Ok, i’m back from my trip to New York. The picture above shows me and the 2 friends that joined me on the trip on top of the Rockefeller building. For those of you who have no idea what i look like (and i’m assuming that’s most of you since i never put a picture of myself on this blog before), i’m the dude on the left (_your left_). The entire trip was simply fantastic… we did so much stuff that we often didn’t remember what we did over 2 days ago without pulling out the digital cameras, but some of the highlights include:

• The statue of liberty… it’s a bit cliche, but seriously, the level of detail on that statue is truly astonishing… the French really did a fantastic job on it (yea i said it )
• Going to a taping of David Letterman’s Late Show… i was sorta hoping in advance that we could get in, but we really didn’t plan on it. We went into the Ed Sullivan’s theater asking for tickets, and luckily we were ’selected’ (the fact that it was freezing and that this was the tourist low season obviously helped) to attend a taping a few days later.
• Brooklyn Dekker… anybody who knows me in real life knows i have a soft spot for good looking women, but when Brooklyn Dekker (the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover model) got on stage during the taping of the Late Show the entire audience kinda got silent for about 2 seconds.. she really looked that stunning.
• I’v been an NBA fan for the last 16 years or so… i finally got my first chance to see an NBA game in real life. Ok, it was the Kincks vs the Kings (2 of the worst teams right now) but it was still a great experience… and i was actually at Madison Square Garden! (if you don’t know the significance of that, don’t worry… only basketball fans will understand)
• My pancakes with strawberries and ice cream breakfast… yeah seriously, it was that good
• Me asking an NYPD officer holding an M16 politely if i could take a picture of him and answering “oh… ok then” when he said he didn’t want me to take a picture of him
• Walking through Brooklyn during Snowmaggedon looking for Grimaldi’s Pizzeria only to (finally) found it being closed.

Those were the highlights but pretty much every single moment of the trip was memorable and i truly hope that i never forget a single one of them. I took 1125 (according to iPhoto) pictures and they were definitely needed to remember everything that happened in such a short timespan. We went during the low-season and even then, New York is definitely worthy of visiting. The only thing you’ll regret is that you either didnt’ stay long enough, or that you didn’t buy enough clothes (thank you oh horrible Dollar).

Once i got back to my country (Belgium for those that don’t know), i was astonished to see how badly it was handling the less than one inch of snow after what i had just seen in Manhattan. The difference really is huge. I usually avoid politics on this blog as much as possible, but the way our government is handling things compared to how they’re dealt with in New York in much worse weather conditions is truly saddening. Less than an inch of snow and the whole country seems to be at a stand still. And people wonder why i dont go out to vote (that’s right… we are required to show up at elections but i refuse to show up because there really isn’t even a single person who’s worthy of a vote right now).

Anyways, i’m back and i’m working through the backlog of unread posts in Google Reader… there have been a couple of posts so far that might inspire a few posts but other than that, i’m lacking any kind of inspiration to write a real post at the moment so if you have any requests, now is the time to make them

To wrap up this post: it was great to be gone for a while, but it’s great to be back as well

Well, i’m off for a week… i’ll be doing the tourist thing (you know, hanging out, having fun, laughing our asses off, taking pictures and generally annoying the hell out of the locals) in New York City and i won’t be back until February 14th. I will be avoiding all kinds of electronic communication and the internet in general, so if you’re wondering why i’m not responding to email, now you know why

I’m not leaving until Saturday morning, so if you have some ‘must-see’ or ‘must-do’ tips about New York, bring em on!

I read an article today about how Chrome has increased a lot in market share in the past year, mostly at the expense of Firefox.  I wanted to see how Chrome usage on this blog has progressed in the past year so i got some stats from Google Analytics and created this little graph:

(note: these numbers are obviously only from visits to this blog and are thus not representative of the entire internet (yet) etc…)

I started at the month before the first Chrome users were reported to give you an idea of Firefox’s score at that time.  Naturally, the people that come to this blog are into technology so it’s no wonder that Firefox is the dominant browser instead of IE.  Before Chrome entered the picture, nearly 70% of all visits to this blog in August 2008 were from Firefox users.  In its first month, Chrome immediately got about 8%, which i thought was pretty impressive.  Firefox’s numbers dropped below 50% for the first time less than a year later.  That’s a pretty big impact in a relatively short time.   And as you can see, Chrome usage has been growing a lot in the past 6 months ago, at the expense of both Firefox and IE.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome catches up to Firefox in another 6 months.

I’m not fanatic about any browser (as long as i don’t have to use IE, right?)… i use Firefox for OS X at home, but i use Chrome at work.  I’m not really into the whole plugin/extension thing (except for Adblock obviously) so i’m not really ‘tied’ to a specific browser.  Now, some people are pretty fanatic about their browser so what i’m wondering is: what would it take for you to switch to another browser (no matter which one you use now)?  Are you hooked on extensions that you can’t go without in another browser?  What was the reason you picked your current browser and why are you sticking with it? Or is it all pretty much the same for you?  Do you frequently use multiple browsers?

In some weird way, i find that kinda stuff interesting so please do share

As my hosting provider is struggling with more instability on their vservers (the ones that host the virtual private servers) i’ve become so paranoid about my site going down at any possible moment that i actually have this open on one of my virtual desktops pretty much all the time:

Occasionally i take a look at that virtual desktop and if i don’t seen any movement, off to their support area i go.

I finally added a CAPTCHA plugin to reduce the amount of spam comments that are submitted by spambots. I used to use the WP Spam Free plugin which seemed to be very good at keeping spam out, but i got some complaints from people that legit comments sometimes weren’t making it through. And the problem with the WP Spam Free plugin is that you can’t look at the rejected comments to mark one or more of them as legit. So a couple of days ago i removed the WP Spam Free plugin and relied solely on the Akismet anti-spam plugin. But looking through the flagged comments to find possible real ones is pretty annoying since i get about 200 new spam comments each day.

So i figured it was better to just add a CAPTCHA plugin (using WP reCAPTCHA) so commenters are required to fill in the CAPTCHA when they post a comment. If you’re a frequent commenter and you don’t like to fill in the CAPTCHA every time, then you can also register yourself on this site and then you’ll never have to fill in the CAPTCHA (except for one during the registration process obviously).

If anyone notices any problems with this CAPTCHA plugin, please let me know

These are the technical commitments i’d like to make for 2010:

Keep improving Agatha. 

It hasn’t been long since i open-sourced it but i already consider it one of the best decisions i’ve made so far.  Most of it was written about 18 months ago, and it had been almost a year since any modifications were made to it before open-sourcing it.  Some new features have already been added to it, and there are some more cool new features coming up in the next 2 releases.  Hopefully, we (the people who work on it and the people who use it) can keep coming up with improvements.

I’d obviously like to see more people using it and increased acceptance in general, but that’s something that will take time and more effort, if it will ever happen that is.  If it doesn’t happen, then the people who did take a chance on it will at least get to benefit from the effort that will be put into it.

Get more involved with NHibernate again

My last commit for NHibernate dates back to August 19th.  Definitely not proud of that, but i certainly intend to get back to contributing actively.  While it’s not a very pleasant code-base to work with, i did find fixing issues for NH to be rather satisfying because you know you’re either helping a few people, or a hell of a lot of them depending on the impact of the bug.  I’d also love to clean up a lot of the query batching code because it is quite messy and repetitive.   If any of you tracks NHibernate’s development and you don’t see a commit from me for a while, feel free to bitch at me because of it

Increase acceptance of QuickNet

I’m starting to love QuickNet more and more.  In the first post i wrote about it i mentioned that i thought it was a revolutionary step in automated testing (at least for the .NET world) and i still stand by that statement.  I’d go as far as saying that if you don’t see the potential and the value of it, that i can’t help but question your willingness to improve the quality of your work in general.  I was actually very disappointed with the lack of feedback that i got on my last post about it, even though i specifically asked you to comment on it.  Obviously, i can’t expect everyone to leave comments, but there are quite a few of you who claim to be interested in automated testing and writing not only clean but also correct code so i was certainly surprised that a lot of those people didn’t respond to the questions i asked at the end of that post.  I’m pretty sure that once a big name blogger jumps on it, most of you will jump on the bandwagon as well.  Until that time comes, i’m going to continue writing about it and trying to get people interested in using it.  If you don’t look forward to those posts, you might want to unsubscribe from my feed right now

Keep blogging

It’s been a pretty successful year for this blog.  I plan to keep up the amount of effort i put into it, and i also want to continue building on some core principles that are pretty much the foundation of not only this blog, but also what i do and how i do it.  I want to keep learning.  I want to keep sharing knowledge and experience.  I want to keep offering my honest and open opinions, no matter how frank or blunt they may be at times or who they might rub the wrong way. I want to remain true to myself.  I will keep treating people the same, no matter how little or big their name is.  A good idea is a good idea and a bad idea is a bad idea and i will continue on treating them as such, no matter who or where it came from.  

My wish for you

I wish everyone the best for the following year, and i particularly wish for you to understand and be inspired by the following quote:

go farther, go further, go harder
is that not why we came?
and if not, then why bother?

Bonus points to whoever can name the author of that without googling it

The frequency of my posts tends to depend on how much i feel like writing posts, how busy i am, and whether or not i feel like i have something interesting to post about.  In some cases, that means that i don’t post for a couple of days and in other cases it means that i post a lot in a short time span.  For instance, i already published 12 posts this week alone.

Now, what i’m wondering is: do you, as the reader, prefer it that i sort of try to spread my posts a bit more? I know i sometimes find it annoying when a blogger posts too much in just a few days, and i already try to schedule my posts so that there are typically a couple of posts per week, and never more than one each day.  Then again, sometimes i really just want to publish as soon as its written, so that sometimes leads to a lot of posts in a short time span or even multiple posts per day.

So anyways, would love some feedback on this from you

This is the 400th post on this blog. I used to have a ‘tradition’ where i posted the most popular recent posts whenever i hit another round number in the post count. Since i’ve been bombarding you guys with links to previous posts a little bit too much in the past couple of weeks, i decided to end that tradition from now on.

Instead, i’d like to ask you for some feedback on what you’d like me to focus on in the next 100 posts. Are there any specific things you’d like me to cover? Is there any topic you’d like me to cover more? Is there any topic you’d like me to cover less? Basically, i want to hear from you what i can do to make you enjoy this blog more. Are there certain things that you’d like me to change when it comes to diversity of content, writing style, layout, whatever…?

I obviously can’t make any promises, but i will try to consider your suggestions as much as possible

Just wanted to apologize (yet again) for the downtime that my site has suffered recently. It’s been down for short times frequently in the past 2 weeks, and it was down for over 6 hours today. This time, it’s completely the fault of my hosting provider since they’re having major issues ever since they applied an emergency security patch to the kernel that they use for their vservers (the ones that host all of their private virtual servers). The problems haven’t been completely fixed yet, so i expect more downtime in the coming days.

Lessons learned:

1. Never get a 3 year hosting plan… you pay in advance, everything works great in the first year but once that second year comes around, it will be one thing after another
2. Continuous bitching (and trust me, i can bitch with the best of them) leads to discounts
3. Dreamhost sucks

I’m still not planning on moving to another host because i really dread the mess that comes with that… Though my patience is wearing extremely thin…

I finally moved past the 2000 subscribers milestone. Yes, i actually consider that to be a milestone. Having 2000 subscribers probably doens’t mean anything to many of the big-name bloggers, but considering the fact that i sorta started from nothing, with no (commercial or personal or whatever) affiliations that i could benefit from, i really am damn proud of this.

And to all of you that keep reading the stuff i post here: thank you