ksymeon

Anybody remember Bryce? That classic 3D modelling program with the extraordinary user interface, developed by Kai Krause's old company MetaCreations? Several years ago - I think it was 1999 - MetaCreations sold Bryce to Corel and then last June, Corel sold to a company called "Daz" specializing in 3D Content and software ( http://www.daz3d.com/ ). When I saw the full version of Bryce 4 being given away for free on the copy of a magazine I immediatelly bought a copy. This one was not to be missed! Check the new home of Bryce and the galleries . And if you see it being offered on the cover of a magazine don't hesitate. Buy it!

I have been looking at the “ atom.xml ” blog technology recently, a publishing standard for news web sites and weblogs. This blog is automatically Atom enabled (see Blogger help ) which basically means that you can use a news reader such as the freeware FeedReader to subscribe and read the posts like in an NewsGroups program. I decided to get some hands-on experience on atoms, so I modified the program that creates my PhotoBlog (“ My Wandering Days Are Over... ”) to generate an atom.xml as well. The result is that you can now keep track of any new posts I create for “MWDAO” using your RSS Feed reader ;-)

From the moment I started my blog I have been thinking about a way to create a photo blog and post some of my favourite pictures. Last week, I managed to get some time off work and create my first photo-blog. While I was building it, I was listening to "Tigermilk" by "Belle and Sebastian" and decided to give it a title; " My Wandering Days Are Over " is now live, hope you like it... For those of you curious about the technology I decided that nothing is better and quicker than plain HTML/XHTML and therefore I wrote a little win32 application to automatically generate photo blogs from a list of jpg files, thumbnails and templates. It's very simple but does the job ;-)

A long long time ago I was still a teenager quite keen in computer programming when a friend introduced me to the realm of Turbo Pascal. It was my first year at the uni, and I was still writing in Basic using my Amstrad CPC464, when I got my first CPC6128 which had a 3" floppy disk drive and an additional operating system (CP/M). I immediatelly fell in love with Turbo Pascal. To these days I believe that a language that can have a statement as readable as "repeat until KeyPressed;", which was indeed very useful in those days, is a superior language. One day that friend of mine told me that actually nobody knows who wrote the Turbo Pascal compiler; the myth says that it was written by Frank Borland a guy who works alone and lives in a cabin high up the rocky mountains and only goes back to civilisation when he creates a new version... (!!!) Obviously this was a story hard to believe, it was however rather amusing and to be honest quite fascinating; I do not know of any...

My beautiful Cherry keyboard has arrived in the post today. I'm still struggling a little bit to get used to it, but I'm telling you what: This is the quality I was talking about in my previous post. Every single key has the same solid feeling when pressed, the feedback is excellent, the plastic material doesn't have the "cheap" feeling of the keyboards I was describing before and the layout is exactly how it should be without silly "innovations" just for the sake of making one. You know what I mean...

Unless you don't know what kind of program you are using right now while reading these lines, I suggest that you go and have a look at Mozilla's website and download the best browser around. Fast and lightweight does not have any of the security problems of some of its competitors... I have been using it for a while and am really glad that the pre-release version is now out. Go ahead, have a look!

It's been a while since I bought two identical 80Gb IBM hard disks for my desktop PC and it's been also a while since one of them died quite dramatically. Fortunately IBM hard disks make all these choking noises before the go to sleep so I was lucky enough to save all my data. I have replaced that fallen one with two hard disks (120Gb and 160Gb) this time from different manufacturers just in case something is wrong with one batch (or generation if you like). About eight months ago the second IBM drive started making some noises. Not all the time but quite often, I would hear this tinkering sound and the computer will slow down until the hard disk would retry to read the data. The only problem is that this is still my system disk and it would be a burden to re-install absolutely everything again. There's no problem of losing data, I have now backups of almost everything on two different hard disks and on several DVDs. Recently, I have installed a very neat little utility ...

I was in the shops the other day looking for a new keyboard and was impressed by the lack of quality of keyboards made by major manufacturers. I am talking about quality of the raw plastic material, the feel of pressing a button, the actual key feedback etc. :-) They all looked and felt like my server's £5 keyboard which is never used. On my normal desktop I am still using my Microsoft Natural Keyboard that I bought possibly in 1995 or 1994; it's so long ago I don't even remember... and the only reason I am looking for a replacement is that I opened it a couple of months ago to clean it and I broke a little piece of chassis that now makes the whole left hand group of keys slide forwards and backwards. Which as a matter of fact does make it a little bit annoying but not unworkable if you know what I mean. Anyway, the other annoying fact is that the new Microsoft keyboards have this elongated Delete button on top of the cursor keys and the Insert button somehow made it int...

I just discovered the "best year of my life" . This trully amazing photoblog, is stylish and contains fantastic pictures. Do not miss it! I am now addicted to it. Moments after I started my own web log, I now find myself in need of a photoblog too...

I've opened my first personal blog. Hope I'll find the time to update it regularly. :-)