Bastiaan en Lily's blog

After the overwhelming uprising against SOPA/PIPA only a week or so ago on the 31st of January 2012 a judge in the Netherlands ruled in favour of Stichting Brein (the dutch MPAA) and ordered these ISP to start blocking 3 IP addresses belonging to the Pirate Bay. The ruling included a provision for Stichting Brein to expand on the list of IP addresses as they see fit, they do not first need to take action in court but have been pretty much given a carte blanche.

Its been awhile since I looked at my own site. i need better blogging software that lets me know when there are reactions.. Openblog seems to be pretty dead:(

So sorry if I haven't reacted to your posts, I'll add a few reactions here as it seems that the comment system has a few issues as well..

I forgot to put this on ages ago. The file for part 5 of the tutorial contains the end result. I made this so long ago I'm crossing my fingers that is still works:) but back by popular demand:

www.basenlily.me/downloads/part_5.zip

Damn, it has been so long since I wrote anything here. Live has just been to busy and I hardly find the spare time to write anything. I am attempting to find the time to learn Ruby so who knows, that might be a reason to revamp this site.

Today was an adventure though, the Dutch festival was on, a yearly get together for Dutch migrants here in Sydney with traditional Dutch food and Dutch entertainment. The festival itself is a 3 day event and today was the last day. The festival was a lot of fun, getting to the festival proved an adventure...

I'm running ahead of myself here but since I haven't posted anything here for awhile now but our site address is going to be amended with BasenLily.me.

I've been way to busy lately to do any personal posts however today there was a topic on the Omnis discussion list about subwindows and communication between them and their parent windows that made me want to write a little something about it. The topic has come up many times in the past and since it is something I've done a lot with it seemed like a good idea to do a little sample library and add some explanation.

Subwindows are basically windows that are contained within another window. They are Omnis Studio's answer to be able to reuse visual components in multiple places in your application. This can be anything from a subwindow containing a single component/field to a subwindow that allows you to enter an entire record consisting of a dozen entry fields.

The problem herein is how to properly communicate between the subwindow and its parent window.
Object Orientation states that any object should not assume or directly influence another object that contains/uses it. That is the only way to guarantee an object can be reused in multiple places without any restrictions in the behavior of the object that uses it. A subwindow and it's parent however always have a symbiotic relationship in one form or another and some measure of communication between them is required. The parent window communicating with the subwindow is easy as this is simply done through public methods, but the subwindow (as it interacts directly with the user) communicating back to the parent, now their lies the problem.

Yet again it's proved what a weird and wonderful place the internet is. We're not sure yet what happened but it seemed that someone installed some malicous tunneling software on our server, god only knows what sortah trouble these guys where up to.

We had to shut some parts of the server down in order to clean up the mess and change some things hopefully to prevent a repeat. Unfortunately that meant my site and some others where down for a while.

Looks like we're back up :)

Couple of days late but I still want to wish everyone a Happy Newyear! We've had a busy couple of days and I have many more busy days ahead of me... Hope to have time for my little blog again soon...

Last weekend we were walking around the Lane Cove Plaza and there was a little fair going on. One of the expositions was Chris Tudor's Christmas photoshoot stand. We had him take a few pictures of Blake and talked to him that we've wanted to do a small family photoshoot for a little while. From one thing came another and on Monday we were at his home taking pictures which turned out to be a very pleasant experience.

Whow, this was a hefty week on the subject of Dutch Tax. My heart sank to an absolute low in the middle of the week but the end result seems to be a positive conclusion after all.

I'm sure one could write a book on ATM interfaces and how bad they are. I'm not going to do that though the realization as an IT person is that I rather have people who haven't got an inkling of proper interfaces but are geniusses on safeguarding electronic money transfers writing the ATM software then the other way around :)

I'm just going to rant a few lines on a very simple thing that not only applies to ATMs but to many other scenarios as well..

Well at least we got one step further in this ordeal. Called the tax department again last night. They hadn't received my letters, atleast according to what the guy could see though I would have expected the first one to have arrived at least. They probably ended up at the wrong persons desk. Alas.

The good news though is that my initial phonecall has bore fruit so my well meant thanks go out to the lovely lady that helped me that night/morning.

I haven't blogged in a while not for lack of wanting but because I've simply been way to busy. Having two kids sounds like a good excuse but the reality in that is that I rather spend time with my kids then sit behind a dumb computer. Still it is indeed exhausting and there have been days that both myself and Lily are ready to pull our hair out. In that my hat is off to Lily, the amount of energy required to take care of our kids day in day out, I doubt I would do as good a job if I was in her shoes.

Work has kept me equally busy, Daniel went on his much deserved retirement a week or two back so it's been full hands on deck. Still we're doing some amazing stuff so I'm having the greatest time.

Unfortunately though, it isn't wanting to blog and give an update on how the family is doing that draws me back. It is pure frustration with the Dutch Tax System.
The rest of this blog post will therefor be in Dutch.

Finally I've got a little bit of time to write a family related post. I need to find some time to continue with my object posts but I'm sure I will soon.

The past few weeks have been pretty busy; Linsey getting fever for a couple of days due to some virus doing the rounds here and me not feeling honky dory as a result either didn't help much. Blake's been a real trooper so far without a sign of getting ill and is starting to sleep better and better; for a moment we thought Lily was getting sick as well but a good nights rest seems to have cured that. So it was time to treat the family to a much deserved outing..

I've been way to busy to mind my blog the past few weeks. Things are finally starting to settle down and we're getting back into a pattern. I'm even finding some time for hobbies, though marginally and at the cost of much needed sleep:)

My internal clock is really messed up, I feel like I've been a new father for over a month now but its only been just over two weeks. Mind you, I went back to work last week already, I had taken some time off before Blake was born, and I'm taking some more time off later in the month. Anyway that may alter my perception of time.

It's hard to figure out whether its between my ears but it feels like these past few weeks have been alot more tiring then when we had Linsey. Maybe its because we now have two children or maybe there is just to much going living in a different country and having just moved and all, I never really was very good with change. Happily though it looks like Lily is having less difficulty then last time.

Mind you, the above said, I couldn't be a more proud father and I wouldn't give this up for the world.

In the news today, we finally have a phone line, also have internet again, but the most smashing news of the day (well actually yesterday), our son was born!!

Well, loosing the recent content of our site was a bit of a downer, it also means that the latest updates of what has been going on have all disappeared. I'm not going to rewrite it all but just to bring those who are interested back up to speed...

Well, it's database management 101 and we advise it to all our clients, MAKE A BACKUP BEFORE YOU UPGRADE!!

Offcourse I did not and offcourse my latest backup was a month old. Brrrrr. Anyways, I've upgraded to Openblog 1.2.1 which hopefully will stop spammers in their tracks.

Unfortunately I've lost one of my latest Omnis tutorial blog posts (if someone has it archived somewhere...) and the latest posts about our situation here in Sydney. Awell, c'est la vie!!

Owh we've also moved house :D

Yup, i went out to the store today to buy DVD player #4 of this year today. We bought a cheap DVD player at Aldi when we just moved to Sydney because our DVD player from Holland hadn''t arrived yet. That DVD player desided to blow its amplifyer probably because the only way to get some resonable sound out of it was running it on its max setting. I had off course lost the reciept and since my old trusty DVD player had been sitting in a corner ever since it had arrived from Holland, I decided to use that instead. About a month back, after 4 trusty years of operation and abuse, it also decided it had enough.

So everything being closed I just ran into the local Coles, they had this cheap 50 dollar DVD player (it would be discounted to 29 a few weeks afterwards grrrr) so I thought I would give that a go. My trusty playstation only plays region 2 DVDs and my WII off course doesnt come with a DVD player software at all (go Nintendo!). This player from Coles turned out to be a region 4 player so I''ve been switching back and forth between the playstation and the MTV (yeah MTV!) DVD player.

Last week we decided to finally get a STB for free arial digital (not really worth the 29 bucks I paid for it but they are pulling the plug on the analog system soon). Plugging it in seems to have caused a small surge and blew the internal fuse on the MTV Player.. Hurray!

I had enough of this cheap stuff and went out to get a proper DVD player at Dick Smith today. I wasn''t ready to get a blue ray yet (we don''t have a capable TV anyways) but I did want to get a good DVD player and found a really nicely specced LG one. After making sure with the sales guy it was region free as I''m tired of switching we went home.. Its a good player, I''ve got Wall-E running on it now and I must say, sweeet! It is however, Region 4.... BLAST!

I''ll try and see if photobucket.com does the trick for now. I don''t like relying on free services like this but until I add something to the blog to do this ourselves..

It looks like photobucket doesn''t remember the orientation so I''ll add more pictures after I change them :)

Still working on supporting pictures correctly, will make a post soon with some cool pictures we made over the past weeks.

For now though, a little rant about our current housing situation. Yeah we''re moving again... For the first time in my life I am not moving by choice but out of circumstance...

As you can see I''ve started to use some new blog software. Some things won''t work right for a little while but it is all in the name of progress:)