Sjoerd Visscher's weblog
Last Update
10/16/2005; 1:30:44 AM
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Musical Baton
Total volume of music files on my computer
Yahoo! Music Engine says “132 Songs, 9 hrs, 25 min, 03 sec, 553MB”.
The last CD I bought was
That's quite a while ago, I don't remember which one was last exactly. Let's say Kid A - Radiohead.
Song playing right now
Well, I was watching TV, but if I want to hear music I usually listen to my LAUNCHcast radio station, so I started that. I got A Stranger - A Perfect Circle, a very nice song that I had never heard before, which is exactly why I like LAUNCHcast so much.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
There are no songs I listen to a lot, that would ruin them. I can't imagine how impressive Bohemian Rhapsody would have been if I could hear it now for the first time.
Five people I'm passing the baton to
There are five Q42 collegues who have weblogs (as far as I know): Laurens, Lukas, Chris, Anne (who passed me the baton) and (soon a colleage) Mark (already batoned).
Monday, May 16, 2005
About my name
If you let an english computerized narrator pronounce my first name, it sounds like sdzowurd, which is completely wrong. It's not really hard, the “sjoe” part sound just like shoe. The “r” should be a trilling r, but you hardly hear that. If you let the narrator say shoerd it sounds quite right.
Sjoerd is actually a Frisian name (not Dutch), but I have no roots there. My parents just liked the name. A while ago I found its etymology on this dutch site, it means victory guardian. Since then I use the name “Sigward” as nickname when playing games (which would be the Old German form of my name). Today I found names which mean the same and sort of sound the same too in other languages. In English there is Seward which is derived from Siward (from Macbeth). In Norwegian there is Sjurd which is derived from Sigurd, the name of two Norwegian kings.
My last name, you might have guessed, means (and sounds like) fisher (fisherman).
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Sets in Javascript
Laurens created a nice hack in Javascript, that allows you to write:
var typeInSet = nodeType in set(2, 3, 4, 7, 8);
I have never even used the in operator in Javascript for anything else than loops like for (prop in obj).
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Cross browser SVG
Firefox 1.0+ builds now have SVG enabled by default. To test it out I changed an SVG animation I created 2 years ago. It is a 3D animation of a cube morphing into an icosahedron. It works in Firefox 1.0+ and in Internet Explorer with the Adobe SVG Plugin. Sadly Opera 8, which has some SVG support, shows nothing at all.
