Dear readers,
I’m looking for an apartment in the neighborhood of Nijmegen. I’m not picky, but can’t afford more than €300,- in total per month.
Contact me per e-mail (bas@this domain) or call me: 0644239435.
Bas
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Looking for an apartment
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Dutch student protest
Sunday, January 31st, 2010This week, various student organisations protest against major cuts in the funding of education and research.
A reader of dutch, can visit their site.
Unique followers on Twitter
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009As pointed out by Jorg Kennis, Twitter’s new lists feature make it hard to determine the amount of unique followers. I’ve written a simple script, using a slightly modified TweePy, to determine the amount of unique followers.
Example usage:
bas@w-nz ~/twitter-unique-followers $ python twitter-unique-followers.py JorgK -ubwesterb
Password:
rate_limit_status: remaining_hits: 112
Jorg Kennis
followed directly by 182
in lists
RPtje/vriendenbekenden subscribed to by 0
JorgK/TechNL subscribed to by 0
sentfanwyaerda/nijmegen1 subscribed to by 9
JorgK/Friends subscribed to by 0
sjorsjes/Community subscribed to by 0
robinspeijer/iPhone subscribed to by 1
nielsschooneman/iPhone subscribed to by 0
JeanPaulH/iPhoneclub subscribed to by 5
number of unique followers: 198
You can download it here. I could write a simple webpage with the same functionality, if anyone would mind.
Normul
Sunday, November 1st, 2009Normul normalizes URLs. It expands shortened URLs:
>>> from normul import normul
>>> normul('http://bit.ly/1I4VQ')
{'type': 'other', 'normalized': 'http://www.shinguz.ch/MySQL/mysql_mv.html', 'original': 'http://bit.ly/1I4VQ'}
And shows useful links for hosted-images:
>>> normul('http://yfrog.com/6c5krj')
{'image': {'full': 'http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1079/5kr.jpg', 'thumbnail': 'http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1079/5kr.th.jpg'}, 'type': 'image', 'original': 'http://yfrog.com/6c5krj', 'normalized': 'http://yfrog.com/6c5krj'}
You can find the simple but convenient sourcecode here.
Cantor never bores (1)
Saturday, October 24th, 2009Given a set of countable sets 
, such that is totally ordered by inclusion, videlicet for every 
either 
or 
. Intuitively, for at every step in this chain one element at least must be added, one expects the set to be countable as well.
Suppose is countable. Then the union, 
is a countable union of countable sets, hence countable. (Suppose 
is an enumeration of and 
enumerations of the elements of the chain. Then 
enumerates .)
Thus is an upper bound of . In the poset of countable subsets of some set 
, of which is a subset, every non-empty chain has an upper bound. Hence, using Zorn’s lemma there is a maximal element, say 
.
Suppose is uncountable, then there exists a 
. 
is most definitely also countable and 
which contradicts ’s maximality. We are forced to conclude that there exists an uncountable chain of countable sets.
Cantor’s set theory keeps surprising.
Update: an example of such a chain is the set of the countable ordinals.
Another update: a “more concrete” example are the downsets in 
without the empty set and itself. These downsets correspond to real numbers, see Dedekind Cuts.
Bond against Loanwords
Thursday, September 10th, 2009Although I don’t bear any animosity against most dutch loanwords (except those Anglo-Saxon), the dictionary of the dutch Bond tegen Leenwoorden is a true joy to read.
21
Monday, August 31st, 2009Since yesterday I, for the first time, enjoy the anything-but-special age of 21 years.
Windows 7 Sins
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Windows 7 Sins. I strongly agree with points 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The arguments for points 2 and 7 are a bit weak, but I do agree with the conclusions.
For the non US audience, it would have been nice to note that if Microsoft (or the US) would recall all foreign licenses for Windows, our entire government is crippled.
Twitter and Facebook
Friday, August 7th, 2009were both victim of a DDoS today. Silently, I always hoped that a really long-lasting one will convince them to put effort in a distributed scheme.
Maybe I should be waiting for another Wave.
PijsMarietje
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009At the faculty for sciences there are canteens for students. In each of these, there’s sound equipment connected to linux boxes. On each of those linux boxes, we run a music-request-server called Marietje. I just finished writing a front-end in Javascript. It wasn’t a pain. As instead, the use of jQuery was a bliss.
The frontend for one of those boxes and the source code (see the ajax folder).
Damned DOM (1)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009When I wanted to react to any changes to a input textbox immediately, my first instrinct was to use onChange. onChange, however, is called when the input loses focus. onKeyPress then? Isn’t called on backspaces. onKeyDown, maybe? It does get called, but the effect of the keystroke isn’t yet applied, for the return value determines whether it that is done in the first place. (Same story for onKeyPress by the way.) onKeyUp does work a bit, except if someone is holding down a single key, for a while.
The solution: hook onKeyUp and use setTimeout with a timeout of 0. Yugh. I hate DOM.
Big Fat Disclaimer: I actually tested this only on one browser.
Unicode to ASCII (1)
Friday, June 19th, 2009When I want to generate usernames from real names, which can contain non-ascii characters, you can’t simply ignore the unicode characters. For instance, danielle@blaat.org is the right e-mail address for Daniëlle, danille@blaat.org isn’t.
There’s trick. Unicode has got a single code for ë itself, but it has also got a code which (simplified) adds ¨ on top of the previous character. The unicode standard defines a normal form in which (at least) all such characters, which can be, are represented using such modifiers. If you then simply ignore the non-ascii representable codes, you’ll get the desired result.
In python: unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', txt).encode('ASCII', 'ignore').
However, this isn’t the right solution. For instance, in german, one prefers ue as a replacement of ü over u.
Javascript’s stupid Date constructor
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
new Date(2009, 1, 1) represents the first of February 2009. Not the second of February nor the first of January. Why this stupidity?
Spacing up- and downarrow properly for up- and downsets
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
is ugly, but 
is nice! The solution: prefix \uparrow with \mathopen.
Fosdem (3)
Friday, February 6th, 2009In a few hours I’ll travel the short distance to Bruxelles to visit Fosdem. Once again I’m pretty excited 
. Lets hope this time the pink elephants of the Delirium Cafe don’t crush me. If you’re also going, drop me a comment.
Timestamp 1234567890
Thursday, January 29th, 2009It’s soon. The 14th of februari, 00:31:30 (Europe/Amsterdam). Will the world end? Will ancient libc code giggle and break?
2009
Thursday, January 1st, 2009Happy Newyear!
On-demand singleton for Python
Saturday, December 27th, 2008Some singletons eat slightly more resources, than you want to give them for free. For instance, if you have a home-brew threadpool singleton, you don’t want it to create its threads if you are not going to use it. The solution: a simple function that creates a stub which proxies attribute access to an ad-hoc created instance.
Usage: create_ondemand_singleton('mylibrary.Threadpool', MyThreadPoolClass).
Music Animation Machine
Friday, October 10th, 2008The sound and performance really aren’t that good, but the visual connection is so powerful: