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

-- Filed under:

Posted by jochem on 2005-08-01, last update on 2005-08-01
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

-- Filed under:

Posted by jochem on 2005-06-30, last update on 2005-06-30
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.

-- Filed under:

Posted by jochem on 2005-06-28, last update on 2005-06-28
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.

-- Filed under:

Posted by jochem on 2005-05-22, last update on 2005-05-22
Ngingenwe Emoyeni

Some rights reserved by Iapia (http://www.flickr.com/photos/iapia) Yesterday I went to African Footprint, a south African dance/musical show, running already from 2000. This month the show visits Amsterdam.

The show was nice, very good dancers, exciting choreography. It was a blend of modern and African dance in which gumbo, jive, eastern, tapping and even western dancing found its place. Besides the occasionally too heroic spoken moments (Africa is the most beautiful country etc., but no word on the problems between the different tribes, aids etc.). In theater I can handle the disney/hollywood setup of the show better than in movies, because I really appreciate the beautiful voices of professional singers and the proper balance of the sound, well-composed songs and good looking costumes.

The best part was in my opinion the jazz-piece. Why did the black people became so rap-obsessed, while they had the much better jazz/blues???

-- Filed under:

Posted by jochem on 2005-04-23, last update on 2005-04-23
<- older entries | newer entries ->