Today we released the 1.0 version of the Euro 2008 Webparts for SharePoint 2007 and 2003.

These webparts allow you to host a Euro 2008 game on your SharePoint portal. The game consists of 2 webparts (there is a version for SharePoint 2003 and 2007), which allow the participants to predict the results of all the matches of the Euro 2008 Championship. The webparts connect to a webservice hosted by Tam Tam where the results of the matches and the scores of the participants is managed.

Other features include:

• Overview of the next 10 matches.
• Overview of all Euro 2008 matches.
• A leaderboard of all users. The top 15 users with the highest points and the points of the current user.
• View the details of a participating country with all the matches.
• Multilingual. The web parts can be displayed in the following Languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Portugese and Spanish.
• The end results of matches are hosted and administered by Tam Tam. You do not have to do anything to update scores.
• All data stored on the Tam Tam servers is hashed.

Download the webparts from the Euro 2008 Webpart site.

Some screenshots:

Upcoming matches:

View a match and enter your prediction:

View country details:

[via: Coding Horror]

"If you are designing a piece of tech gear - be it hardware or software - and you need to choose an arbitrary limit or range for something, make sure the limit is either 2^n or 2^n - 1."

Source: Eric Gunnerson

The best new feature in iTunes 7 is the cover art browser, the not so good feature is the fact that it doesn't work so good on Windows Vista. So after moving back to Mediaplayer and missing the cover art, which takes forever to download for a decent sized library in iTunes. I put together this codesnippet, which lets downloads the cover art from the iTunes store for the specified artist/album.

The interesting part is the headers you have to send with your request:

request.Headers.Add("X-Apple-Tz", "7200");
request.Headers.Add("X-Apple-Store-Front", "143457");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Language", "en-us, en;q=0.50");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip, x-aes-cbc");
request.UserAgent = "iTunes/7.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4.7)";
request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip;

Also note that the HttpWebRequest class automatically decompresses the response.

Program.cs (3.44 KB)Program.txt (3.44 KB)

Note: this code is based on the perl library by Jesper Nøhr and works as long as Apple doesn't change anything.

Mart Muller: There is a lot of talk about AJAX lately. It's not new but there are a lot of cool things that you could do with it. Some guys at Tam Tam dove into it and gave a session about it last week. One of the "demo's" they've built is "Seamen - Massive Multiplayer Battleships". A cool AJAX example I do not want to keep away from you!

[note: it’s kinda slow right now, but that’s probably due to the hosting, it’s hosted from a home-adsl connection.]

[Alienware]

Most attempts to teach Japanese to foreigners start off with long lists of words to learn and endless drills practicing how to say things like "Suzuki-san, konnichi-wa." But with an appropriately nerdular mind, none of this is necessary. The nerd can simply study the formal Backus-Naur definition of the language, and then treat all the individual words to be learned the same way he would learn a long list of manifest constants #define'd in some C library. This article is a pioneering attempt to provide that Backus-Naur definition.

Japanese for nerds 

[via: Enjoy every sandwich]

They only arrived in their new houses in the past weekend and allready one was butchered for it's precious intestines.

"It's so sexy I want to take it to dinner"

iPod mini video review

Frank Arrigo invited me to join orkut, anybody know where the name came from?

I think it's a cool experiment in social computing, so we'll see where this will lead.

If you feel neglected, because I didn't add you as a friend let me know.

"The word 'Oil' is often misintepreted as 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' when written in Courier New 12."

[from: k10k.net]

Allthough I doubt Rory has a new haircut, I secured the Google searchresults.

Speaking of RSS for charity, Rory claimed his first victim and forces this girl to get some education.

Too bad they're $249,-, which makes them a bit expensive for only 4 gb of drivespace, compared to the 15gb version (but those are a lot bigger). When you compare them to other players in the same price range using Flash memory (Rio Chiba), they become a lot more competitive.

mini iPod and iPod specs compared.

Fabrice has a cool code sample, but I doubt I'll ever see something like it in production code.

Mmh, pies and cookies.

Jeff Key has a nice for-loop example.

I occasionally use something like this:

for( int i = 0, j = 10; i < 10 && j > 0; i++, j-- ){
//..
}

I'm a pragmatic programmer, what are you?

And Julia thinks Jeff Julian's desk looks bad. At least his desk doesn't have 8 books waiting to be read and a pile of garbage waiting to be sorted through. At least Rory's desk looks like a proper nerd bachelor™ 's desk.

"It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women (although it is more fun trying)."

More managment proverbs

via Brain.Save() and Alan Dean

I believe this is the first pic of Don's new haircut on the internet. (Don's on the left, being kissed by Chris Sells)

(source: Yosi Taguri )

Please, if your name is Stuart, help Stuart reach his ultimate goal.

update: the post on Stuart's blog seems to be gone.

update2: Stuart recreated his earlier post from memory and I fixed the link.