Sin noticias de Dios (No news from god)

Listen to Silvio

2009-07-13T07:58:00.002Z

2D Convolution example

2009-06-30T12:31:00.001Z

Very clear example of a 2D convolution:

http://www.songho.ca/dsp/convolution/convolution2d_example.html

This kind of convolution can be used, for example, to implement and edge detector applying a Sobel operator.

Enjoy!!!

Books I´ve read this year so far

2009-06-06T22:20:00.003Z

The Bourne Identity. Thrilling action pack book, you´ll definitely learn two English words, kerb and quay. 7 out of 10
The constant gardener. Moving, enigmatic diplomatic atmosphere. I falls a little bit by the middle section, but has an amazing end that leave a great taste. 8 out of 10.
The pillars of the earth. This is my favorite book ever. I've read it twice in Spanish and twice in English. The last time I read it was between 2008 and 2009. 10 out of 10.
Misery. This is my second favourite book ever. How many times I have dreaded Ms Wilkes!!!! 9.5 out of 10.
Hannibal Rising. The surprise of the year. The prose is quite unusual and for a non native English speaker (and reader) it causes some confusing at the beginning of the book. Once you get use to it, the is not a single moment dull in this book. I love Hannibal's character. 9 out of 10.
Alice´s adventures in wonderland. I began reading this book today. So far I've read 20 of about 280 pages, and I´m absolutely delighted. The English used in the book is very very very easy to read, so I recommend this book for those of you learning English. So far 9 out of 10.
A brief history of time. Just one sentence, do not read it if you don´t have a scientific background. I have a background in both chemical engineering, and computer science, thus my knowledge of maths and physics can be considered more than average, and the book became almost impossible to follow once it "falls" into black holes. However is really enjoyable while can be understood.

I addition my parent´s gave me as abirthday present a wonderful Sony PRS-505, this is an ebook reader, so I´m reading more than ever. I transfer to it every interesting article that I find on the net. With a good piece of software called calibre I can convert many formats to PRS's native format, and even download online newspapers automatically. Besides you can access more than 500.000 free books through google or Project Gutenberg.

Enjoy reading!!!!!

Antonio Vega has passed away

2009-05-13T19:30:00.003Z

Today is a sad day for all of us who love music. During his life, Antonio Vega composed a handful of songs that are part of the memories of a generation. An icon of "la modiva" in the 80´s, unfortunately got addicted to drugs, which eventually led to his dead.

We will never forget you, because your music will always be alive in our harts.

Youtube links.

Gyms in Lausanne (Switzerland)

2009-05-04T10:05:00.002Z

I'm doing a little research about gyms with swimming pool in Laussane (Switzerland). There seems to be quite a lot of gyms there. These are the results

Holmes Place. This place looks really posh. Design is everywhere, a very clean modern look throughout the place. No swimming pool though.
Migros fitness park. There is a swimming pool here, but leisure one, with the temperature set to 32Celisiuss!!!!!!!!! You would like to be there swimming for an hour. Prices are kind of high.
Silhouette. Flashy, Flashy web page. It's hard to believe that some serious company has a web like that in 2009. There is a swimming pool with the water temperature set at 27 - 28 degrees. Enough not to overheat yourself, but still a little bit to high. No information about its size. The place look clean, moderns, but a little bit clattered. Wooden floors look great.
Let's Go. It doesn't seem to be a swimming on this one. It looks like the poores so far, although the standard seems very high in Switzerland.

Indoor swimming pools:

Ok, now, this one is kind of funny.

Aquarius gay swimming club. WTF!!!!! jajajajajaja this is a GAY swimming club, but what in the name of god do sports have to do with sexual orientation. jajajaja, I mean, why would you want to swim with only gay and lesbian people, honestly I don't understand. Will they not admit me in the club becuase I'm not gay?

Enrique Bunbury

2009-04-17T21:53:00.001Z

Everyone who knows me will understand why I´m posting this:

Enjoy!!!

Back On Track

2009-03-29T19:19:00.003Z

Hi people!!!

The sports season has begun, and what a beginning! Last week I run the Plassey 10K race, event organized by the University of Limerick physical education students. Enjoyable, not too bad for the first race in months. I didn't beat my PB (personals best) at all, but I have good sensations. My time was 47:05, not too impressive, I know.

Today I took part in a Duathlon for the first time in my life.

The experience was amazing, thrilling, but also absolutely wrecking. The event was organized by the Limerick Triathlon Club. I work with the swimming coach of the club, and lately we've been training together (he was faster than me today). I did well on the first running leg, the on the bicycle I almost died. Ireland is famous for its continuous rain and wind, well today was one of those days when the country feels like honoring his fame. My time was 1:10:57 (3.9 run, 16 cycle, 3.9 run), awful, but I consider it a good starting point.

Enjoy!!!

Brilliant!! Famous paintings recreated using Lego

2009-03-02T22:36:00.002Z

http://www.oddee.com/item_96540.aspx

Confessions of an Irish Gamer

2009-02-28T17:39:00.003Z

I just want to recommend to those of you who like videogames, to visit the blog homonym with this entry:

Confessions of an Irish Gamer

The authors are not really prolific, but the posts are quality ones.

Enjoy.

WIFI WPA Encryption with Ubuntu 6.10

2009-02-22T12:47:00.003Z

Connecting to a WIFI network that uses WEP encription is a pretty straight forward task using UBUNTU, you only have to use the "Wireless Assistant" tool integrated with the system. However, when you try to connect to a network using WPA encryption things get more complicated. For some reason the "Wireless Assistant" do not let you select a other encryption than WEP.

After some research, i.e. google search, I found an entry in ubuntuforums.org that explain how to connect to WIFI networks that use WPA encryption. This process involves mainly editing text files, there is no "Windowzed" application to help:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834

In my case I'm using a network with DHCP activated, and my computer runs a KUBUNTU 6.10. My laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite M70-165 with an integrated WIFI adapter. My /etc/network/interfaces looks like this:


auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-driver wext
wpa-ssid $your essid here$
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk $your hex key code here$

Just follow the procedure explain in the forum, it's easy and it worked for me with at the first attempt.

XSLT with Java and Dom4j-1.6

2009-02-08T18:36:00.003Z

Feeling geeky again!!

Today I´ll show you how to perform an XSLT (XSL transformation) on an XML file using Java and Dom4j. In contrast with the last Java/Dom4j post in this i´ll only show the class that acually performs the transformation. Dom4j is not able to perform the transformation on its own, it needs the help of JAXP:


 1 package com.julio.xml;
 2
 3 import java.io.File;

 4 import java.io.FileWriter;
 5 import java.io.IOException; // dom4j import
 6 import org.dom4j.Document;
 7 import org.dom4j.DocumentException;

 8 import org.dom4j.io.SAXReader;
 9 import org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler;
10 import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
11 import org.xml.sax.SAXParseException;

12
13 import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
14 import javax.xml.transform.TransformerConfigurationException;
15 import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException;
16 import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;

17 import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
18
19 import org.dom4j.io.DocumentResult;
20 import org.dom4j.io.DocumentSource;
21 import org.dom4j.io.DocumentSource;

22 import org.dom4j.io.XMLWriter;
23 import org.dom4j.io.OutputFormat;
24
25 public class XmlTransformer {

26  // The input XML file
27  private File input;
28  // The DOM document for the imput file

29  private Document inputDoc;
30  // Guess what!!!!
31  private File output;

32  // The xslt file
33  private File transformation;
34
35  public XmlTransformer(File input, File transformation) {

36   this.input = input;
37   this.transformation = transformation;

38  }
39
40  public File transform() throws IOException {

41   // Need to create a factory using JAXP
42   TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();

43   try {
44    // Now get a transformer using the facory
45    Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer(new StreamSource(

46      transformation));
47    // Convert the input file into a DOM document
48    this.createDoc();

49    // Dom4j support for trasnformations
50    DocumentSource source = new DocumentSource(this.inputDoc);

51    DocumentResult result = new DocumentResult();
52    try {

53     // OK lets do the actual transformation
54     transformer.transform(source, result);
55     // The rest is boiler plate code!!!

56     Document outputDoc = result.getDocument();
57     OutputFormat format = OutputFormat.createPrettyPrint();

58     output = new File("output.xml");
59     XMLWriter writer = new XMLWriter(new FileWriter(output), format);

60     writer.write(outputDoc);
61     writer.close();

62    } catch (TransformerException e) {
63     // TODO Auto-generated catch block

64     e.printStackTrace();
65    }
66   } catch (TransformerConfigurationException e) {

67    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
68    e.printStackTrace();
69   }

70   return output;
71  }
72
73  private void createDoc() {

74   SAXReader reader = new SAXReader(false);
75   try {

76    this.inputDoc = reader.read(this.input);

77   } catch (DocumentException e) {
78    // TODO Auto-generated catch block

79    e.printStackTrace();
80   }
81  }

82 }

syntax highlighted by Code2HTML, v. 0.9.1

New songs

2009-02-02T19:32:00.002Z

I´ve published a new recording in my Myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/sinnoticiasdedios

Enjoy!!!!

XML schema validation with Dom4j

2009-01-26T19:22:00.017Z

Hi folks, today I´m feeling geeky!!

First and foremost, if you don´t know what and XML schemas or XML documents are, you´d better listen to my music clicking on the youtube video on your right. For the rest of you, a bit obvious, Dom4j is a Java API, so........

Ok, let´s get started.

Dom4j is a Java API that makes XML manipulation sweet, and easier than with pure DOM or SAX. Besides it let you use XPATH to travers XML documents. Dom4j includes its own XML parser, but this in not able to validate document agains schemas. For that purpose we will use Xerces.

In order to develop our example we will define a very little schema and and two XML documents usign that schema, one will be valid, and the other won´t.

I´m using Java 5, and ignore if this would work with Java 1.4, let me know if you discover something. I will assume you have downloaded the following APIs:

Latest dom4j (1.6.1 at the time or writting this).
Latest Xerces (1.4.4 at the time of writting this).

I´ll use Eclipse througout the whole example, so let´s kick off:

Create a Java project. Call it XmlValidation
Add the following libraries to the buid path (Project -> Properties -> Java Build Path -> Libraries -> Add external jars)
- dom4j-1.6.1.jar
- xerces.jar
Add an XML schema called SongSchema.xsd:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  targetNamespace="SongSchema" xmlns:album="SongSchema"
  elementFormDefault="qualified">

  <xsd:element name="album">
      <xsd:complexType>
          <xsd:sequence>
              <xsd:element name="song" type="album:song" />
              <xsd:element name="comment" type="xsd:string" />
          </xsd:sequence>
      </xsd:complexType>
  </xsd:element>

  <xsd:complexType name="song">
      <xsd:sequence>
          <xsd:element name="title" type="album:nonemptystring" />
          <xsd:element name="author" type="album:nonemptystring" />
          <xsd:element name="minutes" type="album:time" />
          <xsd:element name="seconds" type="album:time" />
      </xsd:sequence>
  </xsd:complexType>


  <xsd:simpleType name="time">
      <xsd:restriction base="xsd:positiveInteger">
          <xsd:pattern value='[0-6]?[0-9]'/>
      </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>

  <xsd:simpleType name="nonemptystring">
  <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
      <xsd:pattern value="[\w\W]+"></xsd:pattern>
  </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>
</xsd:schema>

Now we create our actual XML file, called MySongs.xml:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<album xmlns="SongSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="SongSchema SongSchema.xsd">
  <song>
      <title>Oceano de sal</title>
      <author>Julio Delgado</author>
      <minutes>39</minutes>
      <seconds>7</seconds>
  </song>
  <comment>Very Good Song,ideed.</comment>
</album>

We are nearly there!!!
Create the validator class, called Validator, in the Validator.java file:


package com.julio.xml;

import java.io.File;
// dom4j import
import org.dom4j.Document;
import org.dom4j.DocumentException;
import org.dom4j.io.SAXReader;
import org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import org.xml.sax.SAXParseException;

public class Validator {
 private File file;
 private Document doc;
 private SAXReader reader;
 private handler h;
 
 public Validator(){
  reader = new SAXReader(true);
  h = new handler();
  // Lets configure the reader for full validation
  // set the validation feature to true to report validation errors
  try {
   reader.setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", true);
   // set the validation/schema feature to true to report validation errors against a schema
   reader.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema", true);

   // set the validation/schema-full-checking feature to true to enable full schema, grammar-constraint checking
   reader.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema-full-checking", true);
   reader.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/continue-after-fatal-error", true);
   //reader.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/validation-error-as-fatal", true);
   reader.setErrorHandler(h);
  } catch (SAXException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace();
  }


 };
 public Validator(String fileName)
 {
  this();
  file = new File(fileName);
  try {
   doc = reader.read(file);
  } catch (DocumentException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   e.printStackTrace();
  }
  
  // If everything went fine up to this point, now we have
  // an XML document in memory and can try to validate.
 }
 public void setFile(File file) {
  this.file = file;
 }
 
 public boolean validateXml(){
  try {
   h.setHasErrors(false);
   doc = reader.read(file);
  } catch (DocumentException e) {
   // TODO Auto-generated catch block
   System.out.println(e.getMessage());
   //e.printStackTrace();
   return false;
  }
  return !h.getHasErrors();
 }
 
 
 class handler implements ErrorHandler{

  private boolean hasErrors;
  
  public handler()
  {
   hasErrors = false;
  }
  
  public boolean getHasErrors()
  {
   return hasErrors;
  }
  
  public void setHasErrors(boolean b)
  {
   this.hasErrors = b;
  }
  
  @Override
  public void error(SAXParseException exception) throws SAXException {
   System.out.println("Line: " + exception.getLineNumber() + ") " +
     exception.getMessage());
   hasErrors = true;
  }

  @Override
  public void fatalError(SAXParseException exception) throws SAXException {
   // TODO Auto-generated method stub
   
  }

  @Override
  public void warning(SAXParseException exception) throws SAXException {
   // TODO Auto-generated method stub
   
  }
  
 }

}

This code is doing 2 main things:

Configure the parser in the Validator constructor. This include it´s behavior and a class to handle errors and warnings during parsing.
Define a class to handle errors. This is needed because otherwise the applicacion would rise and exception with the first error found, and we couldn´t get a list of all the errors present on the Xml file.

Finally the class that nails everything together, XmlTest, in the file XmlTest.java:


package com.julio.test;

import java.io.File;

import org.dom4j.Document;
import org.dom4j.DocumentException;
import org.dom4j.io.SAXReader;

public class XmlTest {

  // Entry point
  public static void main(String args[])
  {
      System.out.println("XmlTest.main()");
      XmlTest test = new XmlTest();
      test.printWellcomeScreen();
      SAXReader reader = new SAXReader();
      Document doc = null;
      try {
          doc = reader.read(new File("xml/Program.xml"));
      } catch (DocumentException e) {
          // TODO Auto-generated catch block
          e.printStackTrace();
      }
      if(doc != null)
      {
          System.out.println(doc.toString());
          if(doc.getRootElement().getName() == "program")
          {
              System.out.println("program\n");
              System.out.println(doc.getRootElement().attributeValue("buid"));
          }
      }
  }


  private void printWellcomeScreen()
  {
      System.out.println("WELLCOME!!!\n");
  }

}

Now just compile and execute. Try different values in the Xml file, and you´ll see how well the validation works.

Enjoy!!!!

XBOX 360

2009-01-17T20:56:00.002Z

I've bought myself an XBOX 360 last week. After playing a couple of hours with PGR4 I connected the console to the Internet. The process was amazingly easy, I just plugged one edge the network cable to the console the other to the router, and ........ there we go, my XBOX 360 was happily downloading updates and videos from the Internet.

So far I've been playing PGR4, Orange Box (A total must have), GTA4, and ........ Kung Fu Panda, I'm sorry but this game is really fun.

Bye.

Limerick information

2009-01-17T20:34:00.003Z

If you ask an Irish about Limerick, you'll see that look..., that smile on the face. "You mean Stab City?" you'll hear. Limerick is known in Ireland as a city with high crime rates, lots of knackers, horses and some gang activities.

For some historical reasons unknown to me, there are two rival gangs developing all kind of underground activities. This gangs usually kill members of the rival one but, unfortunately, every so often Innocent people get caught in the middle, badly wounded or even killed.

My impression of the city is different, radically different. Once in the city ,quickly you get the feeling of a middle size one, with some big office buildings, lots of cars, and some big industrial areas. Certainly the city is not as nice as Galway is. But its size is also a good thing since the commercial offer is much bigger.

Then you discover the vibrant University of Limerick, its huge campus with its marvelous sports facilities. The offices of the company I work for are in the middle of the campus, in the International Science Center at the National Technology Park.

Also Limerick is a much more international city, somehow people is more open minded, though I'm not saying that people in Galway are not open minded, but here they are more.

In terms of weather, it seems to be a combination of continental weather, with colder winters and hotter summers than Galway, and a little bit less rainy. This last point is yet to be confirmed.

So far I'm happy here. There are two things that I really miss, Salthill's promenade, and the ability to go everywhere with my bike.

Bye.

Back to life

2009-01-13T19:41:00.002Z

After a couple of month of craziness and overwhelming stress, I´m back. Today he have had the Internet connexion installed at home, at my new home in Limerick, Ireland. You´ll hear from me soon, promise.

Byeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Don't forget you past

2008-10-26T01:25:00.002Z

A country that forget it's past is doomed to repeat it. These last days Spain is committed to break apart one of the most remarkable prisons of the dark time, and by dark time I mean Franco's rule: the Carabanchel Prison. Hundreds, if not thousands of innocents where kept inside those walls, just for the crime of thinking of a better society.

No doubt we all evolve, but I can't help looking at how Americans have San Quintin and other famous prison as reminders of past mistakes. Spain is tearing apart a symbol of disrespect, of past repression, of denying the right to be an independent thinker. May be this is a sign of what is yet to come........

Enjoy life, if you can............

From today on, I'm officially in Panic Mode

2008-10-25T00:29:00.002Z

No Microsoft, It wasn't you!!!

2008-10-24T23:33:00.003Z

It wasn't you who discovered the benefits of multi-tire applications, no, it wasn't you who discovered the wonders of using namespaces to logically organize what you call types, and the rest of the world call classes, interfaces, and so on.

These days of financial crisis I'm reading a book about ASP.NET. The book isn't bad at all, but is somehow Microsoft biased. Written by a bunch of MS MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) is not difficult to understand that the authors must keep the big brother happy. But sometimes is so much, that it feels like a comedy book. I'll give you some examples:

1.- Microsoft forget easily: This book criticize merciless the classic ASP model. Well, I still remember how they sold us this cutting edge, flawless technology. Not only classic ASP was a total crap, but now M$ have found the way to make our life easier: fully object oriented server side code, and compiled, Ohhhhhh thanks M$, Thanks for delivering what Java gave us almost 8 years ago, thanks anyway for the laugh.

2.- Microsoft have discovered that mixing presentation and logic isn't good: This is absolutely hilarious. Microsoft have discovered 2 years ago, a principle of Software Engineering that has been with us, software engineers, for almost 10 years now, if not more. It was about time lads!!!.

3.- The most amazing, namespaces: .Net organizes classes into logical units called namespaces!!!!!!!!!!!! WTF at this point I though maybe I was drinking poisoned water. How is this possible, even the most M$ biased programmers now that namespaces have been around for about 20 years now. Of course the horrible Win32 API don't now much about this, but this is no reason to say that one of the wonders of the .NET framework (which I think is a good thing) are namespaces. I will put this in another way, .NET without namespaces would be absolutely pointless.

Well, I could continue for hours, but I think it's enough for today. I hope you have laughed reading this as much as I'm reading that ASP.NET book.

Maybe I'll give the book's title in a future post.

Enjoy life lads!!!!

Alone in the crap, sorry, in the dark. The .. movie?

2008-10-20T22:22:00.006Z

I've just watched Alone in the dark, movie based on the homonym video game. The game was a classic in the era of ancient computers (spectrum and Friends), but the movie has nothing to make it worth the time, thus another 93 minutes of my precious life wasted.

The story is totally meaningless, well, this is shared with the video game. The acting is horrendous, totally dull characters. Christian Slater was good in The name of the rose, but is still using that lost puppy look, for every kind of feeling, which doesn´t work with terror o puzzlement, I´m sure you know what I mean. The music, ohhh the music. Music is meant to emphasize parts of a movie, making it more intense. Well in this movie music comes and goes, distracting and interrupting action, which may not be that bad. It´s used in the wrong place, and the selection doesn´t match the situations at all. Last, but not least, the special effects, well, umm, they really seem to have been created using the same kind of computers that made the videogame famous. If the designer of Alien is making money with the rights, this movie has given him enough for next Christmas presents. I presume they bought ONE kind of Alien monster, and used it once, and again, and again, .......

I like videogames and I like movies, but the combinations isn´t really working out. Games can be simple, because you are the main character, and that felling compensate the lack of depth or excessive simplicity, but in a movie you are only an spectator, and more have to be given to take you into the movie.

Bye.

No words, BRILLIANT

2008-10-18T22:04:00.001Z

McCain - Obama

Multithread programming

2008-10-16T11:55:00.015Z

Multi-threaded programs are a must in a world dominated by servers, GUI applications, multiprocessor computers and so on. The standard way of managing threads is by using POSIX threads. I've found and amazingly easy to follow article about POSIX threads. It's only recommendable for those of you who already have knowledge of the basic thread mechanisms and OS design:

Multi-Threaded Programming With POSIX Threads

Examples are written in plain old marvelous C, so it might be hard to understand for the Java, and C# crowd, but lads, this is real software!!! :)

Here you have a little example using threads, it's not rocket science, but makes the job:


#include 
#include 
#define LIMIT 100

/* prototype of the function that will be executed by a
thread. It's compulsory to return a void * and to receive
a void * as the only parameter */
void * do_loop(void * arg);


int main()
{
    /* The thread to be created */
    pthread_t MiThread;
    /* We will use these two as parameters to do_loop */
    int th1 = 1;
    int th2 = 2;
    /* Will get the return value of pthread_create(...) */
    int rc;
    printf("Starting application\n");
    /* Actual thread creation. Parameters:
       1st .- The thread to be initialized
       2nd .- Configuration parameters, NULL to use default
       3rd .- The function to be executed by the thread
       4th .- The parameter to be passed to do_loop
    */
    rc = pthread_create(&MiThread,NULL,do_loop,(void *)&th1);
    /* The main thread also executes the loop, to show us the intermixed
       execution of both threads */
    do_loop((void*)&th2);
    /* Just in case, the main thread waits for the auxiliary thread to
       finish */
    pthread_join(MiThread,NULL);
    system("PAUSE");
}

void * do_loop(void * arg)
{
     int i = 0;
     for (i = 0 ; i < LIMIT ; i++)
         printf("Hello Thread %d\n",*(int *)arg);
     return NULL;
}

By the way, there is a companion article that gives an introduction to parallel programming. Interesting for the newbie.

Parallel Programming - Basic Theory For The Unwary

Enjoy!

ASP.Net Datagrid control

2008-10-14T21:51:00.004Z

Hi lads,

Slowly but steadily I'm discovering the goods and bads of ASP.NET programming. On the one hand it's pretty simple to make a simple but rather functional web application, on the other hand the programming model, if any, it's really simplistic, and this is good, but also bad. On top of that there aren't billions of frameworks to use, in contrast to the Java world, that makes things easier, but also gives you less power. Other factors are the insane dependency on Microsoft, slave forever of IIS, that is definitely not good. Ahh, and don't forget you can program almost everything using very simple HTML and C#, this last one is becoming my favourite language, after god C++, of course.

Well, one very powerful web control provided by ASP.NET is the Datagrid control. It basically allows to show information in a table. This information must come to any source that implements the IEnumerable interface. All the dirty HTML code is automatically generated by ASP.NET, and this, for those of you who fought with the old classic ASP, is a blessing.

I have found a couple of good articles and web sites about the use of this Datagrid web control, I hope they are useful for you.

An extensive examination of the Datagrid web control.
Datagrid girl, just don't even ask me.
Techrepublic.com on Datagrid. Actually there are loads of articles in techrepublic.

Enjoy!!!!!!!

Mono 2.0 Use .NET out of Windows

2008-10-11T20:09:00.003Z

Since .NET assemblies compile down to CIL bytecode that's executed in a virtual machine under Windows, there's no reason, in principle, that they shouldn't be able to run under any platform. After all, Java's "write once, run anywhere" mantra has the same fundamental architecture: a VM running bytecode that taps into a series of standard APIs and classes.

Visit the Mono Project Official Release Notes.

U.S. takes North Korea off terror list

2008-10-11T20:04:00.002Z

Sounds like a joke. What a wonderful year! First the Olympic games in China, well known for it's respect for human rights, and now North Korea, one of the most open countries in Asia is taken off the terror list.

But these guys actually believe that we are stupid??? I hope Obama has a little more common sense.