Blogging my thesis - second edtition

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the second edition of "Blogging my thesis".

This time, I'm doing a cloud version of the Sage Notebook. I'm doing the front-end in ASP.NET MVC 3 with C# and Razor, the back-end in Python and an SQL Server database in-between.

Since a screenshot is worth around 1024 words, here's a little preview:


The good news is that it's cool and I'm learning a lot while writing it (like MVC or jQuery).

The bad news is that it's due on September the 30th. I wished to have it finished by the beginning of next month, but I'm afraid it will take too much work.

Well, however it turns out, it's cool.

New direction in programming

I had lots of fun learning Silverlight at work, but fun doesn't last forever. I finished the website and joined a big project in asp.net. It's not as easy as Silverlight was, but that's a great thing. Silverlight alone is not much more than a Flash replacement (a good one imho, but still), it's the .net framework that gives it its power.

So I'm not learning Java anymore. I finished the school assignements I had in Java and have no intention of going further in that direction (but let's wait for the semester to begin and see what school brings). I'm learning asp.net.

Does that mean my Silverlight blogging is over? I hope not, but now I will only have my free time for that. And if you know me or have read the colorful paragraph on the right, you know how little free time I have and how much stuff I try to fit in it. Still, I love Silverlight and will do my best.

Sometimes it's better not to have goals in life.

Dear readers, as much as love motivating stuff (I mean stuff that motivates and not trying to motivate stuff), I will be demotivating you today.

I had a great vacation in Spain. Then I had a few exams at school. Then I went to work for a few days. Basically, I never had any free time to allocate during these days. So I started thinking it was time to set some goals in life, plan some activities for the free time, stuff like that.

I do have a few blurry goals, but I need to figure out the importance hierarchy first. These include blogging, writing about Silverlight, learning asp.net, meeting friends, sewing,... well, lots of random stuff.

And then my laptop crashed. Crashed big time - the hard drive is dammaged and is being low-level formatted at this moment and I'll see if I need to buy a new one. No documents lost, but the systems and applications all need to be reinstalled - that's like two days of work, plus one trying to recover the inconsistent ntfs.

Who likes to have three days wasted? Well, I'm really surprised how little I minded it when I found out. What can I say? I had no plans to cancel. Isn't it a good thing sometimes?