Saturday, December 27, 2003

neues & squeak

What is so new about blogging? Apart from the fact that “blogging” is already several years old, nothing. Having a personal website on which you write is, I would say, almost as old as the web itsself. It just wasn't called blogging but news, diary, whatever.

I did play around with squeak, only as much as to get a superficial impression of it. It seems to be a very nice IDE, they syntax though is a bit unusual to me. I wish it were lisp.

Monday, December 22, 2003

approximation of lisp community size

According to google it's 3 pages or ~30 hits. Whenever you search for websites related to eg. lemonodor.com or ww.telent.net/diary/ you get 30 results, which span 3 pages.

Sunday, December 21, 2003

jammin

The jam may have been special, but I don't know why, yet.

Things are looking good, for a) there is something to wait for and it ain't christmas and b) eventhough I have to wait, it won't make me crazy cause i know i won't miss anything.

Life is sooo good, and I'm soo happy. I could just say it over and over again.

Thursday, December 18, 2003

sour cherry jam

If you fetch “Sauerkirschmarmelade” from university things are strange. I hope there is more of it, I'll find out tomorrow.

Sunday, December 14, 2003

languages i want to learn

  • finnish
  • swedish
  • latin
  • estonian
  • danish
  • dutch
  • norwegian

I do already know latin from school, but i forgot most of it.

Saturday, December 13, 2003

no tables, please

I edited the template for this blog, removed some “bad” style. First of all the table had to go, I don't why it was used in first place. It's main purpose was to center & limit the layout to 80%, well width: 80%; margin-left: 10%; does the same. It also seperated the headline, links, content, links into different cells. Thats all gone now and done with divs and CSS, and why divs were placed in the cells is a mystery to me, unless some WYSIWYG editor was involved in the creation of that template.

What I'm still planning to do is to set up some sidebar with some links.

Thursday, December 11, 2003

fairy tales

In the seminar I'm visiting, we had a short introduction into estonian literature. The Lector handed round some books, among them two containing estonian fairy tales (in german, I can't read nor speak estonian).
Fairy tales are interesting, usually they're set in a rural scene, in a time when horse-carriages were the standard method of transportation, a time that is unlike ours. But the deeper meaning of those stories still hold true. The stories also contain forgotten things, thing that were common in those days, but have been replaced or abandoned by us. And they are mostly simple and easy, which makes them a nice read.

For some reason there are many old estonian authors which have german names like Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald author of the estonian national epic “Kalevipoeg

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

owl

I did a presentation on OWL Web Ontology Language 2 Weeks ago

emacs gui

for myself

(custom-set-faces
 '(default ((t (:background "white"))) t)
 '(zmacs-region ((t (:foreground "white" :background "black"))) t))

(set-face-font 'default "-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*")

I saw emacs20 at the university today (because emacs seems to be a link to 20 instead of 21), and my first impression was “wow, a bitmap like black & white GUI, how do I replicate that in (X)Emacs 21?”. the emacs20 GUI reminds me of lisp pr0n, aka simple, sharp, existing for ages, but like the wheel it's reinvented again and again, but with more colours and of course “better”.

Monday, December 08, 2003

cookies and books

Today I bought three bags of “Braune Kuchen” and three books:

  • Informatik - Eine konstruktive Einführung
  • LISP - Anwendungsgebiete, Grundbegriffe, Geschichte
  • The New UCI LISP Manual

The Informatik Library of my university sold them for € 0,50 each. I wish they had sold Pauls books aswell. There are some problems though. The first & the third one were typesetted with a Typewriter, the LISP code in the second book is badly formatted (spaces missing, few newlines), and all of them don't talk about common lisp, so you'll me things like DE instead of DEFUN.

Whats interesting is that “LISP - Anwendungsgebiete, Grundbegriffe, Geschichte” was written by a Prof. in the GDR.

Sunday, December 07, 2003

point of view

taking a negative look at something will give you negative results, looking at these results results in negative results. circle, bad circle.

A lot of my fear comes from this. I try to imagine a situation, see and follow the bad things, which I don't want. Then I fear this fictitious situation and try to avoid it, which is not only bad because I avoid things which I have to do but this is a start of a vicious circle.

Not thinking too much about consequences, choosing the positive pov and getting positive feedback helps.

no panther review, there are enough

Thursday, December 04, 2003

panther arrived

I forgot the other option, one of my neighbours took the package. I have installed already, but the font settings needs fixing, they were sharper with Jaguar.

if i

if I had stayed at home today, I would have Panther and Keynote by now. I didn't so I wonder where it is, as I didn't get card saying where I can pick it up.

I'm not sure, but I think she's ignoring me, not totally but she's showing less attention.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

i could cry

it's so beautiful i could cry, it's different, for better. i don't feel pushed aside, ignored

I will see her again on thursday, two days, which will take a long time to pass.

You know, it's that thing when you are just happy, it comes close to a perfect time, what is better than happiness/love? -

Thursday, November 20, 2003

kissa on matolla

Indicator that you are in love: When you think “Oh, no! It's going to be five days till I will see her again“

That's how I feel at the moment. It's horrible, like waiting for christmas eve. Last night I was so excited I had to read a book to get my mind off her and fall asleep.

Although it's not listed in his schedule, I'm going to listen to Adrian Plass tonight.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Don't watch Matrix 3

I did it, and I regret it, poor story, no very poor story. Everything that has a beginning has an end, Matrix doesn't, or at least it's so disappointing, that it would do better without part three. The only thing which is interesting plotwise is the talk between that architect and the oracle, the rest is crap.

Saturday, November 01, 2003

java sucks!

No not really, it's just that the the current code assignment, which really sucks, is in java.

Too angry, must take a break and go to my fathers birthday.

elaboration

Side-effects aren't cool, calling a method just to get a side-effect, is something i loath to do. We had to code a simple queue whose content is limited by the types the comparator accepts. The comparator will throw a exception if incompatible objects are passed. So the queue.enqueu(Object o) method will “throw” will throw it aswell, which is okay if the queue already contains an element. If the queue is empty no comparison/sorting has to be done, but that means you could have a object, which won't be accepted by the comparator, in your queue. Calling comparator.compare(o,o) solves the problem, but I don't want to compare anything I call it just to cause a exception if o isn't accepted by comparator.compare(). Thats why “java” sucks.

Friday, October 31, 2003

caffein flash

I drank too much coffee at work today, doesn't really do me good.

Lisp leads you to the toilet. If you programm in lisp you'll mostly likely use emacs, which will force you to drink coffee which dehydrates you, fills your bladder, and bladders are emptied on the toilet.

Thursday, October 30, 2003

M-x eval-buffer

my xemacs won't (load "file") and somehow claims # breaks syntax, so as a workaround i suggest: C-x s, and C-x e (load ""), that way scheme handles the evaluation and emacs can't complain.

On Lisp

by Paul Graham, which is what I am reading atm. Sadly it is out of print so your options of obtaining it are basically limited to buying a used one via ebay or flea-markets, borrow it from a library or simply stick with online version, for free.

I think it's a great book, because it delivers what the cover promises “Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp”. Though i find his usage of destructive functions a bit strange, he says one should treat them as if there were a tax on their use, but he uses them in almost every function he defines.

I found a well-preserved copy of CLtL2 for € 12.50 on ebay, but it the last minutes it went up to € 25, too high for me now :(

Monday, October 20, 2003

SemWeb

I signed for up the “Proseminar Benutzungsintuition und Transparenz im Semantic Web”. We had the first meeting today in which she gave us a light introduction into the semantic web.

We will have to present one topic of a givent set of topics and write paper about the same topic, which should be easy and interesting.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

day one

Today we had an general introduction what we are going to do and which tools we will use. We have been given the task of improving a simple text adventure, add a GUI and there is enough time implement some kind of multiplayer (mmorpg?). To do this we have eclipse, JUnit, ant and possibly also JWAM.

Normally I would use vim/emacs to program, but for java using eclipse is the better choice, because it is assisting you so much, autocomplete almost everything, tooltips for everything, JUnit ant and CVS integration, that's more than you need most of the time, but when you do it's there.

define & string-append

Took me a lot of time to figure out how to do it right. What I want do is write a defstruct ala fixnum using only r5rs. Here is what I have so far:

(define-syntax hb
    (syntax-rules ()
      ((hb x y) (eval `(define ,(string->symbol (string-append "hose" (symbol->string `x))) y)))))

I think there is a another better, shorter way to do this, but for now it will do.

Learning to use xemacs is not as hard as most people say, at least not if you have a vi(m) to emacs command chart

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Something I will regret

I love vi(m), it's small it's powerfull and a unix box without vi isn't complete, and right now I'm installing xemacs on my linux box, why? Because of lisp, because of scheme. I want to venture deeper into the realm of lisp, and as xemacs is the lisp editor, I'll try to learn using it.

In the next updates i will probably share some lisp links, write something about my lisp adventures and comment on the Java eXtreme Programming course which will start on thursday. Rumor has it that we will write a game.

Sunday, July 13, 2003

Evangelism gone wrong

While searching for Frozen Bubble I found this request to “not port software to Windows”. Nice, a another person who doesn't understand what “free software” means, and esp. doesn´t know what “good” software is. So here is my response:

Free software for me means freedom of choice, Felix von Leitner (Author), obviously doesn´t, he excludes Windows. Windows may be crap, it may be propietary but if we exclude it from the list of possible options we are behaving just as bad as Microsoft. But what´s really is that he kinda implies everybody should use linux, but as of now Windows IS the better choice for most people. The linux desktop has advanced a lot but it just isn´t ready for joe average yet. And what about the Windows only software? Should we discard it and use some mediocre but “free” software? Nice, but absolutely unrealistic.

Many people using Windows don't care about their freedom. They do care about quality software and for that reason try to replace all the user space software from Microsoft with better free alternatives. This is the sole reason for the existance of cygwin.

This is the worst sentence of his request, he implies that “that if you care about quality and use cygwin you do not care about freedom”. Wrong, just wrong, caring about freedom and caring about quality is not mutually exclusive. In fact if there wasn´t cygwin there would be less freedom, less choice. With the help of cygwin the can use some unix tools and windows at the same time.

My stance on “quality” is as following: If you are looking for software which does a specific job, go for the best software don't hinder yourself by thinking “must be free, must be open source, must run under linux”. It should simply do its job, and be easy to use. Writing software for linux or windows is nonsense, software is written for users.

To sum it up in one sentence: I think he wants to limit choice under the disguise of freedom which is contradictionary and highly suspicious.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

White Stripes

I came home and what did I find? The package from amazon has arrived! “De Stijl” by The White Stripes, which completes my White Stripes collection, and “A Little Deeper” by Ms. Dynamite. I thought I never heard or saw “De Stijl” before i saw a ad for it in “3l3phant”, but after having a look at the inlet I remember listening to the LP at Saturn, I must have totally forgotten about it.

If there wasn´t this urge to visit the toilet I would have written more.

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Blinking

Blogs are about linking, and writing your useless stuff. At least thats my impression, so I will give you some links.

First of all we have webbery, a web gallery by a independent photographer. There are no annoying advertising, but you can go straight to the galleries view photos of eg. hips (which happens to be my favorite gallery).

Next in line is Ship of Fools the “Magazine of Christian Unrest”, for me it´s mostly a discussion forum, about all things jesus. A another highlight of theirs is the “Mystery Worshipper”, reports about church services in (mostly) England, America & Australia.

re:generation is a quaterly christian print mag, because of that some, but only some, of its articles are published only. Nonetheless worth reading.

sensibleerection is a community weblog, which means everyone can post links & comments to articles, galleries, games and pr0n. Yes right porn, if you don't want that enter here or create a account and set the filters accordingly.

There are nice guys and there are “nice guys”, if you want to know the difference have a look at Heartless Bitches International: “Nice Guys”=Bleah!, a collection of rants about these guys, someone could find himself there.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Ich träume von der Nacht und ich träume von dir Ich lausche der Stille und lausche dir Meine Augen wandern über den Himmel und landen bei dir Ein lächeln mich empfängt und lieblich umgarnt

The gift of love is amazing

Monday, April 14, 2003

Punch-Drunk Love

Been to the preview (free), got a arte bag, enjoyed the movie. The story itsself is short but worthwile watching, esp. because of A. Sandler. Unlike most of his previous movies, which i don't like, he's not making a fool of himself. The movie is funny but most of the time i was going with the character, trying to understand him, feeling empathy for him. The movie is weird but good, and the direction was even better, colourfull pictures, unusual perspectives. All in all i would give it 5 out of five points.

Saturday, April 05, 2003

This should have been the first post

Hi my name is Engelke and if you know me you'll know that i�m not saying much , which holds true for this blog aswell. But i think what i write still matters, quality over quantity, but you be judge.

I�m a christian, baptist to be exact. Friday night is reserved for the youth group at the church. If you check those links you'll find out they are all in German, which is because i live in Hamburg, Germany. I'm studying Informatik (which is like Computer Science, though a bit broader) at the University of Hamburg. I earn my money at epharmexx with PHP coding.

Thursday, April 03, 2003

I can't say how much i love websites which deal with web standards. Man i loathe the days when everything was in tables and javascript was a no go unless you wanted to quadruple your work only to find out that it doesn't work.

Saturday, March 22, 2003

test test can you read me?