Aswin F. van Woudenberg

“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”

Thanks Mitsai for taking these photos

Speciaal voor m’n collega Bea een recept met spruitjes. Normaal houd ik niet zo van spruitjes, maar op deze manier klaargemaakt vind ik het wel lekker. Het is niet eens moeilijk.

Ingrediënten voor 2 personen

• 350 gr spruiten
• 1 rode paprika
• 1 ui
• 2 el olie
• 1 geperst teentje knoflook
• 1 tl kerriepoeder
• 1 tl currypasta
• 1 dl kokosmelk
• zout

Read more…

Mathematics is the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

– Bertrand Russell

A while ago I was looking for a simple lightweight c++ library that could produce some basic charts. I quickly found the PPlot library which is designed to easily integrate with different GUI toolkits and also comes with bindings for ruby and python. To make the library usable within different GUI frameworks the drawing part has been abstracted to a Painter class. For each GUI framework a different Painter class must be implemented. The library comes with ready made implementations for GUI toolkits like wxWidgets and QT. However, I wanted to use the PPlot library in a pure win32 application and had to implement my own Painter class. If you’re in a similar situation check out my source for an example.

?- Trace.
% ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later
%
%       >> 42 << (last release gives the question)

The ‘Oldehove’ is an unfinished church tower in the centre of my hometown Leeuwarden. It leans even more than the tower of Pisa and is a must see for anyone visiting Leeuwarden. It’s open to the public from May to September.

Tresoar, the Frisian Historical and Literary Centre has a webcam on its roof that allows one to see the Oldehove in real time via this link. By grabbing and saving an image of the tower every 10 seconds for 24 hours, I was able to create the following video.

I first made a simple shell script to download the latest webcam image every ten seconds. The script looks like this.

#!/bin/bash
let c=1000000;
while [ 1 ];
do
        let c = $c + 1;
        wget http://83.136.192.185/record/current.jpg?rand=$c;
        sleep 10;
done

I got the URL by looking at the image source on the tresoar page. I let this script run for 24 hours starting at midnight. After the script finished I renamed all files using the following command:

rename 's/current\.jpg\?rand=(\d{7})$/current$1.jpg/' \
current.jpg\?rand\=*

The image files are then combined into the final movie by issuing the following command:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o oldehove.avi -ovc \
lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800

Of course you should have the required binaries installed.

Just finished another course, namely functional programming. The programming was done in Haskell and to pass the course one had to do a couple of assignments. Personally, I really like the whole functional programming paradigm a lot, and find it a pity that it’s not used very much in the industry.

I just finished I think the least interesting course for my MSc in Computer Science… You would expect something cool and technical from a course called ICT-architecture, but it was mainly about enterprise architectures… boring stuff…