Aug 232004
 

I think life is not all about dreams. Of course they are very important and everybody should have dreams and try to make them come true.

But life is about expectations too. Today I had a business conversation/interview that I thought would change where my life is heading. In a very positive way, naturally. Being full of expectations, the interview could only bring down those expectations. Every rational thing that was said felt like critique, every question felt like a sting, and after the conversation I could not help feeling disappointed, angry, powerless, frustrated and what more can a person feel at the same time.

It is a couple of hours later, I talked about the interview with some people. With my girlfriend. With family. With friends. And looking back at the interview, things went really well. They were interested in what I had to say, and they asked further instead of taking what I said for granted. Meaning that they saw me as an equal business partner, not as somebody telling what his dream is.

Looking at it that way, I am very proud of myself. I made them listen. My expectations were wrong, so they were not met, but the final outcome of the interview was good or perhaps very good. I like to look at it that way. Being proud is better then being disappointed, angry, powerless and frustrated, isn’t it?

 Posted by at 23:17
Aug 172004
 

If you need to testdrive Oracle 10g on Linux, you can now download installation-kits that install VMWare 4.5, Red Hat Linux or SuSE Linux and Oracle 10g and you are ready to go. You can read more about it on this page.
I think this initiative makes it very easy to testdrive Oracle on Linux, since VMWare allows you to run Linux without repartitioning your harddrive. I use it to have several installations, one for each client I have, so I don’t have to worry about policies from one interfering with policies from another client.

 Posted by at 12:04
Aug 162004
 

The Windows installer I mentioned works perfectly. And the result is a working PostgreSQL 8.0 (beta 1) installation. This is how installations should be done. Well done people.

 Posted by at 23:54
Aug 162004
 

If you play Doom 3 and you have an ATI graphics card, there is a possibility that you can increase the performance by downloading and installing the Catalyst 4.9 beta drivers, supplied by ATI themselves. Thanks Tim, for pointing to this page.

 Posted by at 08:45
Aug 142004
 

Yesterday I went to “The day after tomorrow”. Although the story is quit promising, and the effects are astonishing, the movie turns out to be another romantisized disaster-movie. Bummer. I had a good time, don’t get me wrong. You shouldn’t skip this movie, but if you wait for it to be for rent/sale on DVD, you’re not going to miss anything.

 Posted by at 23:55
Aug 132004
 

If you’re a student, or you want to do some non-commercial 3D modelling, or you want to evaluate the full (Maya Complete) commercial product, you can download Alias Maya Personal Learning Edition. Normally this version is one behind the “real” version, but I just saw on their website that both the real version and the PLE are version 6. It’s a 130MByte download, and you can read more about it on this page.

 Posted by at 00:25
Aug 112004
 

I was waiting for a decent Windows-installable version of PostgreSQL, and it was announced that 7.5 would have such a thing. There’s no 7.5 release, but an 8.0 beta! Still no native Windows installer, but there is one here.

The good thing is, that this release has/will have a native Windows server process, installable as a service. It has point-in-time recovery. It supports tablespaces, to ease diskspace-management/layout. It has savepoints, to fully control whether transactions fail partly or completely. You can change column datatypes now. And the list goes on. Read the full version here.

I’ll definitely check this one out later this week.

 Posted by at 09:49
Aug 112004
 

SP2 for Microsoft Windows XP is finally done and ready for you to download. It took some beta’s, leaks and other non-legitemate versions, but finally everybody can enjoy it 😉

SP2 (just like SP1) takes space on your harddisk. If you don’t like that, and you was planning to reinstall your Windows anyway, why not use AutoStreamer to create an ISO for you that already has SP2 (or SP1)? All you need is the original Windows CD, the downloaded SP2 and SlipStream does the rest.
You can also choose to do the integration “manually”.

Download the full SP2 here or turn on Auto-Update on your machine to automagically download the update(s).

 Posted by at 09:16