The second edition of the Queaso.LAN will happen March the 21st 2009.
If you are an IT professional and want to join us (for free) you can register here: Queaso.LAN 2.0
Back from vacation and back to work also.
in my absence, all extrafilm.com sites have gone live with the new version ... All running smoothly as can be :-)
Queaso (my employer) is growing!
From just me and my 2 bosses, to 15 people strong ...
However, Queaso has a problem ...
We need more .NET developers and can't find any. So if you are a .NET developer, or know any, contact me and I'm sure that Queaso will be up your (or their) alley !
The new site of Cleantronics is live ... Cleantronics used to have a site with the link cleantronics-aic.be, but the aic part didn't say much. So now, the link is cleantronics.be. I've setup all the domains ((www.)cleantronics-aic.be and www.cleantronics.be) to be redirected to cleantronics.be (without the www).
Google only had the index page indexed, so that will remain the same.
It has come !
The first edition Queaso.LAN will be held in March of this year. If you are in Belgium, and you are an IT professional, feel free to join us !
Got me a new client ... BTRC - Big Tyre Recycling Coorporation has a very small site, and cannot be found anywhere as a result ...
They want me to fix this ;-)
I decided to make a challenge for myself.
It involves making a decent amount of money from online webpages. I'm a member @ Squidoo, a site to make webpages with affiliate programs and AdSense advertising about a subject you choose. The setup of the site makes it easy to become well ranked in Google and generate some nice traffic to those pages...
The challenge is to make $500 / month by the end of 2008.
You can track my progress on the challenge blog or get a more detailed view on the challenge.
Kitchens are popular again it seems.
The visitors at my works project (Keukens.be, the dutch kitchen site) have gone from 300+ to 500+ with minimal work ...
For example, check this kitchen out: Ultra modern Corian Kitchen
I went to a presentation of the new upcoming version for Visual Studio codenamed "Orcas". The location was Mechelen, which is a LOOOONG way from Gent. Interesting things have been shown, you can check them out in more detail on my technical blog : Hawkfield.Tech.
I obviously missed again when driving there, but i was still on time. Also met a collegue and a teacher from college at the event ...
It's been a while since I wrote on my blog ...
Alot has happened since, but I didn't really feel like writing about it.
But, I have something to write about now...
I left my workplace @ Sherpa.be in favor of a spot @ Queaso Systems.
One cool thing about it I can already tell you, Queaso must be the shortest name possible with 4 different vowels. Maybe "Queasio" could beat this and still be pronouncable.
Queaso currently focusses on outsourcing their people to different projects, I'm currently stationed @ KONE (the elevators) where I program in .NET (c#) ...
A barcode ...
Such a simple thing.
It contains nothing more than a number, but hidden behind that number can be a huge database.
At Sherpa.be we are implementing the barcode scanning as an access control for the venues that wish to implement it. In a later stade, we will also offer printing at home solutions, which makes the access control a required item.
One would think a scanner is just a scanner. But one would be mistaken then.
We started off with PDA scanners, which were slow and hard to handle (two hands are needed to scan a ticket). In the end, we will be using simple USB scanning devices hooked to our own PCs. This enables us to produce all the information on the screen or even play a sound.
The final choice is a Symbol LS9208 omni-directional scanning device. Priced around 300 euros, we are well cheaper than the PDA's who were included in our budget.
There's an interesting project I've been working on that will soon see the daylight...
Feel free to visit it at potiau.net, it's basically a company website for a lingerie store in Gent.
The weather was great, company was super great and the things we did were great too. But all things must come to an end, and here I am, back at my desk.
No regrets though, we had fun and were able to recharge all batteries, and that is the most important thing to do in a vacation.
Today, the sales for tickets went live at the Belgian MSN site.
Not a big rush as of yet, but what do you want, it has only been online for a very short time.
The new site of Sherpa.be, my employer, has now been running for over a week and it's looking good.
It was hard labor, an interesting new programming language (asp.NET) and a great design that resulted in the site currently live.
If you wish to take a look, click over to www.sherpa.be, feel free to put your comments here, I might actually do something with them...
We started the development of a new project at work, complately ASP.NET driven.
At first glance, ASP.NET looks great, but it still has some minor issues.
Like working together on 1 project makes debugging difficult, one can only debug once at the same time. This is of course not really an ASP.NET issue, but rather a Visual Studie .NET, which we use in development.
Another thing is the designer which randomly changes my HTML code, I'm not a big fan of WYSIWYG editors, and especially not the ones that change my HTML code. Thank god we don't have to use this one all the time.
It also tends to change code. For example, when you have a title tag with the runat attribute, for changing it programatically, and you paste it in another file, Visual Studio removes the runat attribute. Don't ask me why, but it does.
Dralion, the new show, was touring the USA and Canada before, but comes to Belgium in 2004.
I saw there previous show, Saltimbanco, and was rather impressed by it. It's not just a circus, there are no animals, but it's a complete show which has circus acts included. The sales for Dralion opened today, almost 1 year before the actual show, and surprisingly, people are already buying tickets.
It are busy times for the servers of Sherpa. Last week, the windows and database installations were cleaned up by Cronos, today the servers received some extra diskspace.
6 drives of 36GB in raid5 to be precise. I guess that will help us back on track, because there was only like 40 GB in it in total.
Next week, they should also get a memory upgrade. all those upgrades should make up for 3 years of operation time without any adjustments.
I have finished the site for Canoe & kayak services, a store that sells kayak equipment. The content is still rather empty, but he's filling in his products as I write this, so that should improve.
I've been looking at many free tools but have not yet found what I am looking for. The tool needs to be webbased, programmed in PHP with MySQL as backend.
The features need to be easily accesible and contain a management system of client data, orders made by them (no fixed products) and reoccuring orders, so I get warned when I need to sed out the next invoice.
Cool, but not really needed, is a client side, where clients can see what orders they have running, which invoices are not yet payed, etc.
There are many such tools at SourceForge, but I have not yet found one that does what I want, without the hassle of larger programs.
My work recently acquired a competitor, and today, it seems the people are going to move from there to here. We'll be moving desks, closets, boxes, and other stuff this afternoon.
I feel tired already ...
Anyone knows software and hardware to receive SMS messages into textfiles.
I need them to make voting software via SMS ...
UPDATE: many people replied about an sms modem or software, thank you for that.
I also found a cable that makes it possible to attach my Nokia 3310 to my PC and receive SMS'es that way, which is a cheap but great solution to my sms modem problem.
Well, we have a problem here.
When you have a https site running, and go there all works fine, but when you explicitly set the IP for that domain in a host file, all of the sudden it stops working telling me there is a DNS error ... Why ?
The company I work for, Sherpa, decided to move to bigger offices. One of the suggested locations was 50 meters closer to where I live (wow, so much improvement) and looked nice. 8 people will be joining us from TicketClub, a competitor we bought, so that's why expansion was needed.
It finally worked, I started my own web design company.
If you need a website, graphical design or any other IT service, take a look at the site: Hawkfield: Web development.
I used to work for a company called Alphanet and for them I worked 6 months in Antwerp for a place called Frontline.
It wasn't going good with the first one, I knew that, but now it came to my attention the the second one went down too.
Bad time, bad sector, the present and IT. unfortunatly, I'm employed in both. I hope my current company lives the day.
The company I work for invited us to a dinner this afternoon.
We went to eat at a place called 'Le Manufacture', which refers to the leather plant next to it. We arrived, and the first time in my life, we entered a restaurant where they had valets (they come and pick up your car and park them for you). To bad I wasn't driving ...
The food was really good. First some prepartion of shrimps of some kind, fried in some flowery substance.
Then 'Croustillants de filet d'agneau de ...' and some more French words that I don't understand. Was good, but I liked the shrimps better ... Hehe.
For desert we had choclate mousse, which was ofcourse very delicious.
With all that we had wine and other dirnks, which complicated working the afternoon after the lunch (like, right now).
I ran into a small problem at work today. Well, I didn't really create it, but I have to fix it.
So for all people out there designing webpages, read the following.
If you design pages to be viewed on 800x600 resolution, you don't want to make the page (or the flash for that matter) 800x600 pixels. Always take a margin for the scrollbars, the menu, the statusbar, ...
For example, take a witdh of 760 pixels, that should be enough on a screen of 800 pixels to view your site + the scrollbars without having a horizontal scrollbar.
The same goes for sites designed on 1024x768 resolution, they also have scrollbars.
Anyways, try to make it, then set your own resolution on 800x600 and view it. That's the only way to be sure.
My carpool driver overslept today. For once, it wasn't the traffic jams on the E40 that caused us to be late at work.
But we managed to get there only 40 minutes over time, which isn't to bad.
At least his car started, I had some problems with that the other day.
My carpool driver overslept today. For once, it wasn't the traffic jams on the E40 that caused us to be late at work.