Tag Archives: Personal stuff
Questionaire
Posted on 01. Jul, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
How old were you when you first started programming?
I think I was about 7 or 8 years old. Since 1986 we had an Atari 1040STf with the GEM operating system. It had a whopping 1 MB of memory and it could run in super-high graphical resolutions (according to Wikipedia it did a nice 640×200 ??). Most stuff I created was useless offcourse.
How did you get started in programming?
A friend of mine a couple of houses next to me got me hooked. So I lend a book from him, which made me dream of all the cool applications someone could develop! I still have that problem 
, whenever a nice technique appears I dream of the new cool things I could do with it.
What was your first language?
GFA Basic
What was the first real program you wrote?
Pfff, real? In school we had a lot of assignments, but most of them ofcourse were nowhere near as complicated as the projects you encounter when you work at a company. Most stuff developed at school were things as “Otello” and other useless stuff.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
GFA Basic, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Assembly (school only!), VB, VB.NET, C++, C#
What was your first professional programming gig?
Well I do not have a lot of previous-employers yet, my first programming gig where I actually got paid for my work, was at KPN. A large telco in the Netherlands.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
To a lot of people programming might seem like a boring job, but I think it is still very rewarding. There is a certain ‘rush’ that happens when you finally fix some annoying bug or when you created something complex. So .. yes!
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Design, design, design… Sometimes you HAVE to start working on a project without a proper design and I think we all have one of those skeletons in the closet. That project will hunt you for the rest of your life (well, probably until you switch jobs). Another thing is, that people shouldn’t stop learning new techniques, the IT world is moving fast and if you want to keep up, you need to keep learning.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
Pfff, I like almost all my programming things. The most fun are the projects I do in my ’spare’ time, where I can really explore new techniques.
Very weird smurf
Posted on 14. May, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
So, over here in the Netherlands a big grocerystore had an offer a couple of weeks ago, that when you bought for EUR 10 on groceries, you would get a free smurf.
They had a total of 15 different smurfs and because my oldest daughter loves them, the whole family started collecting them for her. In total we got about 40 or 50 smurf and because there were only 15 different ones, we got loads of doubles.
Well on an standard saturday or sunday morning my daughter came to me, telling me that another one of her smurfs was broken, asking me if I could fix it.
I took a look at that smurf and this was what I saw….
Warning: explicit content!!
Testing a couple of VW cars
Posted on 21. Apr, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
Last saturday I spend most of my day at a testing circuit, because a friend of mine was invited to come test some Volkswagen cars. He could bring a friend, so that’s how I got there.
When we arrived at the circuit at around 08:30 in the morning, we were first told what the plan was for that day. It’s was quite simple, we needed to take a couple of driving-skill-tests, but not in the normal test cars, but in cars supplied by Volkswagen.
There were 3 types of cars we needed to test. The EOS, the Tiguan and the Passat. The EOS was a normal 2.0 liter petrol version and the Passat and the Tiguan were Diesel powered cars (which I prefer).
First thing we needed to do was to complete a slalom in the fastest time possible. Normally you would get a penalty for hitting the cones on the track, but that rule was kicked out. The first car we tried out was the EOS, which is a ’small’ convertible. Well, in short : my friend hit 3 cones and got a time of 17.95 seconds, while I did a perfect lap (without cones) in 17.80 seconds.
In the Passat it was about the same idea. I was about 1 second slower than my friend, but my friend took out 3 or 4 cones, while I did a perfect lap again.
The Tiguan was a completely different story. Somehow that car hated me and I took one turn way to wide. Therefor I took out 3 cones at once, but my time was reasonable. My friend did a lot better in that S.U.V. kinda car and he also was about 2 seconds faster than me.
Other tests with the cars were the brake-test and the ‘go in a circle and get the car in a slip’-test. These tests were not a competition, so no real test results there. All I did learn was that when you drive 50km/h on a slippery road, it takes a LONG distance to completely stop the car. This actually surprised me a little. I knew that it would take a while before you would completely stand still, but THAT long?
Continue ReadingMy new camera
Posted on 22. Mar, 2008 by Wim Haanstra.
As I got 2 kids nowadays, my girlfriend finds it very amusing to compare pics of the first and the second kid on the day that they were the same age. My youngest daughter turned 6 months old a couple of weeks ago and all she does is compare pics of our first daughter when she was 6 months old. But then it struck me. My girlfriend told me there was a remarkable difference in quality of the pics taken 3 years ago and the pics taken 2 weeks ago.
Because the camera I was using was an old 3MP beast with no more features than an ordinary bread, we thought it was time to get a new camera.
My old camera had the form of a dSLR and I was really happy with that shape. It was easy to hold and because the lens could be bigger than with those compact camera’s, it really took some pretty pictures.
First I needed to decide if I wanted to start using a dSLR. But in a scary dream I already saw myself dragging bags full of lenses with me and that was not something I liked. I woke up covered in sweat and made up my mind, not buying a dSLR.
So my search for a fine camera started at the new Fuji S8000fd camera, which had a HUGE zoom, 8mpx etc. Because my old camera also was a Fuji I have a big trust in them. When my search continued I noticed that there are 3 camera’s in the category I was looking for.
The Fuji S8000fd.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18
The Olympus SP-550UZ
The quest I started was to gather as much reviews and user experiences of all those cams and see which one others found best. I decided to base my own decision on those reviews and my own logic sense.
After a complete week of reading the complete internet about these 3 cams I decided that my new cam would be the …. *long pause for dramatic effect* …. Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18.
The prices of the camera were all about the same so, that wasn’t really a discussion point. First I looked around for the regular internet shops to see if there was any price difference between the shops, but not really.
Next up I went to search on eBay, to see if someone in Europe had the same cam for sale (in brand new form), but that also was a disappointment. Most camera’s on there come from Hong Kong and I didn’t want customs back on my ass (as they did a couple of years earlier). Then I found this type of camera on a dutch trade-site, brand-new, bought at the 28th of January of this year. After some emailing back and forth we agreed on a price and the woman selling the camera also told me that they could bring the camera to the city where I live because her parents-in-law lived here.
Success!
The camera will be arriving on sunday the 23th and I will let you know what I think of it. Until then, take a look at this pretty picture of the cam:
