Changing pedals on your bike.
So there are a lot of tutorials/videos on the web how to change your bike pedals. From old experience I learned the hard way that there is something special about this 'simple' operation.

The best video tutorial I found was

• http://bicycletutor.com/replace-pedals/
  Note the easy way of positioning the bike You don't need a fancy bike stand.
  

They stress out that the left-pedal removal is a regular loosing, and that the right pedal is counter threaded and must be loosened the reverse way. (as if you were tightening a bolt).


Bad tutorials:

• http://www.trails.com/how_127_change-bicycle-pedals.html
  (no clear mentioning between the difference of left and right)
  

• http://www.ehow.com/video_4468306_remove-bicycle-pedals.htm
  (pretty simple? but why don't you mention the difference between left and right)
  

Lot of people probably read that it was difficult to download the new Radiohead album. Site slow, long download ... Well maybe that was true on the day of the release, but it just took me a few seconds to go through the whole process. As you can see in the screenshot I had a download speed of 300 KB/s. So even that is no excuse to use bittorrent.

If only we did not have to go through that registration process. I really don't need fan mail. I'm 100% capable of finding the information on the web myself. No push technology (by sending emails) is necessary.

Anyway, I'm a happy customer and listening to their new album. Hope other bands will follow.

Add a web reference to an eclipse project

Who would have thought that the WSDL eclipse plugin has exceeded a total of 34.000 downloads!

I've been the admin of this sourceforge project, but have not looked at this code since 2003.

Interestingly around 2006 we reached an all time high of almost 2000 downloads in a month. That was after the project has been inactive for 3 years. Also surprisingly is the number of enhancement requests (less than 5) and other developers participation. I think in total I received less than 5 emails from other developers.

See the stats here

We are in the final stages of testing our 1.5 release of the Rule Manager. One important part is the click-once deployment. Our new release is requiring the .NET 3.0 framework. The previous version required the .NET 2.0 framework.

For internal testing I had some troubles with IIS. I did had the mime types configured:

• You need to add the following Mime Types
  
  .application (application/octet-stream)
  .manifest (application/x-ms-application)
  .deploy (application/x-ms-application)

But you also have to make sure that the Executable permissions are on 'Script Only' (and not including executable). Else you get some strange issues when the setup.exe is invoked from the Install button.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | US 'opposes' G8 climate proposals

Maybe it's time for all countries in the world to stop supporting USA economically, military and politically. USA is a pretty bad team player on this little earth.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | US 'opposes' G8 climate proposals

Good to know that history has shown that empires come and go.
It's really time that they leave the stage.

The true ambition of a software engineer: Get your mark on the
Hello World - world map of eternal fame!

Windows Live WebMail

I have a Yahoo email account, Windows Live email account, and a Gmail account. Windows Live Web Email client recently has change it's web functionality.

Yahoo's and Google's web mail is still far superior than the new Windows Live. And that is just for one reason:

1. They don't have these annoying big banner ads when you access your email.

Banner ads are very distracting. And Google has proven that you don't need these things to make good revenue on advertisements. Maybe they should hire Jacob Nielson for some web usability studies.