Digiwar - the Yeep-blog

So last week the official Beta 2 of Visual Studio was released and I downloaded the release immediatly. I uninstalled the february refresh of the CTP and installed the beta 2 version. It seemed a bit better. One bug I ran into with the CTP release was gone, but I still have the problem that when I’m running Visual C++ for a length of time, it really slows down. It still looks like an enormous resource leak. After about an hour it’s so slow it’s hardly usable. It seems to be related to debugging, because as long as I don’t debug and step through my code I have no problem.

I’m going to try Visual C# out sometime soon, so I hope it doesn’t have the same issues as Visual C++.

I also still have the feeling Visual C++ is being left behind feature-wise by Microsoft. I’m not talking about language features, but about editor features. The C# editor has more features then ever and the C++ editor hardly has any new features. And they still haven’t fixed the task-list!! It’s still completely useless to me. Makes you think Microsoft really wants you to switch from C++ to C#.

[Now playing: Fear Factory - Archetype]

Last week I tried using Visual Studio 2005 February preview release for my VC++ project and I’m not that satisfied with it.

There is some sort of huge resource leak in it. The longer I use it, the more memory it eats and the slower it gets. I stopped using it when it took over a minute to start a small program in debug mode and over a minute to stop it.

Also when in debug mode all sort of debug windows appear (local watch, auto watch, memory windows, etc) which I all closed, then after two debug runs they all reappeared. Clicked them away again and later they all reappeared, and so on.

There were more little issues, all minor by themselves (accept for the resource leak), but all together enough to make me stop using it. A colleague of mine has been using it for C# and ASP.NET and has no problems with it. So it might be just VC++ related. So I’ll have another look at it using C#, but for C++ it’s not really up to par yet.


[Last played: Crowbar - On frozen ground]

It’s been a while since my last update. Life has gone on. I started a project (actually phase 1 of a much larger project) and it’s nearing it’s completion. I’ve broken up with my girlfriend and fell in love with another girl. My daily 4 hour commuting has lessened to just twice a week (when the project ends, it ends altogether fortunatly) and I’ve been thinking about cool stuff to do in my own spare time. So why this update? To tell you about this new idea of mine of course

So, the internet, all this computers wired together. And what do we use it for? Porn and illegally downloading software, music and movies. At least, that’s what you think when you read all the news. And what do major companies see for the future of this medium? To give you services you already have, just a little more dificult, but maybe cheaper. Is this what we want? Think about it. In 50 years, you could be trying to explain your grandchild that we had wireless (although sometimes not), streaming, full motion video (TV) and wireless, streaming audio (radio) and replaced it with services that require a computer and most of the time an internet connection with cable. Is the only future of internet to give us the things we already have, just cheaper? I think not. The internet was about information sharing and it still is. Weblogs are the newest rage and they rightfully are. Now everybody can be a publisher. Everybody can share their thoughs and opinions and everybody in the whole wide world can read it. That’s information sharing.
As I’ve said before, I think the future of internet is still about information, it’s about information availability. Your data, wherever you want it, whenever you want it. And that’s what my personal project is about.

I have a digital camera and I even scanned some of my photo’s. So I have most of my photo’s digitally on my computer. It has happened a few times that I needed to find a specific photo and I ended up scrolling throught them all. Photo’s are just files on your harddisk so you can search for them by filename, but not on content. Besides, I haven’t found a program that let’s me easily organize them (ACD See is pretty good, but it’s quite a choir to do it for all my photo’s). The second problem is that sometimes I’m at work and a friend asks me if i have a photo of someone or something we did and I can’t look them up, because the photo’s are on my desktop at home. My idea is to write a two-part application that solves these problems. The first part will be some service-side scripts, so I can easily store my photo’s on a server so theye’re available from everywhere through the internet. The second part is a program that I can run on my desktop to help me organize and store the photo’s on the server. The program allows me to add keywords to photo’s and organize them into groups.
I haven’t really made a design yet, but I do have some features I want to implement:

• User-based, so you can allow people to look at your photo’s
• The client has ’subject’ intelligence, the server storage and search intelligence (the client sends the server all the info it needs, it won’t try do discover the info (like dimensions of a photo) itself
• Modulair, so I can add more things then photo’s to the application
• The client caches it’s data, so browsing photo’s doesn’t require an internet connection

I’ll post more when I make some progress. Right now I’m thinking about the API the client and the server use to communicate. It’ll be POX-based, that’s for sure.

[Last played: Apocalyptica - Inquisition Symphony]