Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

MacJournal or Ecto?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

This year’s MacHeistcontains MacJournal, a journaling app that apparently also lets you post to (at least) a Wordpress blog. Up to now, I had been trying Ecto, which at first sights seems to be a bit more powerful, but perhaps too powerful for my simple needs. Still, MacHeist is priced at $19.95, whereas Ecto costs $19.95 in itself. I’m not sure if I will ever use the other Heist apps, so it’s a tough call at this point. On the other hand, MacJournal can be used for other things besides blogging. Such as keeping track of stuff you did at work, for which I now use dead-tree type recording. Aargh! The choices!

After trying to post it does seem that adding keywords is not possible, so that’s definitely a minus for MacJournal.

Update: Still need to figure out how to enter raw HTML :-/

hMollom

Friday, February 26th, 2010

You may or may not be aware of the excellent anti-spam service provided by Mollom, founded by two friends and colleagues, Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen. Mollom provides an API to program against, allowing support libraries to be written in a variety of languages and for numerous platforms. Top-notch examples are the Drupal plugin (obviously :-) and the WordPress plugin. Next to that there are a number of libraries for Java, PHP5, Ruby, Python, etc. Sadly, a Haskell library was lacking.

Given that I enjoy programming in Haskell and need to sharpen my Haskell-fu, I set out to write a library for interfacing with the Mollom API. The library is far from finished, but it is functional at this point, so if you have Mollom keys, you can call the services and fight the spam war on your Haskell driven website.

I maintain two repositories where you can get the library:

At this point the library has been given version 0.1. So it is still lacking quite a lot of features. Stuff that is on the immediate TODO list:

  • Add fault handling
  • Add server list refreshing
  • Encapsulate the state in a monad

Any feedback is appreciated.

PyMollom moved to GitHub

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Just a quick update. I have moved the repository for PyMollom over to GitHub. If you are unfamiliar with git, you can check out the library using git clone git://github.com/itkovian/PyMollom.git. At this point, the library is still the same, but I do plan on integrating the new language detection ASAP.

New door opens, old door closes

Monday, February 1st, 2010

For the past three years, I guess, Veerle has been trying to get me to agree to close up the living room door and make a new door in the dining room. Last fall, I finally caved. I saw the light, she would put it :-) We discussed our plans with the guy who will be taking charge in redoing our attic, and signed the agreement last November. Half December he gave us a call, and we agreed upon having the job done by the end of January. On the 29th, the demolition man came by and tore a new hole in our wall. Using a water to limit the amount of dust the wall was split apart at the right spot. Three hours later, everything was cleared and the big cleanup could begin. Depsite the water, dust had spread throughout the living room, partially spoiling my plans for getting some work done. With spurious amounts of water and soap, the living room was cleaned, and along with it, all the toys, books, and decoration.

I tore down the old door, with Nathan’s help — he’s scared of loud noise, so I figured that if I could get him to help me out, he would at least stop crying. And he did. with combined forces, we yanked the door from the wall, and replaced it with a brand new wooden framework, against which I put 18mm of multiplex, covered with 9.5 mm of plaster plate (gyproc). A bucket of Knauf Goldband later and the doorway was effectively sealed shut.

I plastered the new door hole, using metal corners to work against — my plastering skillz are pretty good, but only for small areas, i.e., no wider than my tool is. So, without further ado, behold the new door and the sealed old door.

Changing doors
Changing doors

Needless to say, we had to move some furniture around :-)

Changing doors

Mind, a new glass sliding door will be installed shortly. when the money for it arrives on my bank account.

Flemish programming contest

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

On March 17th, 2010, Ghent University organises the second Flemish Programming Contest, in collaboration with the universities of Leuven, Hasselt, Brussels, and Antwerp.

For three different categories of participating teams (of at most three participants), we offer five problems that need to be solved in three hours. The goal is to have at least one fairly easy and one quite hard problem for each category, but as we all know, a problem is only hard when you do not see the solution. So YMMV. Still, we aim to have each team solve at least one problem. For this, teams can use any one of twelve programming languages: C, C++, C#, Haskell, Java, Pascal, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and VB.NET.

Programming should be fun, but to add an extra incentive, we have up to €2500 in prizes. So, without further ado, head over to the contest website and register.

Python wrapper for Mollom

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

With the release of the Mollom API, I have cleaned up and documented my Python wrapper for the API.

You can get the code from the darcs repository at http://itkovian.net/darcs/python_mollom. Alternatively, a packed tarball is also available.

For the moment, the repository contains two files Mollom.py and HTTPTransport.py. The former contains the MollomAPI and MollomFault classes. The latter contains a derived class to deal with HTTP transport in the XML PRC library, as the default Python code does not seem to do things correctly. To get the response from the Mollom service as a Python dictionary, you need to either use the provided HTTPTransport class or provide your own implementation

To deal with caching and using session IDs a MollomBase class is present, which can be overridden to allow a user defined caching mechanism for the server list to be used. This class is still under heavy development, so it is prone to (frequent) changes.

MollomAPI offers the following methods:

  • getServerList
  • checkContent
  • sendFeedback
  • getImageCaptcha
  • getAudioCaptcha
  • checkCaptcha
  • getStatistics
  • verifyKey

I plan to see if I can get this into Django as well as a contributed app that can be included in a Django project.

Update (2008/09/18) I have incorporated the changes made to the API document on 2008/09/10. The version of the tarball has been bumped to 0.2. Additionally some bugs were fixed, so you might want to update to this version rather than sticking with the old one.

Update (2010/02/08) I have moved the code to a new repository at GitHub. Get the library using git clone git://github.com/itkovian/PyMollom.git. For now, I do plan on keeping the darcs repo hosted at my website and the github repo in sync, so you can pull from either.

Faeries at the Comic-Con

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006



Faeries at the Comic-Con

Originally uploaded by calibre68.

I love fantasy literature. And this picture perfectly illustrates why :-)

Worldcup

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

For Zidane, I hope the French go to the finals, and kick the Italians there. But Portugal remains the only team of which I didn’t want them not to get the cup.

Update: Ok, so France won. So I’ll cheer for them against Italia.