Category Archives: General

BubbleBable

  By olaf | February 10, 2008 - 10:05 pm | General, Nonsense and nonserious
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Seems like I was mentioned… I hope in a favorable context.

Q12　最近メインで使っている言語は？　なぜその言語に引かれたのですか？

Perl。それまではawkやCを使っていて、今でもたくさん使っているけれど、PerlはCでやりたいことをプロトタイピングするのに実は便利。システムコールとかよく似た名前で扱えるしね。後、よいライブラリがそろっている。DNS関連では、オラフ・コルクマン（Olaf Kolkman）のNet::DNSなんか結構素敵。

　Cは知っておくと困らない。おかげで今もなんとかメシが食えてます。別に簡単な統計計算をCでやったっていい。32ビット同士のかけ算で、結果が64ビットであってほしい、というのをアセンブリ言語以外で書くのって結構面倒だからね。

　オブジェクト指向的なものにはイマイチ慣れなくて、使わずにいるんだけど、データや実行しているコードの流れさえつかめば、どういう言語でも対応はできると思う。Concurrency（同時に複数のコードが走っていること）を考えると、順番が書かれている通りに実行されるわけじゃないから、難しいけど。

　言語オタクにはなれなかったというか、劣等感があります。Prologとか、全然分かっていない。LISPのS式は、素晴らしいと思うし、教養の1つとして知っておくべきだと思うけど。JavaとCommon Lispが近縁なんだよな、そういえば。

　ツールというか、ゴチャマンとした処理系としては、Rは面白いと思ってます。プログラミング言語というよりは、統計処理関連アプリだけど :-）

Debating technique

  By olaf | September 28, 2007 - 5:53 pm | General
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 What is the name of the debating trick that starts with making wide sweeping statements about the community of your opponent, like in:

Our 61st Febember blog post on Chocolate Cookies has generated significant attention. It is gratifying to see culinary experts like Cookie Monster respond. Not so gratifying is that Cookie Monster's response reveals that even experts in pastry can fail to understand the dietary implications of the recipes they work with daily. This has been a longstanding problem in the culinary community.

 

 

Sopranos ….

  By olaf | June 25, 2007 - 8:29 am | General
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I am a big fan of the Sopranos. However, Dutch television fails to broadcast the show on prime time so it never made it really popular in the NL. That leaves me nothing but SOBT (Stealing over BitTorrent) or waiting for the DVD series to come and pay 60 Euro.

Anyway, I am watching series 6 and the first episode started with a long scene, with a William S. Burroughs track accompagnying the images, that introduced in what state of life the family and their friends are. The William S. Burroughs track I didn't know but it sounded remarkably like the work he did with the "The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy" (Michael Franti's old band). A plesant goosebump experience.

I try to understand why I like the Sopranos so much, one of the reasons is that the show is pure commedy. For instance, I couldn't stop laughing when one therapist, Eliot, was talking to the other, Melfi, and said, without a trace of cynicism: "This Omerta concept comes from a pre-therapeutic culture".

I fail to understand why the broadcast of the last episode made the Dutch news. They had to first explain that the Sopranos is a popular series in the US and then broadcasted the plot spoiler! 

Wonder goo

  By olaf | June 8, 2007 - 5:48 pm | General, Technical
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We recently bought a house and we are now in the proces of painting it. Some walls need a little more than just a bit of paint. They need patching and fixing and, and that is really bad, removal of texture. I bought myself a grinder to perform the first step. The second step is where ARDEX commes in.

ARDEX is a plaster/synthetic material  that you apply to your walls or ceilings. I am completely unexperienced in plastering but this stuff works like a charm.

Its hard to get though. I had to call 5 hardware stores to find an ‘obscure’ specialized store that carried it.

I didn’t know I could be so enthousiastic about a bag of powder.

From OpenCola to Bin Laden

  By olaf | February 23, 2007 - 8:24 am | Food and Cooking, General
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OpenCola (source: wikimedia.org)

 

I just stumbled upon a Wikipedia lemma on opencola. The recipy contains a fair amount of Gum Arabic. That reminded me of a book by Dorrit van Dalen that recently appeared at Bert Bakker publishers that is high on my wishlist. What is below I read in review.

Apperantly Gum Arabic is one of those substances that is imposible to synthesize and that can only be retrieved from damaged barks of certain spiecies of the Accasia tree. In dutch the phenomena is called “Tranen der Accasias” (Accassia tears) which happens to be the title of one of the first novels by Willem Frederik Hermans. The circumstances under which the gum is produced is hardly known so that the production is hardly cultivated.

The name Gum Arabic stems from the fact that the Accasia species  can only be found in the subsahara regions. If I recall well the main production used to be in West Africa but has moved to East African Sudan.  Traditionally the traders in Gum Arabic are powerful men. It is one of the markets that has always been dominated by the traders. The first major buyers of the product were textile printers and they had no choice than to deal with the traders. Those traders needed to protect the sources for their product and therefore these became a pretty secretive bunch.

The book argues that the Bin Laden familly (Osama in particular) has a large stake as one of the Sudanese gum traders. Sudanese gum was one of the products that was kept out of economic embargos because it is one of the main substances for Coca Cola (and other food and drink). Wikipedia dismisses this as an urban legend. Which makes me want to read the book even more.

 

Also see the Wikipedia Gum Arabic lemma, that is also where I found the explanation why arabic gum is used in cola: Gum arabic reduces the surface tension of liquids, which leads to increased fizzing in carbonated beverages.

 

KORG MS20

  By olaf | February 19, 2007 - 10:11 pm | General, Technical
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Korg MS 20

I almost forgot about it… my Korg MS20

The poor machine and has been sitting in the attick of my parents for years.

If I recall well one of the oscilators is broken. Given that this is a electronic instrument that should be easy to fix with a soldering iron, a transistor, condensor, resistor, and/or some knowledge of electronics.

With the latter I am less comfortable. Fortunatelly the Internet provided me with a copy of the Service Manual and the repair job can be done by handy friends.

I remember fabricating a “drum-pad” by covering two layers of duplex wood with aluminium foil and seperating them a tiny bit so that hitting them with a drum stick would control the input. That with the white noise generator would produce that funky “clap” noise.

I should undust the machine and compare how it compares with Korg’s Legacy Cell software.

Further googling made me aware that this little machine has quite some cult status. It has been valued at about $1000. I am not sure if I want to sell this memorabilia of my teenage years.