A Clouded Vision

Social networking has become more popular recently and finally I've succumbed to the pressure from people around me who already did it. I now actively use two social networking sites; Last.fm and Hyves.nl (dutch). I always protested to people inviting me to such sites because I did not want to do what everyone else did. But recently I came to the conclusion that nowadays social networking has become as popular and useful as E-mail, Instant Messaging and such.

Plus, now that I do use it, I actually like it. Especially when wanting to find old friends from your younger years, there's nothing as good as a social networking site. And with over 2 million Dutch people using Hyves (in a total of just over 16 million) you can find almost anyone with ages < 25.

The other social networking-ish site Last.fm is a different kind of networking site because you can find people with similar music taste It has been a great help finding other artists which fit in my own music taste.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine asked me, how it's possible that his installation of Windows Vista feels so smooth, while the system requirements are so much higher. At the time I didn't know a good answer but then I stumbled upon a preview of the Microsoft TechNet Magazine. This preview explains quite a few interesting details about the Vista Kernel and it's improvements compared to XP.

A brief summary of things:

• Much better thread Scheduling. In XP in some situations (multi-tasking) it was common for threads to be cut off before their actual time was up. When a thread was given a certain amount of cpu cycles, it couldn't even use all the cycles because of other threads interrupting it. Vista takes care of this problem by simply excluding interrupt time from the current thread's runtime. In other words; fair scheduling.
• Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. This service makes sure that applications using it's API get the necessary cpu time they need to do their things. It was created to help multimedia applications like Windows Media Player get enough cycles to continue playing media without clitches. This could happen for example when your virusscanner goes scanning in the middle of a webcast.
• I/O Priority. This is about the same thing as thread priority only applied to I/O. Before this, every application that accessed your harddrive for example was given the same priority. You probably know the situation when you're viewing a movie and your virusscanner (again!) goes scanning. With both applications getting the same priority accessing the harddrive this is bound to cause lag in your video playback. Vista now introduces priorities for I/O to make sure your virusscanner can't interrupt your media playback and stuff.

This was only a short summary, you can read the rest here.

Much much sooner than I expected I've been tagged. Thanks PJ van de Sande for that Being tagged unavoidably means I have to share five things nobody knows or actually wants to know of me:

• I have a cat named Tammie. This little cat, now about 1,5 years old, is really crazy. Almost as crazy as the person feeding it. In the evening when I'm working with the computer she will keep me comfortably warm sleeping on my lap. One remarkable thing about her is that, like dogs, she plays throw-and-fetch (don't know a really good word for it in English) with her fake mouse. She brings it over and we're supposed to throw it away. Unlike easily bored humans, she can keep this up indefinitely...
• I had long hair when I was younger. This one's pretty self explanatory; call it a rebellious period.
• .NET. When I was still in college I promised myself that Java was the future and I would be always using Java for development. Now a couple of years later, the only thing I really know and work with is everything .NET. Why this conversion? I don't know really. In high school I typically resented everything Microsoft because I didn't want to be dependent of them. However during the course of my graduation period I saw that .NET was really powerful, and saw that a lot had changed since Visual Basic 5/6. After finishing my study I continued to work at the same company, and now develop using .NET for a living.
• Far too many hobbies. In contrary to PJ ( ) I have always had the problem of having too many hobbies. Just to name a few; 3D Studio Max, photography, music (listening), reading, development, chatting and gaming. The problem is, some of those hobbies take far too much time. Take Development versus 3D Studio Max. If you want to be good in either one you have to spend a ridiculous amount of time in it. So those two combined doesn't work, even without the rest of my hobbies.
• I'm bad at finishing what I started. Apart from stuff for my study, I'm really bad at finishing things I do. This is probably related to the previous point, because I just think of something else to do and go and do that. This website is probably the thing I spent the most time on working. The website before this one was entirely self-made for example. Other projects I still need to finish are: filling up my empty gallery, an internet connection watcher, AES encryption library, .srt subtitle merger/syncher.

Well that about wraps it up. The only thing that remains is to tag five other people. Well here they are: Richard Tuin, Alex Thissen, Mischa Kroon, Rick van den Bosch and Dennis Vroegop. Some might've already been tagged, but these are the only five I could come up with.

On security?!?

Yes it sounds weird doesn't it. All things considered, when you think security, the first word to come to you won't really be Microsoft. We all know the bashing on either Internet Explorer or their operating systems.

What most people do not know, and that's their right, is that Microsoft makes much more software than just that. Apart from their development tools, which quite frankly are really good, they make server software too. We know Windows Server and such are more secure than the standard operating systems. Now next to that, there is SQL Server. Recent studies have revealed that Microsoft SQL Server, as of version 7 (before 2000!) has always been more secure than it's greatest competitor Oracle.

I'm into server software and more specifically SQL Server software, and this amazed me. I always thought of Oracle as the Fort Knox of SQL, although obviously I and many others have been wrong. Now I know what database server I'll continue to use in the future

Good literature.

It's a pretty interesting search engine.

Today I came across this very nice search engine, built by Microsoft. It features Janina Gavankar as an interactive search assistant. In the background, the search engine is MSN Search. It's a shame the speed of the search isn't as fast as Google's and the results aren't from Google, else I'd surely use this for my searching needs.

Go here to see her in action!

ROFLWAFFLES

Wikipedia's still growing fast with thousands of articles added each day, but this one really cought my attention:

Internet Slang

My personal favorites are OMGWTFBBQ and ROFLCOPTER! Great for confusing people who don't have a clue.

The pictures and stories about this latest game from Will Wright's creative mind have been going around for some time now.

But until recently, that's also where it ended. With the release of a short movie (35 minutes) that changed!

Let me fill you in about exactly what Spore is. Spore is a new game (in development) from Will Wright. You might have know no clue whatsoever about who he is. But you will most definately know his games. He is the creative mind behind The Sims and The Sims 2 and all the expansions.

As you probably know, the Sim-series weren't the smallest of games, with installs going far beyond 3 gb of needed diskspace. This was because of all the animations, textures and models that had to be created for each and every character or object in the game. To keep a story short; the games were huge because of the broad range of different content in them.

This got Will thinking, how big his games will be in the following years. Accidently he came across sites from the demo-scene. This fairly unknown programming 'sport', is based on 'making as much as possible, as small as possible'. Top programmers would make movies well over 10 minutes long, in an .exe-form which would be no more than 64 kb. Yes, that small indeed.
'Wouldn't this technique be something for me?', Will thought. And it was indeed.

In spore, none of the animations are created beforehand. Neither are the textures, or models. Only the basic shapes for a tree and such were defined originally. Instead, based on the shape a certain creature has (the number of legs for example) the game calculates the movement of the creature by itself. And this is done with just about everything in the game.

I could blog on for ages but I think you just have to see for yourself, just how amazing this game really is. There are lots and lots of interviews, pictures and such out there, which you can easily reach via Google. I will only give you the link to the movie. Have fun!

Click here!