The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H. P. Lovecraft
Virtual X(I)

by Sammy A few days ago I read XHTML, what is the point?. Later that day, someone pointed me to Sending XHTML as text/html considered harmful by Ian Hickson. Especially the last article goes in great detail about why you shouldn't send xhtml pages with mime type text/html.

Usually I do not respond to such articles, but this one is very well-written and a lot of points Ian makes are absolutely valid. I still do not listen to this expert and serve my XHTMl pages as text/html, so therefore I feel the need to explain the reasoning behind this situation further in this entry.

In fact the problem is (again) the never updated version of internet explorer, otherwise everybody could happily send application/xhtml+xml for all xhtml pages.

Later that day: Because I had a laptop with ms windows available this weekend I could test the site in iexplore.exe and decided to make the jump now and changed the site to XHTML 1.1 and UTF-8 anyway. It is served properly to browsers that support application/xhtml+xml, others are on their own...

So (with the proper fonts installed), you can enjoy: من می توانم بدونِ احساس درد شيشه بخورم

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Posted by jochem on 24th September 2005, last update on 24th September 2005
OK Computer

Turned 29 at what the hack. I really enjoyed this event, hopefully I have some code to release soon. You can see at these pictures what the atmosphere was like.

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Posted by jochem on 1st August 2005, last update on 1st August 2005
Tango passen
Some rights reserved by nopipno (http://flickr.com/photos/nopipno/)

Eerste seizoen

Tweede seizoen

Derde seizoen

Les 1

Les 2

Les 3

Les 4

Les 5

Les 6

Les 7

Les 8

Les 9

Les 10 (zonder docenten)

Vierde seizoen

Les 0

Les 1

Les 2

Les 4

Les 5

Les 6

Les 8

Les 9

Les 10

Les 12

Les 13

Les 14-17

Les 18

Les 19

Vijfde seizoen

Les 1

Les 2

Les 3

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Posted by jochem on 30th June 2005, last update on 30th June 2005
Enter

Some rights reserved by smiling_da_vinc (http://www.flickr.com/photos/smiling_da_vinciMay 1997: I was visiting a concert on Dynamo Open Air, by a very unknown band, named Within Temptation. About 5000 long-haired and black-dressed metalheads were there to see a very special and refreshing gig.

Now, almost ten years later, this band is very popular and their music has not changed much (genre-members Nightwish, Tristania and After Forever for example, deliver much better, more sophisticated albums). Visiting the Within Temptation concert at Parkpop was however again a nice experience. A crowd of 200.000, consisting of a very wide variety of people, complete families, house- and rapfans, old blues-lovers, ultra-hip designers, etc. etc.) were enjoying the still heavy sound of Within Temptation. Can the world change or what??

Totally unrelated: If someone has/needs a graph of the colour of bread through the ages, contact me; I assembling one.

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Posted by jochem on 28th June 2005, last update on 28th June 2005
Foucault's Pendulum

Some rights reserved by Feuillu (http://www.flickr.com/photos/feuilllu/) These weeks, with much pleasure, I have been reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The writer truly knows a lot about history, philosophy, literature, different cultures and is very erudite. So besides enjoying the good plot, reading Foucault's Pendulum learns me a lot. However, on one thing the writer is a bit off. In the beginning of the book the main person tries to break into a computer by writing a (inefficient) computer program which generates anagrams of 'JHVH'.

Accidentally two weeks before reading this passage I wrote for my DND group a small program which solves a similar question in general. Since this group is too lazy to solve puzzles, I put the program on line; it is called rotx. Perhaps someone can make good use of it. It finds all rotx puzzles (with x = [1..25]) which deliver again a known word.

So, for example layout is the 'encrypted' version of fusion (rot6, so a->h, b->i, c->j, d->i, e->k, f->l, etc.), curly -> wolfs, arena - river, etc.

In dutch some solutions are urnen -> lieve, opaal -> hitte, knijp -> bezag and kerk->gang.

To use rotx you need a wordlist, for example as generated by aspell:

   aspell --lang=en dump master | ./rotx - > rotated.txt

The output (in the example above copied to rotated.txt) contains all rotated words which can also be found in the original wordlist..

The first incarnation of the program was in bash/sed/tr and awfully slow. (I had to try though, "No premature optimization!"). It should take two weeks to process a 1.5 MB English wordfile. (Eco's Basic script should take what, years??). Enter C++ and STL. The direct approach (rotating all words through the entire alphabet and looking all results up in the original list) should still take around 20 hours. So I cooked up an algorithm which uses more memory, but finishes in approximately 15 seconds on my old and crusty AMD duron 850!

The source can be found at /downloads/rotx.cc.html.

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Posted by jochem on 22nd May 2005, last update on 22nd May 2005

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