “but”) [Source: Slashdot]
THGTTG = The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy [Source: Sells Brothers Blog]

Are there any other obscure acronyms that I should know about?

Posted by trumpi | 6 comment(s)