Le Chatelier's Principle for complex systems and the Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem

Ehh... what...?

As (nearly) always the blog entries by Raymond Chen are very good; his latest one is about a number of books he has on his "to read" list. That's a concept I'm very familiar with by the way...

Two principles he mentions (especially the second one) seem to exactly coincide with one of my views of this world: When you start to think about it, it is actually amazing how much is happening without problem:

The most important lessons I learned are a reinterpretation of Le Chatelier's Principle for complex systems ("Every complex system resists its proper functioning") and the Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem ("Every complex system is operating in an error mode").

At least it's clear that - apart from Expert F# which I started reading yesterday - I still have lot left to read...

(Originally posted in Dutch on the 17th of april 2008.)

Cool: My article got translated and expanded upon!

It happened almost a year ago already, but Peter de Jonghe seems to have translated my article on BlobStreams to English and expanded the subject matter a bit to generalize the method to more than just SQL Server image blobs. Cool! (Originally posted in june 2008.)

Do you like 'casts? I don't...

Please check out my comment on Stack Overflow on 'casts. Is the increasing number of 'casts based on people generally loving to consume information in that format? Or is it just that it's less hassle for the publisher to just hit "record", start yapping and dump the bits somewhere afterwards? Do you like the "personal broadcasting" way (or as I call it "lazy blogging" way) of supplying content on the interwebs like this? Or do you share my view on them and think it wastes your time, hampers you and makes the information content generally less available/useable? What do you think? (Originally posted in july of 2008, but I still think this way.)

Ancient hardware/software...

Someone has written a description on how to enable printing from HP calculators. The hardware device (a small battery operated IR connected thermal printer) that HP made for this seems to have been terminated a long time ago, but I did write an MS-DOS application more than 10 years ago to emulate it. Apparently that piece of software is still the best way of getting hardcopy output from a HP calculator at this time (taking trouble to run it in an MS-DOS emulator, as it does not seem to run in XP+). Maybe I should try to find if I have the source code of it somewhere (or just use the printer code information on my own site to work from scratch) and construct an up to date application written in .NET to emulate the printer under Windows...? What do you think? (Originally posted in july 2008 and apparently my ancient MS-DOS only emulator is currently still the best bet for printing anything from HP48 or HP28 calculators if you don't have the actual hardware!)

What's with the "repost" tag?

I have just started this weblog and will (also) be posting some things I have posted elsewhere before. These items will have links back to the original location and a repost tag. Just so you know.

Oh no, yet another blog? Yes...

Welcome, everyone! I have been blogging at various locations for quite a while now, but that was all kind of haphazardly (for lack of a better word). Personal stuff, programming related stuff, English, Dutch, and all that intermingled. From now on this should be a thing of the past! My weblog at Microsoft Live will remain a personal blog (with most or all of it in Dutch) and this new weblog should contain more work related ramblings in English. This can be .NET related, programming in general, experiences with devices, conference news and notes, etc. I will look through other blog locations for potentially interesting info from my past and crosspost that here. So expect some potentially dusty items to appear here first.