Xavier Defrang

Something For Your Mind...

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 23:45:00 CEST

Awesome collection of 300+ old school house and rave tracks.

Bonus: a whole bunch of video of UK raves from the early 90ies.

Ever Meulen Retrospective

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 17:51:00 CEST

If you like the ligne claire, you only have one week left to visit the Ever Meulen exhibition in Leuven.

I'm so glad I spotted this a couple of days ago on the door of Plaizier.

Last Transmission From Lardossan Cruiser 8-203 X

Sun, 9 Mar 2008 21:44:00 CET

Awesome 27 minutes long interview with the late James Stinson of Drexciya, recorded a few months before he passed away. This was his first and last radio interview and it's like he knew it.

ActiveResource: A Ride On The Wild Side

Thu, 3 Jan 2008 23:06:00 CET

Things have been very quiet down here and hectic everywhere else. As a proof that this is no lame excuse, my first Rails patch was just committed into the trunk.

For the record, it addresses an issue in ActiveResource which could not locate resources defined in nested modules.

I've been using ARes a lot in my current project in which I've built a rich client-side API packaged into a Rails plugin. To be honest, I'm into a love-hate relationship with ARes and things were not as smooth as initially advertised.

I've experienced some severe hiccups with nested resources, inflected collection names, attributes vs prefix hashes and some nasty XML (un)marshalling oddities. If I find some time, I will document here the problems I encountered during this wild ride...

Even though it has given me some serious headaches, I still think this REST approach is better than dealing with a huge black box supposedly implementing some funky flavor of SOAP.
ARes is not totally mature in its current state but the size of its code base still allows a mere mortal to dive into it and see what's happening.

If the popularity of REST services keep on rising, ARes will need some real refactoring and internal plumbing work to bring it to the same level as ActiveRecord in the ORM field.

The bottom line is: ARes is a neat library you may want to play with but you must be warned that things are not as simple as they seem and it may require some significant tweaking on both sides of the wire...

Halcyon Days

Sun, 9 Dec 2007 12:18:00 CET

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.

Welcome to City 17

Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:46:00 CET

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.

The Game Will Never Be The Same

Sat, 3 Nov 2007 18:14:00 CET

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!

The Return Of The Ponytail Man

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 14:20:00 CET

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!

Let's Pretend I Actually Cared About This...

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:09:00 CET

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).

This Must Be The Funniest Thing I Have Ever Seen

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:43:00 CEST

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!