Xavier Defrang

If you ever talked face to face with a computer or if you just want to take a stroll down the memory lane with some anonymous heroes, I highly recommend you to take a look at Halcyon Days, a collection of interviews with bytes counting and cycles saving übercoders from the golden age of videogaming.

This is a screenshot from a news on the BBC website

Now don't these riot police officers look strangely familiar? They surely do...

Welcome. Welcome to City 17.

Update: I'm not the only one who noticed the gasmask.

I've already tried a few times to write a short review of the iPhone but I just can't find the right words. And so many things have been written already...

I guess the simple fact that someone who has always dodged PDA's and "smartphones" is actually using one should indicate how great this thing really is.

I could never understand why people were buying such devices and why would anyone care about the mobile internet when all you had in the field were half-assed browsers with clumsy user interfaces.
I would have never imagined that it was actually enjoyable to check emails and google up some stuff on the go. The Google Maps integration is brilliant, so is the address book (it's so fun that you just want to fill it up). There are so many details about user feedback and the screen is so gorgeous that this thing seems alive.

I've never been a mobile phone freak but this one is just too cool!

For the other weirdos into B-Movies: you may want to read this breathtaking review of Steven Seagal's latest DTV release entitled Urban Justice.

Update: the movie is indeed pretty damn good for the Seagal DTV standards. Seagal displays some serious street cred, the man's spittin' ebonics like a real brother!

It looks like some folks in Javaland are pissed at Apple because Leopard did not ship with Java 1.6.

I still doesn't understand why Apple should be held responsible in any way for the port of a third party technology such as Java to its operating system.
Isn't Sun supposed to make sure the JDK works on all major operating systems or are they too low on cash to afford their ADC renewal?

Sure, OS X ships with some popular open source programming tools as part of its UNIX layer, but I just see it as freebie which saves me a few minutes of compilation and surely not as some human right.

It's not like it should come as a surprise neither since Apple has been continuously shying away from Java which used to be one of the languages of choice to build Cocoa applications.
The Java/Objective-C bridge has been discontinued since Tiger while Leopard saw the addition of this technology for Ruby and Python, including Xcode integration.

As usual, John Gruber sums it up nicely (or on a more serious tone).

And I mean it! I'm still crying and my throat hurts as I write this post...

Be sure you check out the other videos from this guy. He made my day!

It's been too long since I have learned a new programming language. I had a swift look at the Flex framework but XML is not a programming language, is it?

Nowadays, it seems to be all about the lambda calculus hippies reinventing the wheel in Haskell or thread happy ruffnecks playing with Erlang... I'm probably a bit too down to earth to jump on those bandwagons at the moment so I thought It was time for me to go back to the roots of object oriented programming: so I'm finally going to learn Smalltalk.

If you are curious, you can find some freely available PDF versions of out of print Smalltalk books.

Now the worst difficulty wont be to grasp the language but actually get over the horrendous and sluggish user interface of Squeak. Wish me luck!

UPDATE: We are not quite there yet but it looks they somehow acknowledged the GUI issue...

Legendary drummer Max Roach has passed away. He was one of my favorite musician.

I'll stick to vegetables and soda, thank you!

Lesson #12: How To Pay A Tax You Are Not Supposed To Pay Because Of A Mistake You Haven't Committed

Preliminary: commit the crime not to work for the Almighty Welfare State and run your own business.

1. Stop your business dating december 31st of year Y
2. Get the first notice for a tax (that you're not supposed to pay in the first place) relevant to the Y+1 period at your previous address and do not get notified
3. Get the a second notice for that very tax (that you're still not supposed to pay in the first place) and still relevant to the Y+1 period, this time including a penalty fee for the delay
4. Email your local tax administration that you are not supposed to be burdened by this tax anymore
5. Wait 1 to 4 weeks
6. Get answered by snail mail, important points are:
   • according to the database of the responsible administration, you were still registered as a business january 1st of year Y+1.
   • if a mistake has been made in the update of their data, you must notify the aforementioned administration to fix it, but you're still due to pay the tax
   • don't even think about it: it's too late to provide the document which proves that you are not supposed to pay the tax.
7. Pay ^*

Belgium: It's as simple as that!

^* Because going on a Oklahoma City scale rampage just doesn't feel right... ;)