ideas, code, stuff

" (defun print-number-1 (val) (handler-case (format nil "~,2f" val) (t () "ERROR")))"

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:41:00 -0400

“

(defun print-number-1 (val)
  (handler-case
      (format nil "~,2f" val)
    (t () "ERROR")))

”

- the epitome of defensive programming

also print-number, print-number-2 and print-number-3

Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 16:37:26 -0400

Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability

Instead of CDs, read-only and long-term storable USB-sticks bundled with MP3/OGG/FLAC/…...

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:01:12 -0400

Instead of CDs, read-only and long-term storable USB-sticks bundled with MP3/OGG/FLAC/… downloads. Big enough to fit some design on it and read-only to be able to use a more robust chips which will usable after a few centuries or so in a dusty box. For those users who want additional, non-virtual, benefits from downloading MP3s (instead of buying a CD). So

Mobile or smart phone (don’t know atm how much computing power would be necessary, so go...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:15:00 -0400

Mobile or smart phone (don’t know atm how much computing power would be necessary, so go figure) application with GUI for gnupg i.e. web-of-trust client. Should exchange public-keys and pre-encrypted messages, possibly checking the signature of incoming messages. And not more, since manipulating your private key (i.e. signing other keys) requires your passphrase and therefore complete trust in your platform, your surroundings, possibly your network. Stealing your phone should not compromise your private key, because then you’re very much in trouble. Personally the main benefit of this would be easy exchange of keys off the net and possibly a check button to mark if you’ve seen some identification from the other person. I could also imagine (if you have a dedicated root? server) to have a service somewhere, which could be used to encrypt/decrypt/sign things for on a secure platform, provided a secure transport to your phone, i.e. TLS. In any case you should have an automatic memory wipe tool included.

Then extend this to a meshed and distributed tool for a reputation network. But I have to read about that a bit more before including it here.

Business cards with your normal email address and homepage, but add another unique identifier at the...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:27:05 -0400

Business cards with your normal email address and homepage, but add another unique identifier at the end i.e. http://example.com/;foo so you can additionally control some additional bits of information. For example I normally won’t post my phone number anywhere, but using this identifier like a personalised password I can control who can see it and possibly revoke the access after some time. Of course using a secure connection will also protect against sniffing attacks if you worry about them.

For fun include also a qr code on the back.

Browsing with multiple renderers, architecture Webkit is...

Sat, 21 May 2011 17:06:24 -0400

Browsing with multiple renderers, architecture

Webkit is embedded rather easily, Gecko (with xulrunner) doesn’t want to cooperate with me though. On the other, maybe I should first define the other components and the communication protocols more clearly.

Blimp lights, like the ones in Dune, except that I don’t remember their name. So some...

Sun, 01 May 2011 20:21:00 -0400

Blimp lights, like the ones in Dune, except that I don’t remember their name. So some incombustible gas to keep it levitating, some way to adjust the height by adding or removing weight and a lightweight and flexible cable to provide power. LEDs to keep energy consumption and heat generation down. Shouldn’t that be possible in 2011?

Programming Ideas: "Heladera": a web based recipe, meal ideas search app

Sun, 01 May 2011 20:12:07 -0400

Programming Ideas: "Heladera": a web based recipe, meal ideas search app:

programmingideas:

I started this using Django.

Idea:

The user select what he/she/it got in his kitchen from a taglist

The user optionally selects more filters (allergies, max calories, max fat, estimated time of cooking, needs oven/microwave, etc.)

The user gets the recipe. Allright!

Idea from the idea:

…

Also: scaling for different number of persons or desired volume/mass, unit conversion, links for lesser known ingredients to Wikipedia. Creation of whole week plans for less creative people aka me, using a metric to mix “different” recipes together, not all similar ones. Filtering should include generalised cases like vegetarian etc.

Yeah, I don’t know any specific recipe sites, since I’m using Google in any case, still, filtering by allergies is useful.

Client-side filtering proxy

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:21:00 -0400

ie. ad- and malware-blocking, user-side script, stylesheet insertion and text, html, xml manipulation (regexes, xpath).

Because then you don’t have to write different scripts for different browsers (in the case of pure filtering). Parsing the stuff ourselves and then forwarding it to the browser (who parses it again) isn’t particularly efficient, but I don’t see how you can circumvent that for proprietary browsers (such as Opera, which I’m primarily using atm).

Should be error-resilient against malformed input (html, xml) and user-specified rules, ie. xpath expressions.

Since imho none of the available proxies quite fit my needs (yet one could possibly chain them, ie. one for ad-filtering, which is available, and the custom stuff ourselves, but I’d rather compile that stuff done into one single binary) there’s the question: When do I do this?

At the moment I have an Opera extension which does what I want, but for reason above this should be extended, possibly with dsl support for rules and optional compilation into state machines for additional speed-up (but which might easily backfire, so benchmarks are in order).

Pluto Scarab — Hash Functions

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:57:45 -0400

Pluto Scarab — Hash Functions

Eternally Confuzzled - The Art of Hashing

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:57:39 -0400

Eternally Confuzzled - The Art of Hashing

General Purpose Hash Function Algorithms By Arash Partow

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:57:30 -0400

General Purpose Hash Function Algorithms By Arash Partow

myNoSQL: Make Data Available - Open Data Manual

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:05:56 -0400

myNoSQL: Make Data Available - Open Data Manual:

nosql:

From the Open Data Manual:

Open data needs to be ‘technically’ open as well as legally open. Specifically the data needs be:

Available — at no more than a reasonable cost of reproduction, preferably for free download on the Internet. Summary: publish your information on the Internet…

Trivium

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:53:09 -0400

Trivium:

another interesting blog

One idea floating around for some time no: I want to capture keyboard (mouse?) events and force them...

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:52:00 -0400

One idea floating around for some time no: I want to capture keyboard (mouse?) events and force them to a specific application window when e.g. a modifier is pressed. So suppose I want to read an article in my browser and write something down at the same time. The splitter application is then configured to route the arrow keys and page up/down to the browser and everything else to the text editor.

If we can identify the input device, this could also be used to split according to the device, i.e. one keyboard to the chat window, the other undisturbed or so. Even though I think this is too much work if you can just context switch but still.

The Pure Programming Language

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 19:25:30 -0400

The Pure Programming Language:

A dynamically typed language based on term-rewriting, via Lambda the Ultimate. Actually I think this one and me can get along just fine, since it isn’t pedantic about type discipline like Haskell. We’ll see. Oh, and it compiles fast and fine, because it uses the LLVM infrastructure (which I’ve already had installed, so no more compile time for that dependency).

Fwd: Merging a Mercurial repository back into Subversion

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:29:22 -0500

fooyeahcode:

karltk wrote:

In a recent project, I forked an upstream SVN repository into a new Mercurial repo, to do some exploratory programming. The exploration proved very fruitful, so I decided to merge the code back into the upstream SVN repo.

Should be simple, right? Wrong. For posterity, here’s a high-level…

This is definitely the best guide I found on this topic. If you want to convert an existing mercurial repository into an subversion repository the best way is to collapse all branched commits as described by karltk, because SVN needs a linear history when converting from hg to SVN. When collapsing, the -f switch may useful if commits come from different authors.

I modified the toolchain a little bit:

As soon as all entries are collapsed in hg-repos and the history is linear (check with hg view or hg glog), convert hg-repos to a subversion-repository with hg convert:
hg convert --dest-type svn repos_hg/ repos_svn
Read More

Hum, so it’s really easy to develop tiny extensions for Opera, thanks to the rapid-reload...

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:10:00 -0500

Hum, so it’s really easy to develop tiny extensions for Opera, thanks to the rapid-reload developer mode and good documentation. The fast Dilbert interface is nice, but the navigation buttons aren’t properly accessible in Opera via the fast-forward button, e.g. the space key. So one way to fix this is to inject a small Javascript file, which links the back button into a head link with rel set to “next” and href to the URL of the back button. Simple as that. This file is a ready made extensions, but I only spent about five minutes on it, so I’ve uploaded it only for information purposes; nevertheless, it works for me.

Whatfettle

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:41:00 -0500

Whatfettle:

another blog to read -.-

Shop

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:03:43 -0500

Shop:

A tool to show permissions at every level in a path. Shop gives you a quick overview of the permissions of the directory in question, as well as the permissions of every directory above it in the tree.