Erwyn van der Meer

Couldn't think of a better subject, so I just used Dennis' subject.

Dennis tagged me and yes, as Alex wrote, this proves "With all the big names and blog-gurus tagged, eventually the less known/unknown ones had to be reached." ;-) Thanks, Dennis!

So here's my list of five things you might not know about me:

1. Like Dennis and Frans, I started programming on the MSX. In my case a Sony HitBit 75. I had an earlier encounter with a floppy disk drive than Dennis as I bought a 3.5" disk drive that could be hooked up via a giant cartridge to the HitBit. It cost a whopping 800 Dutch guilders (360 euro) and could store 360 KB (single side, single density). Of course these disks were SO much better than the poor 5.25" floppies that the Commodore 64 guys had to live with ;) Nevertheless I regularly encountered disk corruptions ;( 
2. The first software I bought was an Z80 assembler program. It could only be started from MSX-DOS as it was originally written for CP/M. Before I had this assembler, I wrote small assembly programs by  looking up OP-codes in a table and poking them straight into memory with an MSX BASIC program. Just a slight mistake would cause the machine to hang or reboot. For instance, it was terribly risky to have to calculate jump addresses and offsets by hand. 
   With the help of the assembler I wrote my first major program in assembly: a program that allowed me to edit the FAT12 tables on a floppy disk. I had a floppy disk with corrupted FAT tables and I wanted to salvage the data that was still on the disk. I reverse engineered the FAT12 structure (as I had no documentation on it) and with a bare minimum of documentation on the MSX disk API's I was indeed able to repair the disk. The disk was fragmented so it was quite a puzzle to put the pieces of the files together.
3. I was supposed to write an article for the Dutch .NET Magazine on developing for Windows Media Center over the Christmas holidays, but I didn't do any work related stuff on my days off. That's a rare thing for me. Hopefully I will still make the deadline ;(
4. One of the reasons I didn't get around to writing the article was that I became an uncle for the first time. As it is very unlikely that I will have children of my own, I am very happy that my sister is providing my parents with offspring ;) 
5. One other reason I didn't get around to writing the article yet is that I am terribly in love at the moment. I have no further statement to make at this time other than that I am suffering ;( However, if you have any advice on how to undo falling in love, it is very welcome.

I tag Edward, Chi Wai, Matthijs (a good reason for your third blog post? ;), Olaf and Octavie (how's life at Ordina?).