Christophe Herreman

How about that for a Saturday morning. Although it was a very tough decision, I decided to go with the “No” option.

The recycle bin icon showed up as if there was some content in the recycle bin, but when I opened it there was nothing inside. Trying to empty the bin resulted in this confirm box. Various posts on forums, found via Google, suggested all different things (reboot, safe mode, show hidden files, …). The error disappeared when I right clicked the recycle bin and called up its properties. For some mysterious reason, the error was gone and the icon returned to its normal “empty” state.

Oh man, this is a dear diary moment !

Belgium’s biggest multimedia event is here again. This should be tons of fun as usual and an informative afternoon with speakers like Aral Balkan, Serge Jespers, Edwin Van Rijkom, yours truly and many more…

I’ll be talking about AS2lib, how we use it and how it is integrated in our own e-learning framework called Eduma-tic.

Later that day there will be an open-source Flash panel that will discuss some of the projects on osflash.org and the pros and cons of using open-source software.

Registration is free but required due to the limited spaces available. Check out the Multi-Mania website for more info.

See you there !

My sister passed away last week on March 9th. She had just turned 30. She and her husband were in the middle of a divorce and during a serious quarrel, he lost total control over himself and strangled her. She was killed in their bedroom, next to the room where their 6 year old boy was asleep. He never even noticed the fight and slept through the whole tragedy. Her husband tried to commit suicide but failed. He turned himself in and has been taken into custody. He is now being accused of manslaughter and is awaiting his trial while the whole case is being investigated.

This whole situation feels so unreal. I cannot describe how I felt when I was told the news. You can’t believe what you are hearing. This must be a bad dream. These are things that your see on television, hear on the radio and read in the newspaper but that never happen to you. Unfortunately it was bitter reality and we couldn’t turn back time. How could it ever come this far? Why didn’t they look for help by a third party? Why should verbal discussions end up in physical violence with sometimes death as a fatal result? Could we have done something to help them? Thousands of questions rage through your mind. Emotions have taken control and they keep you back from thinking clearly. You are even starting to feel guilty because you think you could have prevented this situation. All I wanted to do was lock myself up, be alone and let the whole thing pass over. I talked with several people about this. It helped me to express my emotions and to realize that life goes on no matter what happens. This is sad but true. There is nothing we can do to bring back my sister. We should focus on the future and take care of their son. He is now living with my mom and 2 brothers.

This might sound strange but I’m even worried about my brother in law. What made him do this? Was it really his intention to kill her? What will happen to him when he gets out of jail and has to start a new life all over? Will he be a better person after he has been locked behind bars for several years? These people need help seriously and should be taught about how to express themselves and talk about their emotions. Nobody can be born with a killer instinct. Society and how one is raised is what makes people how they are today. DARE to resist violence. I feel like a traitor to my sister thinking about him in this way, but that is just how I feel when thinking rationally. Of course, I cannot in any way take peace with what he has done. He has commited a crime and must be punished for it. I hope I will ever find a place in my heart to forgive him. Letting feelings of hate control yourself only makes things worse. You only damage yourself and you are another victim in the collatoral damage that has been caused by his deeds.

I first wasn’t going to blog this, but I wanted everybody to know that such tragedies could happen in your own family and circle of friends. Although you are never always able to prevent such deeds, be there for eachother and most important: communicate. Talk with people and let them know you care about them and that you want to listen to them. People give signals all the time. It is upto ourselves to learn to interpret them.

Sylvie, you are forever in our hearts and we will miss you very much. We’ll meet again, sometime.

I just installed the latest available Eclipse version (3.2 milestone 5) and couldn’t run my ANT builds anymore. The error I got in the alert box was “Could not find the main class. Program will exit”.

The problem was that the ANT_HOME variable was still pointing to the previous Eclipse folder and the solution was simply to change the path. This can be done through Window->Preferences->Ant->Runtime. Once there, click the “Ant home…” button in the “Classpath” tab and browse to the ANT plugin folder in your Eclipse installation. Now hit the OK button and try to run the build file again. Everything should work again.

A Dutch OSFlash mailinglist has just been set up. This should lift the English language barrier for some of the Dutch, Flemish and maybe some of the South African (I love their double negations !) flashers and make them join OSFlash. I wonder how many Dutch people are out there…

Subscribe here.