Tag: Personal

Yay! My new article on Excel, OpenXML and PHP has just been released in php|architect! A copy-paste action from http://www.phparch.com/issue.php?mid=102: “A few months ago, Microsoft released Office 2007, a version of their office suite that generates open source documents. Here, Maarten Balliauw gives an overview of the history and the politics surrounding the release before moving on to introduce his PHPExcel project, an early adoption of Microsoft’s OpenXML API that enables Excel 2007 spreadsheets to be generated with PHP.”

Yesterday, I bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 940BW wide screen TFT. My old screen, a IIyama 17 inch monster weighing CRT, needed a replacement. Not because of it’s age, but because I really started hating this huge block on my desk. The SyncMaster is a great screen. Not the newest, not the most feature-loaded, but it delivers a 1440 x 900 resolution (nice if you are used to 1024 x 768!) and DVI. Photo’s, regular use, … all is really sharp on screen. If you’re looking for a cheap wide screen TFT, this one’s great!

I was tagged by Joris and Kristof, so I guess it’s about time I give away some secrets about myself. Did you know that… I’m tagging:

No posts last week: I was on a ski vacation to Pitztal, Austria. Found a cheap (and good!) hotel over there, Pension Haid, which offered me breakfast and dinner for 36 EUR per night. I’ve been skiing on Rifflsee and the Pitztaler Gletscher, which offers great slopes (and also good weather conditions last week). Après-ski was offered by Siglu, which offered great Kaiser Pilsner! Back to reality (and work) now, problem with all vacations is: they are too short!

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I’ve written an article on the basic principles and usage of NHibernate, an ORM-mapper for the .NET platform. It’s written in Dutch, so I must disappoint my English blog readers… A PDF version and example code can be downloaded on the .NET magazine #15 homepage. Comments can be posted on this blog post.

One of my former classmates, Bart Dekeersmaeker, has just created his own blog. He will be posting news from Chennai, India, where he currently resides for work. He is outsourced to KBC, and they asked him to go to India. Good luck on your mission, Bart!

I’m back from vacation! I went to Salou, Spain. Not to party or to find a new girlfriend every evening (I have one for almost 4 years now), but just for the sun and some vacation feeling after a year of work. The photo on the left was taken on the beach between Salou and Cambrils. Back to work now, be it a little more tanned than a week ago

Sometimes, I take a look at Google maps to check if Belgium is finally mapped and photographed with more detail. When I checked today, I found out some regions near Antwerp and Brussels now are much more detailed. On my house picture, before really blurry, I can see the snapshots were taken during the summer: our new umbrella (is parasol correct English?) is open on the terrace. Looking for evidence of this update, I found an unofficial article on Tweakers.net stating that also the Netherlands have had a major imagery update.

Seems like Proxis is offering a 10% discount when you order 2 computer books before the end of september! And I saw 2 nice PHP books… “Php5 Objects, Patterns, Practice” and “Php 5 Power Programming”. Anyone knows if I should give them a try? If you have other great titles on topics like PHP, C# and ASP.NET, please comment this post with title and ISBN number

Almost a year ago, Google acquired Urchin, a company specialised in providing web site statistics. They renamed Urchin’s project to Google Analytics and started a beta for some. Today, it seems Google has opened Analytics for everyone. Get it while it’s hot, they really provide in-depth statistics about what’s happening on your website. I tried it out for a few days on my website Holidayhome.be, and experienced all possibilities. Currently, I use Statcounter there, which also provides detailed statistics, but only for the last 100 visits.