I'm back. Yes, I know I've said that before. The reason for the apparent death of my fabulous weblog was the loss of its source code and the lack of proper backups. That, and of course my lazyness to fix the site back up.

I've since learned my lesson, and I've started using Dropbox to provide me with fresh, juicy backups of everything I make. I can very much recommend it to everyone, except the rare soul running on KDE, BSD or Solaris (no support for you oddballs!).

I've found the time to rewrite and redesign my blog (pretty, isn't it? I tried to go for the web 2.0 cliché look). Under the hood, I've used ramaze, an amazingly powerful yet simple web framework for Ruby. For the storage, I've written my own old-school flat-file database system, so I can easlily backup both my site and data.

So, after all this time, a lot must have changed. Tell you about it? I thought you'd never ask.

School

I've received my Bachelor's Degree in Informatics in June this year, and started my Master in Computer Science: Software Engineering in September. We've had lots of projects and work, most of which I hate(d), but I've learned a lot about web applications and corporate systems thanks to them. If only I cared about those in the slightest.

Work

This summer, I worked at Curious.be, a small software development company. They mainly develop web applications, and have recently decided to do all future development in Ruby. They let me pick my own tools for each task, and allow me to work on their more challenging projects. I've since continued to work for them every now and then as a freelance developer.

Play

I've bought lots of new toys and learned lots of new things since I last blogged. I bought a Thinkpad SL300, which isn't all that bad, but certainly shouldn't be called a Thinkpad in terms of reliability. Linux support on it is less then ideal, with battery life being about an hour less than on Windows. It also fails to pick up a few wireless access points, including my own.

I've happily been running Windows Vista Business for quite some time now, and I really don't understand why everyone dislikes it so much. Sure, it's a little on the heavy side, but if you have a newer machine, it's actually not that bad. I even dare to say it's quite good. And coming from a Linux command line junkie like myself, that means something.

All things considered however, I'm probably going to give OpenSolaris another try when they get my wireless working. I've given it a test spin, and it's moving at such an incredible pace. Only 6 months ago, their hardware support was terrible: it didn't even run properly on a 2-year-old desktop with probably the most popular components in computer history. Now however, it supports everything on my new laptop out of the box, except for a tiny PCIID bug in the wireless driver. I'm very impressed.

I'm also trying to play around with Squeak a bit, whenever I find the time. Once I understand enough of it, my first job will be to make it look a bit less like kintergarden, because the colours just freak me out.

See you next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel

Well, maybe not next week. But I promise I won't be leaving you for a year this time. I'll try to blog again before the year is out, and with some useful content, no less!