Web Development and stuff…

Have been working hard this week on kremermakelaars.nl. And managed to finish it right before the end of this year. The old website was one of those left overs from the early 90’s. The only thing missing was a spinning @ sign. But i think i managed to give it a nice visual boost. For the back-end i created s nice CMS to manage all objects and page content. The whole thing is build with ZF, Mysql, and some javascript libraries.

The customer is happy. I’m happy. Now it’s time for some fun!

So that’s all for 2009. I wish everybody a good and happy new year.

A few months ago i got stranded on adda’s website. This stuff looks so interesting. But thinking about building my own gives me sweaty hands. I love to build computers from scratch. But building a motherboard… i don’t see me doing that anytime soon. Even though i have null knowledge of the subject. I decided to give it shot anyway. And ordered the Russian Tube Clock. It arrived pretty fast. But occupied some closet space for at least 3 weeks. I however managed to push my self into building this thing. So here goes.

When you unpack the whole thing and lay it out on a table it looks pretty impressive. And at this point i got the feeling i would never get this to work. But thank god for the internet. I quickly found some nice hand held guides to guide me through it.

I will not bother you with all specifics. because i can’t And for that you should read here and here Or just order the kit and give it a shot. it’s great. So after burning my self i managed to get the first set of components mounted properly on top of the PCB.

The only problem i encountered (and it spoiled most of the project) was the soldering iron. Which was a mess to start of with. And it was way to big for this delicate work. The result was my soldering didn’t look that proper as you can see in the image below.

The hardest part was to get the tube mounted correctly. One end of the tube is a spring of wires that need to be attached to a jack on the smaller PCB. It’s a time consuming and tedious job to do. But i think i managed. Although not all wires are as straight as they should have been.

It finally starts to look like something. After hooking it up to some power and running some tests. I was ready to build the outer casing.

The outer casing is a simple design. Done in Plexiglas. It looks simple. But it was a struggle to get the thing assembled.

After my struggle with the casing i switched the tube on. And was greeted by a nice blue/greenish color and a beep. The color is a bit different from what is shown on the main site. But that has something to do with the tubes i read. The brightness is adjustable so that’s no problem. As you can see i still miss one time delimiter. And the menu is still not function 100%. But the clock works. And i can set the alarm.

I had so much fun building this thing. that i ordered a new soldering iron. And will be doing a new attempt soon!

This post is a recap of a post i made earlier this month. Normally i would leave it as it is. But i wasn’t really happy with the outcome. And it didn’t really reflect the current situation. So here goes.

As the technological challenge in my current day to day job started to decline. I started to think this was not the right position for me. So i decided it was time to search for something new. And at that time i could not find anything interesting that didn’t include relocating my self to an other part of this world. This left me with a hard choice to make. But i left AddMissions anyway. With a good feeling though. I had have a great year there. Now was just time for a change.

All that was about two months ago. And for the past time i have been doing some freelance projects to pay my bills. And although i enjoyed the time working from home. I feel it is time again to go and search for a new opportunity. I learned a lot from the past two months but freelance work is not something i tend to do full time. I need people around me. Even though i don’t talk that much while i work

I have some things cooking at the moment. Let’s see what the new year has to offer.

My feed reader today showed the post from “Ilia Alshanetsky” a well respected PHP core developer. The goal of Ilia was to find the shortest domain possible for his blog. So there will be no need to use URL shortener’s. This made me think about my own little travel over the Internet to find a two character domain. It took my quite some time to find a registrar and top-level domain that actually allowed registering domains shorter then 3 characters. Ilia found his relieve in the .gd (Grenada) domain. And i myself found mine in the .vc (Saint Vincent) domain. So it’s still possible to get short domain names. It just takes a bit of research and time

I tried commenting on his post. But he either disabled the commenting. Or i just can’t get the CAPTCHA right.

Last week was the big move for us. We were first located on the Brouwersgracht in Amsterdam. But it was getting to small for us. Besides we wanted to team up with some other smart people. So we decided for a bigger office. This time on the Herengracht in some old “grachtenpand“. Right in the center of Amsterdam. What a location. And i am not even speaking of the great nostalgic looks of the office i am in right now. I will try to post some images later this week.

It took us about a week to get ready in the new office. And not everything has it’s place yet. But that’s just a matter of time i guess. We are still waiting for a new fast Internet connection. So for the time being we are sharing a line with another office. This of course leads to some security issues. But we will manage until the new connection is delivered.

Good thing i sometimes use my wife’s computer for backup. I found my lost pictures again Say hi to my blue family.

I was reading up on some new features the guys at google pushed into google-earth. And i was curious enough to give it a try. So i downloaded the installer for Linux and installed the application without any errors. But when i tried launching it from a command line. I was surprised to see the application crash and burn with the following message:

Warning: Unable to create prefs directory ‘/home/user/.googleearth’. File exists.
./googleearth-bin: relocation error: /usr/lib/i686/cmov/libssl.so.0.9.8: symbol BIO_test_flags, version OPENSSL_0.9.8 not defined in file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 with link time reference

Seems the libcrypto.so is linked against some wrong libraries. Thankfully this is pretty easy to fix. Just browse to the google-earth install directory and run the following commands:

$ rm libcrypto.so.0.9.8
$ ln -s /usr/lib/libcrypto.so libcrypto.so.0.9.8

The main reason i installed google-earth was to check out the new ocean view feature. So i selected a piece of coastline near the Netherlands.

Although i was looking for some ocean life. The first thing i found was an airplane

It’s been a while since i last wrote something. I just couldn’t put my self to it. The last two weeks of the years paid it’s tole on me. And the new year started of busy like always. So no time to reflect on last year. Any way i wish everybody a happy and good 2009.

It’s been a while since i blogged last time. But i’m still here. And still planning to continue this blog. I just need to make some time to write. And time is not something that comes cheap latley

Some months ago i move to my new appartment. But i’m still working on it. It probably would have been better if i completed it completly befor emoving there. But it has to be done. So it takes up a lot of my time.

And besides that two weeks ago i started my new job here in Amsterdam. And this takes up the rest of my time. Trying to read into a new code base. And trying to understand everything that goes on around the office. It’s a hectic place. But it feels great so far.