This is a blog post about something which took place six months ago, so it could be considered somewhat belated. On the other hand, that gives me the opportunity to give the full story in one go, rather than just posting “well, I had the operation two hours ago and they didn’t actually blow up my eyeball, so I guess it could have been worse, but I’m not really supposed to be staring at a computer screen just now and anyway I am doped up on painkillers so I’m leaving now, okthxbye.”
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LASEK
February 7th, 2010The Betrayal of the Spirit
January 30th, 2010I don’t normally like to do “link blogging” — I’d rather post nothing at all for several months (which frequently happens) than just copy someone else’s work. But I’ll make an exception for this XKCD strip. I think it actually brought a tear to my eye.
Scripting Excel: can it really be this horrible?
December 27th, 2009OK, I have managed to avoid this for a long time, but I guess it was inevitable: here comes Martin’s cheap, nonconstructively sarcastic I-hate-Microsoft post.
So I was visiting my parents this week-end, and my Dad asked me to help him with a little macro job on an Excel spreadsheet. It sounded simple enough. However, I had forgotten just how astonishingly horrible Visual Basic For Applications, the sorry excuse for a programming language built into Excel (and the other Office applications), can be.
As far as I remember, the last time I did anything with VBA was probably somewhere in the late nineties. Even by the standards of back then, VBA is a really shitty programming language. By the standards of 2009, it’s spectacularly bad. The only explanation I can think of is that somewhere high up in Microsoft Strategic Command, somebody decided to spend a lot of effort on making it as useless and infuriating as possible, while still keeping it just barely functional enough to be able to do the things you want to do with it, if you’re willing to go through a lot of pain. God only knows why they made that decision, but surely a language as bad as this cannot be created by accident.
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Paying with bits
December 14th, 2009In the course of a friendly discussion with Dirk-Jan, I’ve been reading up on the miracles of digital cash.
And by digital cash, I do not mean lame stuff like Paypal, which is basically just an ordinary bank account to which you can send transfer orders. No, what I’m interested in is the real heavy stuff, whereby you have a digital wallet full of cryptographic “coins” which can be transfered from one party to another, without a single central entity keeping track of the contents of your wallet. Ideally, you want to be able to transfer such coins even off-line, without the central entity needing to be involved with every individual transfer.
There are a couple of basic problems with the idea of using bits as money, which any “crypto cash” system will need to find solutions for.
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I’m a runner!
September 20th, 2009Today was the day of the 25th Dam-tot-Dam-loop, a 16.1km running event from Amsterdam to Zaandam. Yours truly was one of the 35,000 people who signed up for the event, and one of the 17,614 people who made it to the finish line! Read the rest of this entry »
FritzBox!
June 23rd, 2009Wow!
I received my FritzBox 7170 today, as a present from XS4ALL for renewing my ADSL subscription for another year (cheap deal — I would have done that anyway). And it totally blows away my Thompson Speedtouch!
Golfing with prime factors
June 14th, 2009Dirk-Jan reminded me of the Perl Golf and Code Golf contests, both of which have the aim of solving a simple programming task in as few characters of source code as possible. See his post for a stunning example.
One of the open challenges is to work out the prime factors of a given number. To make things a little more difficult, the output must be printed in a specific format:
7000: 2^3 5^3 7
123456789: 3^2 3607 3803
Obfuscate your numbers!
June 7th, 2009Time for some silliness.
In a little over a month, I will be
years old.
What’s that, you didn’t get it? Here, I’ll repeat it for you in terms you may understand more easily:
At work, it has become a bit of a tradition that when people announce their birthday, they do so in an at least somewhat obfuscated format. Hexadecimal, binary and more obscure number formats are always popular, of course, as are silly descriptions of the form “my age is the ninth distinct biprime“. But last year I decided to take it to the next level, and write a little generator in Ruby for expressions such as the ones you see above. As you can probably guess, the expressions are generated using TeX.
You can play with it for yourself, if you want to, and also download the latest version of the code. But please be gentle with my server, as you can probably guess it’s a rather heavy application and I’m running this site on a little home PC..