The reality of Stefan Scholl

LHC explained

2009-11-30T22:22:00.003+01:00

So, the LHC is on the news again. If you have missed it last year, don't miss it this time:

Large Hadron Rap

Getting the old open tab behavior back into Firefox 3.6

2009-11-29T00:13:00.002+01:00

Set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false.

99 Bottles of Beer in Factor

2009-11-08T03:38:00.004+01:00

99 Bottles of Beer in Factor.

A naïve implementation from someone who is just beginning to (re)learn the language and doesn't want to (nor can) show off the flashy features, like so many other examples of 99 Bottles of Beer.

USING: combinators io kernel make math math.parser sequences ;
IN: 99bottles

: bottles ( n -- str )
  {
      { 0 [ "no more bottles" ] }
      { 1 [ "1 bottle" ] }
      [ number>string " bottles" append ]
  } case ;

: verse-0 ( n -- )
  drop
  "No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.
Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall."
  print ;

: verse-n ( n -- )
  [ dup bottles % " of beer on the wall, " % dup bottles %
      " of beer.\nTake one down and pass it around, " %
      1 - bottles % " of beer on the wall.\n" % ] "" make
  print ;

: verse ( n -- )
  dup 0 number= [ verse-0 ] [ verse-n ] if ;

: 99bottles ( -- )
  100 reverse [ verse ] each ;

MAIN: 99bottles

Flash Gordon and NoSQL

2009-08-28T23:05:00.002+02:00

No matter if they say that MongoDB got its name from "humongous", for me it's the planet Mongo from Flash Gordon.

Other blogging software, again

2009-08-27T21:37:00.002+02:00

It was time again to change the blogging software. Sorry if the newsfeed is showing old messages as new.

Nice Anti Register Globals Code

2009-06-06T16:45:00.004+02:00

Found in Textpattern:


     if (@ini_get('register_globals'))
        foreach ( $_REQUEST as $name => $value )
                  unset($$name);

Benchmarks are merciless

2009-05-28T14:18:00.001+02:00

A number 1/4 for A vs. B means that B is 4 times slower than A.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game is more a community benchmark than a programming language benchmark. You get some ballpark figures that confirm what you already know beforehand: C++ is faster than Ruby :-)

But it's still depressing to see that a current implementation of JavaScript is faster than Python.

IE is not a current browser!

2009-04-10T15:39:00.001+02:00

It's an OS extension that got recently updated to support over 10 year old standards.

Bookmarklet for HQ Videos on YouTube

2009-04-02T14:25:00.001+02:00

YouTube sometimes gives you an HQ button to switch to a version with higher quality. But not all videos have this button. You can add "&fmt=18" to the URL and most of the time the video is better than the default one.

Or you can bookmark (or better drag and drop it on the bookmark toolbar) the following bookmarklet: YouTube-HQ

This was done quick and dirty and may stop working tomorrow. It depends on the current HTML code on the page.

Just watch a video on YouTube and then select the bookmarklet. The page gets reloaded with "&fmt=18" attached to the URL.

Binary Clock in the Sidebar

2009-03-28T18:16:00.002+01:00

I have a binary wristwatch and had a simple binary clock in the sidebar for some time (no pun intended) now.

But now it looks a bit more like the real watch.

The first row shows the hours and the second row the minutes. It's 11:46 on this picture. 8 + 2 + 1 hours, 32 + 8 + 4 + 2 minutes.

It gets refreshed every minute via JavaScript. I'm using the <canvas> element of HTML 5. I wanted to give it a try for some time now.

It's supported by all current browsers, tested on MacOS X, Linux, and Windows XP.

MacOS X:

Firefox 3.0.8
Safari 3.2.1
iCab 4.5
Opera 9.64
Chromium in a development version r12443 ("soon" to be Google Chrome 2)

Linux:

Firefox 3.0.8

Windows:

Firefox 3.0.8
Safari 3.2.2
Google Chrome 1.0.154.53

Update: Removed after change of blogging software

Yes, that's me

2009-03-01T01:28:00.001+01:00

$ grep -r 'Stefan Scholl' /usr/lib/ruby/1.8 | wc -l
3

CodeIgniter likes the eval()

2009-02-28T01:20:00.001+01:00

$ grep -r 'eval(' codeigniter/ | wc -l
20

Version 1.7.1. From the changelog: Fixed an arbitrary script execution security flaw

Well, who would have expected that?

Old Perl Code

2009-02-09T13:50:00.001+01:00

Uh, oh. Just found some old Perl code of mine. It's from 1998-05-31:


[...]
return undef unless defined($findit);

return 1;
}

Well, in my defense: It's Perl. ;-)

OK, this can't excuse it. But don't be afraid: The program isn't used anymore.

Plone is like Emacs

2009-02-08T02:50:00.001+01:00

Not about beer

No, this has nothing to do with the Emacs is like beer article. The article was about Emacs users and this is more about the critics of Emacs and Plone.

Emacs

People (mostly vi users) laughed at Emacs, because it was a big, fat editor. "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" was the meaning of the name back then.

Today Vim isn't much smaller anymore and we hardly remember the time when 8 MiB of RAM were a lot of memory. Emacs looks relatively small when compared to big IDEs, written in Java.

Plone

That's similar to Plone.

Plone is an Open Source CMS written in Python. And it has the reputation of being fat and slow. A resource hog that needs a big server just to show a few pages in bearable time.

The speed got better from release to release and is still an important point in the development. But what's more important: Today's servers have more than just 256 MiB RAM, as recommended for a straightforward Plone site.

The server setup of plone.org:

Dual 3 GHz XEON

4 GiB of RAM

You can get a similar system for about 60€/month from respected hosting companies.

We programmers are always looking for technology that scales and can handle many concurrent users. That's the reason for the rise of Erlang web frameworks and the downfall of Ruby on Rails. But most of the time our projects won't get as many hits in a year as Plone.org gets in a day. A medium sized server can handle more than one medium sized Plone site for you.

So, Plone is like Emacs. Once laughed at because of the size. But computers became bigger and faster, making this a non issue. What stays is the question of the complexity. To quote Wikipedia: Plone's weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers.

Hey, let's deploy this Python Web Application!

2009-01-20T20:29:00.001+01:00

Please choose:

Apache + mod_python
WSGI
CGI
FastCGI
Python webserver
Python webserver behind Proxy
SCGI
just give up

Background: A customer's hosting service has a nice table with all features that are available. Packet A and B don't allow Python and Ruby. But packet C does. Nice!

Nice?

They don't tell you which version of Python or how to use/deploy it.

Emacs is like beer

2009-01-20T19:56:00.001+01:00

There's much peer pressure when it comes to beer. People expect you to drink and think you are weak if you don't.

Reminds me of Emacs.

Emacs users can't understand that not everybody wants to use their favorite "editor". This comes double if it is a programming language community that got emacsyfied, like the Lisp community.

Paul Graham used Vim and GNU/CLISP to become rich. He wrote some essays and inspired many programmers to try out Common Lisp as well.
But today you are weak if you don't use Emacs, SLIME, and SBCL.

I mentioned enclojure somewhere. It's an IDE for Clojure. But I guess people will stick with Emacs. And they will not admit it if it was the wrong choice for them.

Tcl Shocker

2008-12-14T15:07:00.001+01:00

The article Tcl the misunderstood does a good job explaining most of Tcl's features. But some things can shock most programmers. Things that could fulfill the perverted dreams of a PHP user:


$ tclsh
% set a pu
pu
% set b ts
ts
% $a$b "Hello World"
Hello World

But don't let this stop you from learning/using Tcl.It's still a nice glue language.

Important fact on the IMDB: 36

2008-09-07T19:05:00.001+02:00

36 is the body count in The Dark Knight. ;-)

Batman Begins only had 18. Rambo 236!

Gas hits $9.50 in Germany!

2008-07-05T13:19:00.000+02:00

We paid $9 in May. Now it's July and the average price for a liter gasoline is €1.60. That's €6.06 for the gallon. At the current rate $9.51.

ARE YOU MAD??

2008-06-07T13:34:00.001+02:00

On 2008-04-29 I wrote Update your Flash! because a lot of users still used a vulnerable version of Adobe Flash. Date of the Security Bulletin: 2008-04-08

On 2008-05-28 I wrote Deactivate your Flash!, because the first announcements said that all versions of Adobe Flash are affected by an exploit. This information was updated later: Only old versions are affected. The current version 9.0.124.0 is OK (for now).

So, now it's 2008-06-07 and I checked 4 sites on Google Analytics. Only the last week from 2008-05-30 to 2008-06-06:

Site	9.0.124.0	9.0.115.0
A	34.48%	40.23%
B	45.16%	25.81%
C	41.89%	33.78%
D	23.08%	31.79%

Site B and C are two blogs that mentioned the urgency of updating the Flash plugin. Site A is a simple service. Site D the site of a media company for print, web, etc.
You can do the math to see that there are a lot of people using even older versions of Flash, that have even more security vulnerabilities. The table just shows the last two versions.

I have to repeat the question from the title:

ARE YOU MAD??

There is no safe place on the web. Every corner of the WWW can be the host of evil code. Harmless websites could include uncontrolled ads from unknown sources. A comment could exploit some bugs on a blog or similar page (MySpace, Facebook, ...) to hide code to include remote Flash files.

Check your version of Adobe Flash and update if necessary! NOW!

Want to learn programming or just another programming language?

2008-06-07T13:12:00.001+02:00

PLT Scheme is a nice implementation of the Scheme language. The upcoming version 4.0 will include many things that make programming and learning to program easy.

The Tour in Video announces a 10 minute short YouTube video showing the programming environment DrScheme (belongs to PLT Scheme). This beats SLIME, IMHO.

Deactivate your Flash!

2008-05-28T15:04:00.000+02:00

First I said "Update your Flash!" and now even the most current version isn't enough:

The current (unsecure) version is 9.0.124.0. No update available at this moment.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: 9.0.124.0 isn't vulnerable to this exploit

$9 for the Gallon

2008-05-17T13:54:00.001+02:00

Current gasoline price in Germany is €1.539 for the liter. That's €5.826 for the Gallon. At today's rate $9.077 for the Gallon.

A bit over a month ago it was at $8.73.

Fan of Harry Potter and Python?

2008-05-03T20:28:00.001+02:00

$ sudo ln -s `which python` /usr/local/bin/parseltongue

Mozilla's Add-Ons Site supports Compatibility Ranges again!

2008-05-02T17:04:00.000+02:00

In Mozilla's Add-Ons Site redesigned I was a bit disappointed, because I wasn't able to see if my favorite add-ons will still work with Firefox 3 anymore. The redesign removed the information about the compatibility of an add-on.

A minor revision of the add-ons site has now restored this information.

Check it yourself. Visit the NoScript page, scroll down a bit, and there you are:

Works with:
Firefox: 1.5.0.4 - 3.0pre

Thanks to the AMO development team. Thanks to Paul Kim for the information!