May 16th, 2008
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I’ve been a bit silent on the blogging front until recently, however I’ve picked up the pace again.
My posts will generally be found at FourStarters.com from now on though, unless it’s about very specific programming ramblings.
enjoy!
I’m back from an excellent vacation, and more about this later.
However, for now, just a quick shine on the ongoing internet armchair debates on who really owns the “iPhone” name - apple, or cisco?
It’s apple’s, and the reason is simple. Fortunately, in this case, Cisco’s clear bungling of the case should make this a slam dunk for Apple’s legal team, but it’s a nice foray into why the whole patent & trademark office isn’t working.
zd.net’s sleuting - read it for all the details.
Now how come the very obvious nature of that sticker wasn’t caught by the USPTO?
Apparently, I’m it!, but I’m extremely tired (spending 3 hours chewing the fat with some very talented (they do exist out here in Delft!) web 2 prodigies at the mashup contest where Alper lifted himself into top spot wasn’t exactly in the planning for an already busy day but I’m very glad I went), so I’ll take the wimps way out.
I was originally supposed to mention 5 things no one (few) knew about me, and tag 5 other bloggers.
I’ll have to reduce that to 3 on both counts. Here goes, enjoy!
My parents bought me a Commodore 64 back when I was.. uh.. 7? I think. Back then we played games like Beamrider with 12 people at a time (neighbours and the entire family), which suggests to me that Nintendo might be on to something… but I digress. This was the ‘platform’ I used to first learn programming. The ‘click’ that really made me go for it is perusing a rather graphics-oriented beginners book to programming the C64. One of the things (it was written in dutch) it said in one of the very first chapters is that it would ’say’ (translated back to english) stuff ‘at’ me if I wrote 10 print "stuff"; run. I actually thought this would somehow result in the C64 speeching at me, something the SID music chip in those things certainly can NOT do, but it got me started anyway.
I stayed the course on BASIC even going so far as to program an Ad-Lib background (a TSR taking up 80k space, for those poor saps having to deal with DOS’s 640k limit back in the day) player in PowerBASIC.
After that I found Assembler, and did a lot of fun stuff by loading asm libraries into basic to tie it all together. Only much, much later did I finally bite the bullet and begrudgingly learnt java, the language I generally use today.
Probably owing to my penchant for staying up all night programming combined with the total lack of 24-hour economy out here in the Netherlands, I’m an excellent cook, capable of mixing up something quite delicious off of frozen, canned, and otherwise long-term storable goods. Of course, my culinary preference is some sort of strange italian/indonesian combination featuring plenty of spicy foods, so my culinary skills aren’t much appreciated (yet!). A lot of experimentation paired with a disdain for pre-made sauce packets is really all thats required to become a mean hand at the stirrer and frying pan.
My personal favourite recipe, very tasty, very healthy, very quick to cook, and the ingredients keep for years:
Fried Noodles (per person):
75g noodles (the type that are prepared by leaving for 4 minutes into recently boiled hot water). For extra taste, cook in chicken or beef broth.
some frozen peas, chopped ginger, and maybe an onion or some such.
A good helping of sesame oil, sambal (sambal badjak is best if you can find it), and chopped garlic in oil base (keeps for years, no cutting needed!) to start things off. Cook this mix up for a bit if you want to take the spicy edge off. Frying sambal reduces the spicyness but leaves most of the taste intact. Just don’t let it burn.
Add the peas and the like to the simmering sambal mix. At around this time, rinse off the finished noodles and cool them off quickly in tap water to prevent them sticking together or burning quickly for the frying stage.
Add plenty of Mirin (rice vinegar) or ricewine vinegar (not quite the same) and salty Ketjap (’Ketjap Asin’. ‘kikkoman’ is a world-wide brand that makes good ketjap asin. Also known as japanese ketjap - it’s the stuff you mix with wasabi to make sushi sauce), then add the noodles and fry it up (using a good frying pan or a ‘wok’, set your stove to ‘high’, and stir a lot over the course of 3 to 4 minutes so that the noodles get fried).
Transfer to plate and enjoy. Takes 10 minutes to make. The final 3 to 4 minute ‘frying’ stage should be separated for each plate - you can’t actually fry the noodles if you’re trying to do it all for 4 eaters in one sitting unless you have a huge pan. On the flipside you can ‘personalize’ each meal by adding some extra sambal (for the spicy inclined) or favourite greens.
NB: Sambal is a type of chilli paste. It’s extremely spicy by itself, and few can eat a spoonful of the raw stuff without chasing it with half a gallon of beer or milk.
My sleeping patterns are extremely erratic. I can’t sleep unless I’m very tired but without a good reason to get up I snooze away for a long time, which adds up to being incapable of keeping a normal sleeping pattern.
On the flip side, almost all the ideas that turned out to serve me very well just sort of exist in my head when I wake up. As a result I’m disinclined to mess with my sleeping habits lest I lose my primary source of insights.
I have a very hard time falling asleep without music. In fact, I have a very hard time concentrating for very long times without some music in the background as well. I’d rather be blind than deaf if I was forced to choose.
Well, enjoy. TAG! You’re it, Alper, Axel, and Slava!
Two excellent pieces of news for you, my dear friends, readers, and random stumblers!
Today I have received word that I am, indeed, getting my engineering degree - &it’s been confirmed.
Another interesting piece of news:
You may remember my clash with the justice system regarding running a red light that I’m certain I never did.
The result of my challenge is in - I’m off the hook. The Officer of Justice in charge of the case agreed with my complaint that stuffing me with the responsibility for proving I didn’t do it 6 months after the fact is a farce of justice and a ridiculous way to treat your citizens.
In other news I lost a whole 3 bucks at poker yesterday, but I guess not having to pay 160 for a bunk traffic ticket makes that a fairly inconsquential event.
NB: For the poker fans amongst you, if you live around delft, send an email to pokerdelft@gmail.com and I’ll put you on a mailing list about poker events in and around the area.
I’m still anxiously awaiting delivery of my MacBook (also known as ‘GlossBook’amongst some). TNT’s track and trace is brilliant in how it says absolutely nothing useful so I have no idea if they’ll make the original planned delivery time of tomorrow.
It’s interesting how so many things just become too much of a drag to run without your favourite environment. News? Net reading any of it - my newsreader is in storage. Mail? Sort of, but only once a day through gmail. Programming? Can’t be bothered to set it all up for just a few days layover.
Here’s hoping the MacBook arrives soon. I’m starting to show withdrawal symptoms. I’m certainly even crazier than usual, apparently. In this way having a notebook is more annoying than the usual desktop. I don’t run anything across web services (with a notebook there’s no point in the portability aspect), and I’m used to having my stuff with me all the live long day, from trains to friends houses to something as simple as going out to a movie or some such. Discussion turns to something that I can show on the notebook, and, voila, there it is.
As with so many things, once you’re used to a thing, it’s very very difficult to let go of it.
Apparently my forays into bomberman last time I was at the mediamatics building in Amsterdam for an unconference made some sort of impression.
There are some Firefox dev guys here along with an Opera employee, and it turns out bomberman makes for an excellent speed test. Only safari manages the full 50 FPS that bomberman tries to run at.
There isa debug build of bomberman available here. The number in the top box should be between 40 and 50 for a full speed bomberman. Any less and you’re in trouble.
Current standings, measured when 1 bomberman is running, a bomb is pulsing, and one explosion is going off, all measured on my iBook G4 1.333 Ghz (50 is max):
safari 2.0.3: 44
firefox 1.5.0.3: 15
firefox 1.6a1 (Deer Park Alpha 2): 18
opera 9 preview 1: 36
Note that at least in firefox (either version), the addition of the FPS counter and the debug boxes SIGNIFICANTLY slows down the whole thing, whereas Safari doesn’t skip a beat. This is really strange, because the purely DHTML (non-Canvas) based gfx demos like the one I reported on earlier (here) is notably faster in firefox.
Just got my Cryptography exam graded. An 8 (out of 10). I have an interesting observation regarding the way I studied for this (Executive Summary: I read Wikipedia articles instead of the book), but for now, let’s just leave it at:
That was my last exam for my MSc degree. Just some presentations and reports left.
Just working on tipjar all day, unfortunately haven’t had any revelations of Truth and Light these last few days.
So, I’ll just entertain you with some brilliant inventions instead: chindogu.
Reporting from Cocoa Dev House, Amsterdam, I’ve finally produced something playable with a little advice from the Mac gurus here.
check it out! (bring a friend, 2-player only for now).
Andy from Flock also managed to solve the sound dilemma (how to add sound effects) for me and he has a lead on a potential way to make bomberman networkable!
So, perhaps, in the future, you can play bomberman across wires instead of sharing a keyboard. Then again, the shared keyboard way is probably more fun.
I’d love to have some stats. (unique) visitors per day, same but for each article separately, some sort of nicely sorted view of referrers, etcetera.
How do I go about this? I believe (not sure) that it placed a google analytics bug on every page but so far I have no clue how that works. Can that do what I want it to do?
Are there plugins for wordpress?
