Peterbe.com

I just found out that I have passed my latest grading that I took on the 11th of Jan (2004). Now my highest pattern is: SI MEN DOU DI - Four Doors/Five Elements. Cool!

See this blog about the previous grading.

dabbrev is a plugin for Jed that allows you to repeat a word that has been written before with a simple key-command.

Suppose you write somewhere in your text the word: SelectHDSDirectories_sql. Then a little later you intend to write that word again, but can't be asked to type it all out, then all you do is write Sel and press CTRL-Q (i.e. Ctrl button at the same time as the key q) and it finishes the word for you.

Simon Willison has written a nice article about Simple tricks for more usable forms and from it I learned about how <label> tags work. They have been part of HTML since 1998 so today most browsers should support them; and if not, it's not a show-stopper. What they do is that they help to associate a text with an input field. For example, here, mouseclick the word "Name" and "Agree?" below.

"robots.txt" is a file you can create on your site to help indexing bots to index your site correctly. These bots first scans your robots.txt file to see which pages to ignore.

This page is a good tool to keep in mind to validate your robots.txt files. robotstxt.org has more information about the wannabe standard.

My near-future hope is to set up my own weblog where each new blog item is my write-up of notes from my math lectures. The purpose of this is twofold:

• Study my notes from lectures
• Learn more about web development with odd content/format

I then need to be able to write mathematical expressions in my HTML using TeX syntax and have the expressions converted to images. TeX (father of LaTeX (father of Itex)) looks like this:

\[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n} \text{ is divergent, 
but }  \lim_{n \to \infty} \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{i}
- \ln n \text{ exists.}\]

Fun little Flash game where you hit a penguin as far as you possibly can.

My record is 316.7. Can you beat that?

SimCity 4 is out. Or actually, I think it's been out for a while now, but I haven't noticed it until now.

Anyway, it looks absolutely stunning from the screenshots and apparently you can make friends with a selected few citizens who will give you feedback from their neighborhood.

On their website, there is also the option to play SimCity Classic online I couldn't be asked right now because you have to register (free I think) but if you give it a go let us know what you think.

Today I got my new keyboard. A Microsoft Internet Keyboard. It's exactly like the one I had before. The old one work just fine except that the keys were starting to get squeaky. The difference is very subtle but I felt I had to punch the keys from directly upwards. With this new one it's so much easier to type. Small difference on the outside but a really big difference for me.

Today I've also had my first "Object Oriented Programming in C++" lecture and lab. This is as far as we got today:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
   cout << "Hello world!\n";
   return 0;
}

Actually we did a few more things. Next lecture I think we'll start with classes and stuff. A requirement for this course is that you already know programming (in Java) so we'll be able to skip while loops and if statements. Good.

Today was also the first lecture in Bottom Up Computing and Discrete Mathematics. A combination of elementary discrete math plus some general knowledge of how computers work. We'll even have a lab where we take apart a laptop to learn about the hardware inside. This lecture we spent discussing how Google's PageRank works. I'm looking forward to doing some serious math on algorithms like this. It will help a lot in understanding how Google does it.

Some truly amazing photojournalism here on the former Soviet block. The photographer/journalist travels through Russia, Ukraine, Chechnya, Kosovo and many other countries. Start on the introduction and enjoy every photo.

"For 10 years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, TIME contract photographer Anthony Suau has travelled the lands of the former Soviet bloc. In the hundreds of powerful images and audio commentaries that follow, Suau documents in stark detail the people of that region as they shed their former skin and head into an unknown future."

The photo collection is called "Beyond the Fall" because it starts when the Berlin wall fell.

I can't guarantee the validity of this experiment, but it sure is unusual. They give a poor subject LSD in doses and has the subject to draw to see the effects.

"These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD

part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils."

If this experiment really happened, then what are the ethical implications of this today?