January 2007 - Posts

• The Venice Project changes name to Joost!

  Last week I blogged about the Venice Project. Well, I just got an email telling me they've changed their name to "Joost" and will soon be accepting more beta testers. Maybe I'll even get some more invitation tokens soon.. Posted Jan 16 2007, 09:26 AM by anders with 7 comment(s) Filed under: PVR, The Venice Project, Joost

• Slow day today

  I'm here at work trying to read up on the Service Factory guidance package I blogged about a couple of days ago. But everything is soo slow. The GotDotNet-site hardly works at all, all msdn articles load with like 10 bytes per minute and CodePlex is even more sluggish than usual. Good thing I'm only doing 4 hours today.. Can't wait to get home to Miranda..!   Posted Jan 15 2007, 11:51 AM by anders with no comments Filed under: Personal

• Tagged!

  Wow, that was quick! I got tagged by Joakim Sundén which means I'm supposed to tell you five things that you may not know about me. Well, luckily none of my friends actually read this blog so I should be able to tell you more or less anything and it'll all be news to you . So here goes: I was born and raised in Göteborg on the Swedish west coast but moved to Stockholm in 1995 to start my studies at KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology). I chose KTH over Chalmers for two main reasons; first of all they (at least at the time) had a Computer Science program that suited me better, but maybe more importantly I really liked the idea of getting a fresh start in a new city! My first computer was a Commodore 64, but even before that I used to play a lot with my best friend's VIC 20. I was never into computer games at all though. The only thing I was interested in was programming BASIC. Of course, that changed eventually, and now I enjoy my computer games as much as the next guy.. or probably quite a lot more than the next guy... A few months ago I made a deal with my girlfriend (Elisabeth). The deal was that she would start blogging (on our common blog "Pop") if I gave World of Warcraft a chance (she already had a couple of lvl 60 characters but to her dismay, I never wanted to play with her). Anyway, she made a couple of posts but haven't blogged since Miranda was born. I, however, got totally hooked on WoW and I even think she's starting to regret having made the deal in the first place. My master's thesis had the title "Natural Language-based Query Processing in a Limited Domain". It was an attempt to implement the basis of a search engine that could interpret full scentences and then give the expected answers. It was written using a combination of Java and Prolog and was actually quite a lot of fun to do! Since then, I haven't been close to the subject... Politically, I'd like to describe myself as Green Liberal. Since there is no such party here in Sweden and I'm more green than liberal, I recently joined the Green Party. I don't exactly agree with everything they say, but I really think they've made quite a bit of difference (in a good way) to the Swedish environmental policies the past 10 years. Now.. who do I tag, who do I tag.. I guess I'll go with; Meri Guso, Frank Kroondijk, Dag König, Rob Hornby and finally my brother, Thomas Ljusberg (I know, he doesn't have a blog but it's only a matter of time, trust me..!)   Posted Jan 13 2007, 07:04 PM by anders with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Personal

• The Venice Project

  A couple of weeks ago, my application for beta-testing The Venice Project finally came through and I was able to get my hand on the client. They call it "the future of television" and I have to say that so far I am very impressed with what I've seen. Don't get me wrong - at the moment, most of it kind of stinks.. The UI is fairly difficult to navigate; my MCE remote control only works for half of the things you want to do so I still need a mouse/keyboard. Everything is in 4:3-format so my widescreen TV isn't very happy. And seriously, who's interested in watching old black-and-white episodes of Lassie or a whole channel devoted to "Paris Hilton behind the scenes"-shows? But there is such a huge potential here! The quality is almost as good as can be expected (the resolution is OK and since the latest build the feed is pretty much free from stutter). I'm sure that the UI problems will be worked out and the lack of widescreen support seems to be more of an issue with content rather than the software. Finally, if someone is interested in beta testing this thing too, I have two invitation tokens to hand out. Just send me an email using the contact form! Update (2007-01-12): I'm now out of invitation tokens...  Posted Jan 11 2007, 10:17 AM by anders with 1 comment(s) Filed under: PVR, The Venice Project

• MSBuild script December CTP

  Time for a new release of the MSBuild script for Sandcastle, this time targeting the Sandcastle December CTP. Download it from the CodePlex site.  New in this version: Better support for Sandcastle December CTP A short FAQ Posted Jan 04 2007, 06:05 PM by anders with 6 comment(s) Filed under: MSBuild, Sandcastle

• Web Service Software Factory

  I know, I know.. I'm very late to this game, but I just looked through a webcast about the Web Service Software Factory and it really looks pretty interesting. I say this much because, well, the basic architecture that their recipes produce looks very similar to the one I started to implement almost a year ago. I even think that it might be possible to migrate our projects without too much hassle, so my next step will be to figure out if it's going to be worth it. Posted Jan 04 2007, 02:37 PM by anders with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .NET, SOA, Architecture