Christmas menu
Friday, December 24, 2004, 22:05 - Personal
It is by now a tradition that my sister, my brother and I cook a full-size multi-course diner for the whole family (seven) on Christmas Day at my parents' house. I think having a good diner together and catching up is a great way to celebrate the holiday.
All shopping has been done by now. Tomorrow a large part of the afternoon is spent on preparation ("Mis en place") so in between courses only the final cooking needs to be done.

Tomorrow the menu will be as follows:
* Aperitif
* Creamy Celery Gorgonzola Soup
* Tomato-Ricotta Timbale
* Pork Filet with Apple and Ginger Stuffing / Mushroom Strudel with Nuts / Stuffed Tomatoes, served with Potato Truffle Gratins, Smoored Leek and Corn Salad with Tomato Vinaigrette
* Steamed Pears Sorbet
* Coffee

Merry Christmas to everyone!


Perfect Man & Woman
Thursday, December 23, 2004, 18:37 - Humor
There was a perfect man who met a perfect woman. After a perfect courtship, they had a perfect wedding. Their life together was, of course, perfect.

One snowy, stormy Christmas Eve, this perfect couple were driving their perfect car along a winding road, when they noticed someone at the side of the roadside in distress. Being the perfect couple, they stopped to help.

There stood Santa Claus with a huge bundle of toys. Not wanting to disappoint any children on the eve of Christmas, the perfect couple loaded Santa and his toys into their vehicle.

Soon they were driving along delivering the toys. Unfortunately, the driving conditions deteriorated and the perfect couple and Santa Claus had an accident.

Only one of them survived the accident. Who was the survivor?

(continue here for the answer)


No software patents in Europe yet!
Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 17:29 - The News
Thanks to a firm position of Poland, the European Union has not yet taken a decision on a software patent directive at their Agriculture and Fisheries council meetings. The Dutch Presidency has been using diplomatic pressure to bully Poland. It tried to push the much debated proposition really hard and tried to get it approved without discussion, against the will of a majority of Dutch Parliament.

Poland has many software developers and they want to have as much work as possible without worrying about patents or paying high licenses. Therefore neither the Polish government nor the Polish industry supports the directive text.

European Parliament earlier also expressed its doubts about the patents. It fears they will endanger the open operating systems like Linux and R&D in the computer branch.


If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers...
Tuesday, December 21, 2004, 02:58 - Humor
I received a link to this funny story about how it would be if architects had to work like web or software designers. It describes the amount of conflicting and/or ridiculous requirements some customers come up with.

Unfortunately it isn't as far from reality as one would hope....

"You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this!"
Last Friday a customer told me this exactly. And of course the project isn't the least interesting to me because it is more of the same.


Geolizer patch to webalizer
Sunday, December 19, 2004, 23:18 - Software
I'm using webalizer to analyze my web server access log files, and I noticed that many IP addresses could not be translated into a name automatically, resulting in an "Unresolved/Unknown" percentage of about 50. I would like to have as many hosts grouped in .com, .net and the country codes as possible.

I came across this article on optimizing Apache server performance. They amongst others recommend turning off HostnameLookups completely in Apache for performance reasons and do any hostname lookups only when processing the log files.
I found out that webalizer has its own DNS lookup mechanism and tested that a little. But still about half of the IP addresses could not be resolved.

Then I came across this geolizer patch for webalizer. It uses the GeoIP library to generate faster and more reliable geographic statistics than using the default DNS suffix method.
Now I only have 20% unknown, and that seems to mostly come from hostnames that already have been resolved in the past. From now on I will only be using IP addresses and I have good hopes that the hit rate then will be even better.



rootz.nl
Saturday, December 18, 2004, 22:45 - Personal
If you ever happen to be in The Hague looking for a nice cafe-restaurant, I definitely can recommend rootz.
We went there Friday night with a couple of colleagues and had a great time. The food was very good, and the drinks were as well :)


Another small .NET project
Friday, December 17, 2004, 01:29 - Programming
Today at work I had to do some performance testing on our intranet. When we use a java applet on the intranet, it takes very long to load the homepage. We suspect that it is caused by the virus scanner, because when you turn that off, it seems to load faster.

But to prove anything we of course need hard measurements. First I tried using a web stress tool, but it appears to not load up the java applet at all, as the response times are too short.

So I decided to whip up a simple .NET tool using the Microsoft Internet Explorer ActiveX component as described in this article on c-sharpcorner.com.
When you load a page using the Navigate method however, the call is done asynchronously so the call immediately returns. This makes it impossible to get relevant timing.

So I used the Navigate2 method and added an event handler to the NavigateComplete2 handler. That event is fired multiple times before the page is fully loaded, so I had to trick it a little to get the last event as the total time needed to load the web page.
But now I can select how many times the web page should be loaded and I collect a nice min/avg/max load time. Timing is written to a log file for later analysis. Simple, but it seems to be capable of doing what we need.

Only problem we haven't tackled yet: how to get the plugin to use the Sun java virtual machine instead of the MS VM.


BTW: I love the way you can add event handlers in the .NET 2003 IDE! After you type "axWebBrowser1.NavigateComplete2 += " the IntelliSense autocomplete kicks in, and by pressing TAB twice, you have added a handler with the correct signature. Now you just need to add your code there.

BTW2: Here it is promised that IntelliSense in Visual Studio 2005 will be even greater! Still need to wait half a year for that one though...



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