About

Hi,

My name is Martijn Kooij. Loving boyfriend of Elja and proud father of our beautiful daughter Leanne who was born in 2009.

In my free time I love to relax and watch a movie and go out for a run, but most of all I love to create new things on the computer. At the moment I am working on a project for an old friend who is a physio therapist, the project involves using gyroscope and accelerometer sensors to research the stability of the (neuro)motor system.

I recently also picked up on another old dream of mine: I want to build a robot! I already discovered years ago that this is actually not entirely my cup of tea, soldering and all the wiring, but when I found the Arduino kits that allow you to easily construct mostly solderless systems I decided to give it another try.

For this blog I plan to write to you about these 2 topics. Working in c# on the physio project and all the math that comes with that. And my progress in building an autonomous bot using the Arduino platform.

15 thoughts on “About

  1. S. Chang

    Hi Martijin,

    This is S, an user of your firefox extension: Quick Locale Switcher. This extension was perfect when it’s under your development, but is now criticized for its sneaky adware. Please see the reviews on mozilla addon page:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-locale-switcher/

    I know that you are not supporting the FF extensions anymore, but this extension had been injected with malicious spywares and adwares by your successor developer, ‘ppclick’, with no functional improvements. Could you take extension development back, or assign it to other developers? I am also a web developer and would be glad to continue on developing it.

    Thanks and best regards,
    S.

    Reply
  2. Martijn Kooij Post author

    I will look into it, and try to contact Mozilla if action is required.
    I have knowingly sold the extension to a commercial company, so I had expected that they would try and make money from it. They did promise me they would use clean and fair methods though…

    I’ll see what I can do.

    Reply
  3. Angela

    Hello
    I am interested in learning how to continue your websearchpro search engine project. I have moderate html knowledge but little javascript. I have saved each of your pages and i looked at the source code but i couldn’t figure out the javascript coding for the icons or adding engine script. I was hoping if you have a minute can you explain it to me so I can upgrade my website with your permission of course.
    Thank You!
    Angela 🙂

    Reply
    1. Martijn Kooij Post author

      Hi Angela,

      The search engines come from a MSSQL database and all the lists are generated in server-side ASP.net code. The same goes for adding new engines from the extension, it’s just an ASP.net server call. So there’s not much to see from the client’s side I’m afraid. AFAIK the search engine part is still working just fine on it’s own as long as I keep the server up and running. And I have no intention of shutting it down so that should be OK?

      If you’re just interested in how a search engine gets from the site to the extension have a look at the JS function SelectWSProSearchEngine. In short it creates a custom event and dispatches it. The WSPro extension has an event listener on that “WSProSearchEngineEvent” and will capture it and add the search engine which is passed inside the event.

      Reply
  4. Marc J.

    Web Search Pro user, I just got your message on “End of life for my Firefox extensions” and just want to say, sorry to hear it but thank you, I have truly enjoyed your work.

    Good luck to you on your future quests.

    Marc J.

    Reply
  5. Erik Petersen

    Hi, I enjoy the FabTabs Firefox Add-on and like to suggest to improve the visibility of the active tab, because one can not see anynmore which tab is active, at least when some similar tabs are open (and the close-x is often not very good to recognize). May be a kind of a thick border on the bottom of the tab button can help.
    By the way, just add a FabTab page to your blog to describe and comment this Add-on. Kind Regars from Germany.

    Reply
    1. Martijn Kooij Post author

      Hi Erik,

      Thanks for the compliments!
      Unfortunately I have quit developing Firefox addons a couple of years ago, and have sold a couple of them to a commercial company…
      You can try to play with the active tab opacity setting a bit, or post your feature request on the addons page.

      Reply
  6. Dario

    Hey,

    I realy need the pong multiplayer game. Is it possible to make it work in any way? I managed to install it on an old thunderbird version – now it sais, that the server is down. Can I make my own server somehow?

    If not, do you know of any other version, where I can multiplayer pong with a specific player and chat simultaneously?

    Reply
    1. Martijn Kooij Post author

      Sorry but the mp server has been down for quite some time now since I quit… I probably still have the ASP.net source somewhere. Contact me if you want to continue this extension and server.

      Reply
  7. Nick S

    I’m so glad you’re supporting those trying to continue your work. I can’t imagine living without Web Search Pro!

    With the recent Mozilla announcements, I’ve realized that if I want to keep using it, I’ll have to get serious about developing it on my own. And with the signing requirement, I’ll probably have to make it public on addons.mozilla.org instead of it just being for personal use.

    But that would be a fork, and I don’t see a license for it on its page. What would you recommend if I’m interested in porting it to the new addons API? Unfortunately I can’t promise I’ll have the time to do it, but I’d like to be able to try.

    P.S. Thanks for all your work over the years!

    Reply
    1. Martijn Kooij Post author

      Hi Nick,

      The license (included in the xpi file) is the Mozilla Public License, so your free to fork it if you want to.
      But… If you are serious you would probably do the world a bigger favor if you would continue developing the official version, on AMO. I have already done this with Drag & Dropzones, and I think it would be better for WSPro as well. If you’re up for it. Send me an email if you want to discuss, post[at]martijnkooij.nl
      I have not followed everything in detail, but I cannot imagine that a developer would not be able to run his own work. So if you want to rework it for personal use you can.

      Cheers.
      Martijn

      Reply
  8. HappyZippo

    Hi Buddy,
    I just read your announcement. Thus I only want to drop you a line to say a BIG THANK YOU for all the effort you put in my beloved search engine launch pad. This is a great software! I wish you all the best, whatever your plans are.
    Greetings
    Joerg

    Reply
  9. Adam

    Your extension (web search pro) is the best. Are you able to make them on chrome. I’ve been looking for something similar for years and can’t find it. Is it possible to convert them to chrome engine.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *