Another week past and another step closer to realizing my Widget. This week was all about deciding wich concept we were gonna focus on. When creating a Widget it’s important to seperate yourself from the pack. There’s litterlly thousands of Widgets available but only a few really stand out. One of the aspects we really focussed on during out brainstorm session was wich target audience has the largest reach. Rather soon we came to the conclusion that it was the ‘blogosphere‘. Nobody can deny the ‘power’ a blog can have and the level of interaction wich takes place there. It’s also a small step from a blog (we are talking about a personal blog here, not a coorporate blog) to social networks such as Hyves and Twitter. Some even claim they all fall under the aforementioned term. Another thing I noticed about these Widgets is that they is almost no interaction between the provider of the Widget and it’s readers. You could say “well that’s not the main goal of a Widget” but I think it can really help you with bonding with the readers if there is some kind of interaction, instead of just ‘reading’ the content of the Widget.

We are aiming to build a Widget wich depends on viral marketing. I can’t give out all the details here but bassiclly it’s a Widget to express yourself in a non textual way wherever you are and whenever you want. And it’s up to the readers to agree with your expression or not.

Interested? Keep checking back here.
Not interested? Cry me a river :”)

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This ain’t about to become a long blog post or nothing so calm down.
Y’all already know what it is ! Now CHUUCH ! Get those Laker flags out !

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Lakers breeze past Nuggets in four games

The Denver Nuggets finally gave the Los Angeles Lakers a good fight.

No surrender on this night. No frustration fouls filling up the fourth quarter of another blowout.

No matter. The Lakers dispatched the tempestuous Nuggets anyway.

Kobe Bryant scored 14 of his 31 points over the final 5½ minutes Monday night, leading the Lakers to a 107-101 victory and a sweep of their first-round series.

“He is unbelievable,” Luke Walton said of Bryant, his teammate and one of the MVP favorites. “It’s always so comforting knowing you have the best closer in basketball. They were making huge plays down the stretch, but Kobe came right back to do whatever it took: huge plays, steals or an incredible shot like that fadeaway over Kenyon Martin from the top of the key. He wanted it badly tonight and we followed his lead.”

Pau Gasol added 21 points in the Lakers’ first sweep of a playoff series since whitewashing New Jersey in the 2002 NBA Finals, the last time they won it all.

The Lakers will meet the winner of the Utah-Houston series, which the Jazz lead 3-1, in the Western Conference semifinals.

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“You get programmed by the programmers
That’s why you gettin locked up by the door slammers” 

You already know when Ice Cube goes into war mode, all hell is gonna break loose. After releasing a first appetizer off his upcoming solo album “Raw Footage” in the first single “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It”, along with the remix featuring Scarface and Nas, the West Coast War Lord is blasting out another album track called “It Takes A Nation”.

In times where every artist is worried about “finding the right single”, it’s truly refreshing to hear an artist like Ice Cube, in who’s music you can truly feel that it’s ginuine and coming from his heart.

“It Takes A Nation” is Ice Cube at his finest: raw, uncut and political. The beat, courtesy of Emile, is banging too, ya’ll need to turn this one up to really feel it’s energy. Cube calls himself “the only rapper that wants to fist fight the president” on the track, and it’s a good representation of what he’s offering us with his latest tracks. Check out “It Takes A Nation” on his official Myspace

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Well…my internship has ended. Wich was rated REALLY good, so thanks Wout & Evert
That doesn’t mean I have left Freshheads though. I have another 10, hopefully insightfull weeks here.
I have stared on my internship project this week. And the subject is…. *looks at the title* WIDGETS !
Yeah, Widgets, those little applications you see on the rightside when you start up Windows Vista or when you fire up Mac OS X.

There are two major categories of Widgets: web Widgets and desktop Widgets. Web Widgets run inside a web page and are also known as “modules” or “badges”. Web Widgets allow anyone to create their own website “mash-ups” by embedding content from one site into a page on another site. These types of Widgets are completely based on browser technologies — HTML, Flash, etc. And while they have been around in various forms for a while, the use of the term “Widget” to refer to these web page modules is relatively new. Widget has conventionally meant a desktop-based mini-application that shows discrete information, often connected to the Internet.

This first week was all about research. I was quite suprised that there was such a large Widget community. At the beginning of next week I hope that I can use a more targeted approach for my research.

I have already created my first Widgets with the use of the Yahoo! widget engine. It’s rather easy to pick up if you know HTML. Yahoo uses their own XML but with some logical thinking you can whip up a Widget without to much hassle.

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It was a busy period these last weeks. But really helpfull and informative.
I’ll start out with the presentation of Bas van den Beld gave last week. He concentrated on ‘planning’.

Bas works for Nettraject Now everybody knows that planning is an important (maybe THE most) aspect of any project or company for that matter. You can even say that it pays to plan everything. For example, when do we have weekly meettings? Or when is the right time to deliver a product. (I guess that’s why they invented agenda’s?)

Anyway, I allways thought that Freshheads where pretty good whenit came to planning a project from start to finish. But it seems there could be some improvement. (That sounds worse that it is, don’t worry guys )
I won’t really go into detail here but what stood out the most for me during the presentation is the fact that you really need to plan everything and not only a project. For example, we have a meetting every monday where we get together and discuss the projects Freshheads is working on. Those meettings last approximatly one hour. So that mean, on monday you’ll work an hour less then normal. The problem here was that the lost our was still counted as a full working hour. So every month you’ll miss about 4 hours you’ve coulda spent on a project. In the end, that can get you into some trouble. Especially when working with deadlines.
What I’m trying to say here is that you need to plan these meetings so that everybody knows they have a hour less every monday. And take that into account when planning a project.

Another thing what is very important is the fact that you need to plan ‘bug-fixing’. For example, when a client gets the finsished product and the bill has been payed often the client comes back and has some ‘minor-adjustments’ he wants to see implemented. The time you spend on those bug fixes need to be planned aswell. Bas said you can take 60% of the total time you spend on a project and add that to the total time. That way you have some more time to solve any kind of bugfixes or other problems that might occur.

It might sound really logical and all, but I think it was extremelly helpfull for a guy like Bas to come to Freshheads to give some advice and tips on planning.

On another note, we finally put klusgames.nl up for everybody to see (and play!) So go out there and play the game and you might win some nice prizes. Although it seems the second price has more value to me then the first one.

Security was kind of the central topic this last week. It’s important to make your application so secure as possible. Not only to protect your own data, but also the data of your customers/clients. There are some shady people on the web and you never know who might be looking. Especially when working with MySql it’s important to ’sanitize’ any input you might wanna use on your website or in your database. I really feel that Avans didn’t discuss this subject propper during our second and third year PHP backend development. Because we really didn’t learn to sanitize our input. Now I understand that security in PHP/MySql wasn’t the main subject here but atleast they’ve coulda gave some tips.

One week left until my internship will officially end. I am curious on how they will grade/rate me allthough I think it will be quite positive considering our ‘pre-evaluation’ with Norbert went really well…

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No blog entry last week. Why?
I was busy. But I’m baaaack.

The past two weeks seem like a whole new experience to me. For the first time since my internship I actually see progress in developing my programming skills. Usually I hear other people say that I am improving. (Not that I don’t belive them though) Maybe because I didn’t really took the time to reflect on my technical skills I didn’t notice this improvement.

For example, I started working on a project for E-10 communication. Because I had to start this project from scratch I really felt responsible to complete this project as best as I could. As the days went allong I noticed that I hardly asked for help. I just did what had to be done and I completed this whole project on my own. And I must say it feels good to start and complete a project entirely on my own. It was also a good opportunity to work on my communication skills. I kept in touch with E-10 the whole time and gave him updates on the project. He would get back at me with some adjustments he wanted to implement. We would then look what the best solution was to get the desired result.

Also worked on gettin to know the Zend Framework some more. I have now made a small application wich functions as a place to store your cd collection. Think Ant Movie catalog, but this time it’s for music CD’s. It’s really amazing to see howfast you can get an application up and running with the framework. I’m starting to like it more and more. And since I’m an avid movie collector I might make my own Ant Movie catalog. Who knows.

FEM was another minor project I worked on last week. They needed a news and Rss reader for their website. Now sure, you might think it’s not a big deal. Just a small news reader wich is fairly simple to make. Well my thoughts exactlly. Untill I got an email containing a 30+ page document with all the code conventions. I am not new to code conventions. Since Kerim showed during me during our cuizine.tv project it can be really helpfull when creating any sort of application. But a 30+ page document for a Rss and news reader, are you kidding me? Seriously, you could whip up that news reader within 5 minutes using a couple of table’s here and there, and some spacer.gif’s to add a final touch.
But this time, that was not the case. We had to use all the latest web-standards and whatnot.

In the end it was all worth it. Hearing wout say:

“you’ve made yourself immortal”

Oh PS: I lost ALL my matches playing pool last week. Wow!
I better step my game up. Gijs better watch out because I’m taking over the crown.

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Son Ye Jin (A Moment To Remember, April Snow) masters the art of seduction in Open City, an erotic crime thriller penned and directed by Lee Sang Ki in his first feature film. The chameleon actress is enchantingly breathtaking as the sexy, manipulative femme fatale who leads an organized pickpocket ring. The first Korean film to reveal the intricate inner workings of what is considered Korea’s equivalent of the FBI.

The Limited DVD edition is now availiable for pre-order at yesasia.com for only € 19.45 (excl. shippingcosts)
Order it sukkaz ! What do y’all know bout a DVD like this?
Really though…

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Currently in the studio, putting the final touches on “Raw Footage“, Cube is also gearing up for his own headlining concert at this year’s South by Southwest (SxSW) festival in Austin, TX on March 15th at 8pm CST/9pm EST. Performing for an expected crowd of 20,000 plus fans, Cube will carry out crowd pleasing, classic material along with current hits, which includes the controversial, breakout record, “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It” featured on his forthcoming new album.

For those not able to attend the free event, Cube has partnered up with Microsoft Corp. to live stream the performance exclusively on UVNTV.com utilizing their groundbreaking, Silverlight technology, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer user experiences on the Web. Co-created by Cube and hip hop legend DJ Pooh, UVNTV is the world’s first real-time streaming television network online, complete with individual channels broadcasting unique content, a TV channel guide and broadband social network.

“We are excited to partner with UVNTV.com and SxSW to bring this live concert into the homes of people globally, using our Silverlight technology which delivers the high-def experiences that Ice Cube’s fans will love,” said Rob Pulciani, Microsoft’s senior marketing manager. To download Silverlight and watch Cube perform live at SxSW, visit UVNTV.com. For more information on obtaining tickets to the concert, visit sxsw.com.

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