david's blog

Well, after a couple years offline, I am putting davidseth.net back on the map! Woohoo! Okay, this is likely to mean more to me then anyone else, but it is a big milestone.

I build web sites for a living and I haven't had my own for 2 years. A bit odd, but I guess not really. I do this stuff day after day so the last thing I usually think about is building "yet another site".

I was having trouble getting D2R server running on my machine. Now, I know this worked in the past with no problems, but that was a few months ago. I think my version of MS SQL 2005 Express has been updated since then, but I wasn't sure.

Anyway, I couldn't get the thing to run. I kept getting the following error message:

The connection to the named instance has failed. Error: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Receive timed out.

I was using the exact same configuration file as before so I was getting very frustrated.

map:database a d2rq:Database;

It is with trembling fingers, watery eyes and a heavy, heavy heart that I write this. A warm and gentle person I met at a conference earlier this year and had the pleasure to personally talk with has lost his three daughters due to a tragic house fire. Chimezie Ogbuji and his wife Roschelle have lost so much, I can not even fathom. I pray that they will be okay...

A charitable trust has been set up in the memory of the three girls.

I have been waiting for this for, let me see, one year... but finally they have released a .CRW codec for Vista. This allows me to use the RAW files that my 10d has been writing natively in Vista and the Photo Gallery app. Canon released a version for the CR2 format but I had thought they were just going to leave the older (but still wonderful) cameras out in the cold. I must add that Canon has always done a great job of driver support and had some of the earliest Vista drivers and support many older hardware as well.

I am here in Busan for the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2007). I arrived yesterday afternoon and my jaw still hasn't properly aligned itself with my head :) This place is amazing, the sheer size of it is mind boggling to me. I haven't seen such a scale of population, high rises, office buildings, factories. I am impressed. The population of Busan is 3.5 million, all packed into a relatively small section of land.