Welcome at The BalusC Code!
This website (let's call it "blog" for now) was originated at a site called "The BalusC Server" which existed since may 1999 and was available on http://balusc.xs4all.nl since june 2001. At 31 august 2007 that site was stopped due to the emigration plans of BalusC and its family from The Netherlands to Curaçao. That site was hosted at a private webserver which was running right at home and it was not an option to take that webserver along to the new house. It simply doesn't fit in the second life.
The two most valuable content groups of that website were the "Hardware" and the "Development" groups. The first one was responsible for about 70% of the 80.000 monthly pagehits and the second one for about 25%. The first one costs too much time to be maintained and also the area of interest has been moved, so BalusC decided to stop definitely with that. It is currently sold to Tweakers.net BV. It will be available sooner or later as a part of their Pricewatch. The second one is fortunately moved to this blog. You can find them in the Articles bar at the right side. It's all about Java and nothing else. The articles are goaled on environments with at least Java EE 5.0, Servlet 2.5, JSP 2.1, JSTL 1.2 and JSF RI 1.2 (Mojarra).
Next to this blog BalusC also maintains another blog together with his wife. This blog is located at http://curalive.blogspot.com and is focused on their new live at Curaçao. That blog is and will be written entirely in Dutch only. Foreigners who doesn't understand Dutch can use Google Translator for it or just view photos -which can say more than thousand words.
What is the main language?
This blog will be a mixup of English and Dutch articles. The choice of the language will be based on the availability of comparable content somewhere else on the Internet. If there is lot of them then the article will be written in Dutch. Generally those are the "basic" Java articles (tutorials and knowledgements) which are mainly already available at sun.com. The more "advanced" Java articles (best practices and useful snippets) which aren't available widely on the Internet will be written entirely in English.
What does 'BalusC' mean?
It's a concatenation of the first two characters of each name part of his full name Bauke Luitsen Scholtz. It was invented at 1995 when he created a small ANSI DOS Batch program to select DOS games out of his collection and directly run it: "Gamemenu made by BALUSC". It was for personal purposes only. Later when he joined the IRC chatrooms at 1996, this acronym was used as nickname to identify himself. After quickly becoming more familiar with the netiquette and having learnt that CAPS == SHOUTING, he decided to lowercase the middle characters so that the nickname 'BalusC' was created. The last character is still uppercased, because 'everyone did it also', referring to the so-called good old l33t speak. Up to now this nickname is still unique and practically all Google hits refers uniquely to himself and/or his website.
3000?
Yes, the welcome page which you're facing is posted at 1 january 3000.
So this page will be kept on the top of the blog forever =)
It's actually posted at 31 august 2007.
