Saturday, December 03, 2005

Misterious Flame ...

I just ended reading Umberto Eco's latest novel "The Misterious Flame of Queen Loana". Another experience of reading. Exploration of the impotance of our memory . Touching the
most important questions of life ... The unexpected second part of the book. Near-death experience. And the last thought: What about Lila Saba .... ?

Irish ....

I'm reading Thomas Cahill's book "How the Irish Saved Civilization". It is amaizing readining. I came to a thought that we do not know much about history. I was thinking of myself as quite literetate in history, as the educated, but not historian, could be. Butin Cahill's book I found facts I was not aware off. The distinctive culture of Irish people. Their bloodless attitude to misionary activity. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in history....

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Cryptography & XML

Probably it is good thing to announce now ( to mobilizie myself!!!!) ... I write two books ... Based on my lectures on cryptography and on XML technologies the two texts grow slowly but steady almost every week. As for cryptography one, I devided it in two parts. The first is about cryptology history (I would not dare to write it if I had not chance to read the monumental Kahn's "The CodeBreakers") the second is about modern cryptographic techniques described in almost-non-mathematical way. The intended audience of the books are my current and future students of The Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz. I can not afford two much of math there :-(.
The XML book covers XML basics and some selected XML technologies. Both are (unfortunately) so far in Polish. However, the fact is that all informal notes I make while preparing the material is in English, so maybe one day .... :-)

.NET in my technology lectures

This semester, while lecturing on e-commerce technologies I added a bit more than usually of C# and ASP.NET technologies. The material, in Polish is at http://e-handel.mm.com.pl/dotnet. Although not complete, I'm quite happy I managed to write it in quite difficult time for me.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Life goes ....

I'm indeed bad blogger. Seems I'm not in the blogging mood... Or maybe not. Anyway, I have my debut on Flickr. See http://flickr.com/photos/sopek/ where I have some NOT business NOR science related pictures....

Friday, February 11, 2005

What really is RDF. Student's answer ....

When we spot something extraordinary stupid in a student's exam answer, we call it "a humor of students' exercise books" and we publish it (of course without student's name).
The thing I found in the answer to an exam question to the course on XML techniques, made me laughing for an hour or so.
The questions was "What is RDF? Describe its current use by publishing media".
The answer was: "The RDF is something used by media to adjust car receiver frequency to the radio station and display it on the radio display"

Wow - it is really good answer. Particularly as for XML technologies student :-)

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Lexus and the Olive Tree

I'm happy to read (rather listen to :-) thanks to www.audible.com) Thomas L. Friedman's amazing book "Lexus and the Olive Tree". A must for almost everybody living actively now, particularly for Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and all of us who came out of the shadows and behind the walls of the past....

Not so good blogger

Seems I'm not that good blogger, I imagined I could be. Hard work at my company takes its price. So nothing new about ASPexplore, as for now.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

ASPexplore offline apps and RSS/RDF feeds

I have tried an interesting and very, very simple thing. Using ASPexplore I wrote a little app that goes (using XMLHTTP) to some indicated place on the web where I have an RSS feeds - and displays them (XSLT transformed) right on the desktop. I was inspired by Juicy Studio examples. Nothing special, one would say, but it is just beautiful to see these little things working right. In this case it is this little app that can be build using ASPexplore in 15 minutes and display things beautifully.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

RDF lecture

I didn't write here about but I lecture at The Academy of Humanities and Economics in Lodz. This semester (just ends) was all about XML and related technologies. So far my lectures are not ready for publishing. Tomorrow morning I will be talking about RDF, Semantic Web and Ontolgies. Nice themes. When younger, I was crazy about philosophy, and partially still am I. :-)

New version

On Thursday and part of Friday I tested our flagship business product, MegaSale with latest version of our engine - ASPexplore 1.1.19.1. The results are very promising - I did not report any problem that could be attributed to the new methods of handling temporary files, managing the size of ASPTEMP folders etc.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

FireFox & ASP.NET

We had a strange experience today. One of our business projects done in ASP.NET refused to display correct GUI using FireFox. I'm however, not sure if it is not a problem of ASP.NET. The promise was the client side HTML will not depend on the browser engine. Apparently it does.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

FireFox - an alteranative rendering engine for ASPexplore

We shortly discussed today the possibility to use some Mozilla rendering engines in future versions of ASPexplore. To soon to have a definite conclusion if it would act better or worse that IE.

Monday, January 17, 2005

ASPExplore article

Well, I probably should explain the context of my technological thinking first. But, as a busy man, I have not enough time to do so. At least at once. Future posts will explain more. So well, let me refer you to my article that will apear in March edition of "Software 2.0" magazine (http://www.software.com.pl/main/en/). My text of the article can be find here. It is all about ASPExplore, the tool that realizes my idea of writting modern software. I just finished the article a day before, so it is fresh :-)

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Welcome

Welcome all to my blog. Well, as I wrote in the description, for years I did not appreciate blogs. I found them as an expression of exhibitionism. Well, everything changed after David Weinberger's (http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/)

Macrospherology of humans. Globes - volume two of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres

I have been reading the second volume of Sloterdijk's magnum opus for a couple of months now. I still haven't found the time for a f...