Download prohibition & Privacy

The whole debate concerning the legality of (unpayed) downloading and the legislation surrounding it, interests me a great deal. Coming from a career as a professional musician, and working in the tech industry now, I think I have a uniquely mixed perspective on the subject matter at hand. While I feel artists have the right to earn a decent income from the works they produce, I also think the entertainment industry as a whole should try to adapt to the technological advances happing right now. Ever since the Dutch government opted to criminalize downloading, I wanted to write an article about the implications of that particular idea. When one of the courses at the University required me to write an article concerning Security and/or Privacy, I decided to combine the ideas. The result is the article you can read below. It is written in Dutch, and has also been published on the Music Industry group on LinkedIn. You can find the original LaTeX typeset PDF document here.

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I got 93% on my OCJP exam, here is how I did it

This week I finally took the Oracle Certified Java Professional exam (formerly SCJP) that I planned a long time ago. During the first year at Uni I figured it wouldn't hurt to get some certificates during the course of my studies. I'm not really biased towards Java in any way, but that's the main language we got taught during my first year, and a few people told me that those Sun/Oracle certificates are actually worth something. Last month, after a couple of delays I finally managed to plan the exam for this week. The result exceeded my expectations: My score was 93%! Needless to say, I'm very happy with that. I approached studying for the exam in a very methodical way, so I thought it would be nice to do a write up on how I prepared and what materials I used.

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Burglar's Doom - An Arduino Project

Keeping my blog up-to-date, while being busy with Uni and work is harder than I anticipated. So when I can squeeze in a little moment to share some stuff here, I'm always happy when there's a long overdue subject waiting to be covered! Today, I'm gonna share the result of a litte project with you that I built a few months ago during one of the courses in my minor, Mobile Life. It's centered around the Arduino and I built it together with my classmate. Sadly, because University failed to order the right sensors, none of our original ideas came to fruition. Instead, we decided to put together a burglary alarm that notifies the victim through Twitter. It's called.... Burglar's Doom!

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Diem CMS: Seize it or leave it?

A long, long while ago, I promised some people - including myself - a decent review of the CMS I used to build this site. Of course, as it always goes, I got lost in some kind of time-sucking black hole called study-and-work. I still remember the article that made me choose Diem in the first place, though. His words, in an email conversation following that article he wrote: "My preference is that you try out Diem and write a review like mine with a live preview" As you can see, I did try out Diem (this site is built with it). In my first blogpost on this site, you can read in detail how the birth of this site came down. The only thing that's still missing, is that review, so I reckoned it was about time to correct that mistake.

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Mobile life: the consolidation of personal computing into a mobile future

This article was written as an assignment for my Computer Science studies at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. I wrote it together with Daniel van Dorp. Note that we're certainly no experts on the subject, so - aside from the information derived from the listed sources - most of this article is based on conjecture and speculations. Feel free to comment on both our ideas and our interpretation of sources.

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