Kristof Rennen’s Blog

The european communtity of fitness clubs, is working on a large “Fitness Level Study”.
During a period a 5 weeks, they want to confirm that frequent training leads to significant improvement in health and well-being.

The research is done by license holding fitness clubs and health centers. Persons taking the tests, are being accompanied by professional instructors.

The fitness level will be estimated using following factors:

• BMI
• Blood Pressure
• Body Fat Percentage
• General Condition
• Muscles
• Flexibility
• Coordination
• Nourishment

When I read the poster in my fitness center, I immediately was interested in participating.
But since I’m already a frequent sporter, doing almost 8h of physical workouts a week, I think its best not to loose my time with this and just continue the same way I’m working out now.

For more information, you can visit http://www.hoefitisbelgie.be/. The site is in dutch.

Kristof Rennen Fitness Fitness, Fitopia, Health, Research, Shape, Workout

Two weeks ago I visited the Pre-Conference of the Microsoft TechDays 2009 in Antwerp.

The last session of the day I visited was given by Miha Kralj, one of the only senior Architects at Microsoft.
Hi talk was about “How IT will change in the next decade”. The presentation was great, covering various topics which have changed over time in IT.
Certainly when he started talking about the evolution in hardware and servers I was really impressed.

He talked about the evolution of servers and also the size of servers.
We at our company recently upgraded all our servers, from standard pcs to rack servers, but we seem already outdated :-(.

19" Rack Server

When he showed the latest “Container Servers” Microsoft was using, I was really impressed.
The image he showed was from an Hp POD (Performance Optimized Data Center), which can serve 3500 compute nodes and 12000 hard drives.

The outside:

Hp POD: Outside

The inside:

Hp POD: Inside

The servers:

Hp POD: Servers

The really cool thing is, that this server only has 3 cables to be connected:

• Power cable
• Network cable
• Water cooling cable

The support model for those kind of servers is also easy.
They allow 10% of the cpu units to die before anyone even thinks on opening the box

His final statement was that Microsoft almost has 500.000 servers available, which are managed by only !35! people.
So far the future of system administrators, happy I’m not one of them.

On youtube you can find a video with a Tour of the inside and outside of the POD.

Kristof Rennen Hardware Hardware, Hosting, Microsoft, Review, TechDays

What a week for Microsoft users and fanatics.
In my 2 previous posts, I already mentioned the releases of Silverlight 3 Beta and ASP.NET MVC 1.0, but ont he same MIX09 event Microsoft also release Internet Explorer 8.

The new features look promising:

• Accelerators (map to an address, translate a word, find someone on facebook, …)
• Compatibility view (render a website in IE7 when its not fully ready yet for IE8)
• Enhanced tabbed browsing (tab groups, tab colors, …)
• A better back button (for RIA applications support)
• Smarter address bar
• Increased performance (even faster than it already was ;-))
• Web slices (to keep up with frequently updated sites from the favorites bar
• And much more …

I haven’t installed this new version yet, and I will probably wait until I have some feedback from other users.
Its not really a good idea to upgrade to another browser when the web applications you are developing still need to support older Internet Explorer versions.

More information can be found on the official website.
The application can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website.

Kristof Rennen Software Browser, Explorer, Internet, Microsoft, MIX, Software

Great news for the Silverlight fans out there since Microsoft already released the first beta of Silverlight 3 at MIX09.
Its a preview release which continues Silverlight’s track record of rapid innovation, introducing 50+ new features.

Some of the nice new features include:

• Support for higher quality audio and video (more formats, 720p+ streaming, HD, content protection, …)
• Empowering richer experiences (animation effects, enhanced control skinning, perspective 3D, …)
• Improving RIA productivity (60+ controls with source, Search Engine Optimization, improved performance, …)
• Out of the browser capabilities (life outside the browser, shortcuts, auto-update, …)

Together with this beta release of Silverlight 3, Microsoft also released a first preview of Expression Blend 3.

More information can be found on the official Silverlight website.
The windows developer runtime can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site.

Kristof Rennen Development .NET, Blend, Expression, Microsoft, MIX, Silverlight

Yesterday Microsoft released version 1.0 of its ASP.NET MVC framework.
It finally is production ready, supported and lets hope stable.

I don’t have any experience yet with this new technology, but I’m sure I’m going to check it out somewhere between today and a few weeks.

I will use this opportunity to finally create a proper website for my band Jessie’s Five.
The current version of the website is a temporary one, containing all information but in an ugly shell using static ASP.NET.
The new version of the website will be dynamic and containing an Administration section.
The other band members will be able to update the site themselves, resulting in a more updated site and me not forgetting to do it anymore.

I hope my host Mochahost will support the MVC framework soon, so I can start using it.

For more information on the ASP.NET MVC Framework: http://www.asp.net/mvc/
Version 1.0 can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site.

Kristof Rennen Development .NET, ASP.NET, Jessie's Five, Microsoft, MVC

In my first article I mentioned my new blog.
Since I can benefit from a fresh start, I’m now thinking which language I should use for my posts.

English seems a good choice, so almost everybody can read my stuff, but on the other hand its more difficult to write good posts on certain topics.
Also for local topics, like a discussion about the weather where I’m living (not that I’m really going to do that), English might be some overkill.

On the other hand, if I only use Dutch for this blog, I will probably miss a lot of reader on my technology subjects.

A third option is using a mix, like a co-worker of mine is doing on his blog. But I’m not really in favor of this solution either.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, they are always welcome, but in the meanwhile I’ll stick to English for everything.

Kristof Rennen Blogging Blogging, Dutch, English, Language

Since 2005 I’m one of the many happy Dreamhost users.
I bought the hosting with the idea to host several sites, run some spikes, tryout some stuff, …

But after almost 4 years, I made the balance and except for my mail, a few subversion repositories, one ruby on rails site, an ftp site to dump some stuff, and a not used blog, my hosting was wasted.

The reason why I chose Dreamhost, was its price and feature set:

• Almost unlimited storage
• Almost unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Subversion repositories with web-based access
• Unlimited domains, sub-domain, email addresses, …
• PHP, Ruby On Rails support
• Many more …

At the time of signup, I also had a look at various windows hosts, which were too expensive at that time with a really small set of features.

Since I’m working allday with windows and microsoft technologies as my job, it was finally time to have a look at what windows hosting had to offer these days.
After having investigated a few different hosts, I found Mochahost

The features of Mochahost were certainly worth considering:

• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL databases + Unlimited size
• Unlimited MsSQL databases + Unlimited size
• Unlimited domains, sub-domains, email address, …
• PHP support
• .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 support
• ASP.NET support
• AJAX and LINQ support
• Windows Communication Foundation support
• Full Trust!!
• Many, many more…

Another great benefit of switching to Mochahost was the price. For my Dreamhost plan, I had to pay 120$ each year, where for my Mochahost plan (business plan for 3 years), I only pay 150$.

After I talked to a few support people using there nice 24/24 and 7/7 online chat, asking many and many questions, I finally decided to signup for a business plan.

After the signup was completed, it took me almost a week to transfer all my mails from Dreamhost to Mochahost, since I had to transfer them using my mail client with an Imap connection and the mails were about 1GB is size.

The blog you are currently reading, is my first real application running on Mochahost under IIS. Installation and setup where easy, the blog is fast and everything seems to be working fine.

If you are in search for great windows hosting, Mochahost is really worth considering.

Kristof Rennen Hosting .NET, Dreamhost, Hosting, Mochahost, Review

I installed a brand new wordpress 2.7 blog on my brand new host Mochahost this week, not because I’m already a real and frequent blogger, but more just to have one.

Since I only had 2 or 3 posts on my previous blog, I am not really sure if I will do any better on this new blog (probably I won’t)

That’s why I will be reviewing my blog experiences in a month or so, and if I didn’t manage to write enough “interesting” posts by then, the blog will be burried forever, we’ll see…

Kristof Rennen Blogging Blogging, Mochahost, Review

A few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to windows hosting and I started transferring everything from Dreamhost to Mochahost.

Since my previous blog wasn’t a real success, with only 2 or 3 posts, its time for a new and fresh one.

Kristof Rennen Blogging Blogging, Dreamhost, Hosting, Mochahost