Adventures with Computers
Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category.
PhpWiki:ReiniUrban added the [PHP Weather][] plugin code from PhpWiki:CarstenKlapp. It was on PhpWikiDemo:enPhpWeather for some time but never in CVS.
Here is a test of the [PHP Weather][] plugin:
<?plugin PhpWeather icao="EKAH" language="en" ?>
It shows how the weather is where I live.
I’m moving my site to a WikiWikiWeb instead of these static HTML pages. A WikiWikiWeb is a special kind of site where everybody can edit all the pages live in their browser (try it yourself in the SandBox on my Wiki) from anywhere in the world.
Until most of the pages have been moved to the Wiki, you’ll be able to access it here:
When the transition is done, then I expect to install the Wiki as the root of gimpster.com. But now, please go to the Wiki and explore. Perhaps you have something you would like to put on the frontpage? No problem — just place your news for today at the top of this page! Perhaps you have a question about my PhpTutorial? Then just edit the page!
You probably know the old game where you’re have to guess an object that someone else is thinking about. You have 20 questions, and the objective for you is to narrow to amount of possible objects down to only one. You can play this over the Internet.
It’s the computer that plays against you — you have to think about something, and the computer will guess it. It’s quite amazing how good the computer is: it has guessed all the common things that I’ve tried. I also tried with “the weather” as the object. The computer came very close, but it couldn’t decide if I was thinking about “life” or “the weather” :-)
I just saw this huge discussion over at the Debian-devel
mailinglist
about whether or not the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License) is a
free license. That is free in the Debian sense:
it has be fulfill the
DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) before it can be
included in the main section of the Debian
archives. There’s currently lots of stuff in the archive that’s licensed
under the LPPL, but the
Debian guys would rather see that it was
distributed under another license, or that the
LPPL is changed to conform with
the DFSG.
The problem seams to be, that the LPPL forbids you from modifying a file and then redistributing it using the same filename. This is important for us LaTeX folks, because one of the promises of LaTeX (and TeX) is, that a document processed today will look identical when it’s processed 10 years from now. If everybody is allowed to change important files, then that promise would be hard to keep. This isn’t just a theoretical concern — it has happened that someone changed the Computer Modern fonts made by Donald E. Knuth and distributed them as the original set. They thought that they were helping people by improving the fonts, but that wasn’t how others looked at it. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, but if they had changed the width of a character just a little, then it could mean that lines would be broken differently, something that must not happen. If an author has prepared a document using his own installation of LaTeX, then he has to be absolutely sure that the publishers version of LaTeX will place the letters at the exact same position on the page.
One the other hand, then the Debian guys want to reserver the right to change the files in their LaTeX distribution, in case they discover a security risk or something like that. This is a very hypothetical situation, but they want the right to do this anyway.
So, is boils down to a question of trust: do the LaTeX community trust the users not to cause havoc by distributing modified files from the core of TeX and LaTeX? Apparently not, and after the story about the improved CM fonts, I can understand their fear. I don’t think they fear that the teTeX maintainers would go crazy, it’s more about the principle that people has the option of changing those files.
I hope that they can works things out — it would be a real shame if this
“battle of principles” should end with moving the teTeX packages to
non-free, as almost everybody recognizes that TeX and
LaTeX are some of the finest examples of
free software.
I had my first exam (in dADS) last Monday.
It was a written test that lasted four hours. It wasn’t exactly an easy
exam, there was four major questions each with three or four subquestions.
I answered all the subquestions except one. Now we’ll just have to wait for
the result.
The next exam is also a written test, this time in Probability Theory. It’s a week away now, so I have plenty of time to get prepared. I’m also pretty confident with this exam because we have done a lot of training with the questions from previous exams. It’s the same four questions each year — the numbers are just a bit different :-)