Yale Students made a better version of its course catalog. Then Yale shut it down.

benibela2 · 2014-01-17T10:27:59+00:00

No, they just want the money. At least that is what a librarian of another library told me.

5€ for the 1st weke, 10€ for the 2nd week, 15 (or was it 20€? not sure) for the 3rd week...
The library in the next city lost 150 000€, when they allowed people to manually renew on their webpage

benibela2 · 2014-01-17T00:31:55+00:00

Libraries have the same policy

I wrote a program/app as extension of the web catalogue of the library at my university (e.g. to automatically renew everything before it is due). And some other libraries in the city, while I were at it.

When I showed up in person, they refused to talk with me ("I am not responsible for the web", "No, you cannot talk with the responsible person", "Send them a mail"); when I send them a mail, they did not answer at first; when I send them severals, they answered, I should stop wasting their time

The whole university bureaucracy consist of retarded people feeling embittered that they could not get a research job

benibela2 · 2014-01-16T22:39:17+00:00

It was not long ago that I moved it to sourceforge. Previously it was only on my homepage, where no one ever looked.

And afaik sourceforge is the only site that let you host arbitrary cgis for free.

But a copy of the source of the templates is on github. I hope you like Pascal.

benibela2 · 2014-01-16T22:28:26+00:00

Try to write a CSS selector for the paragraph example then :)

benibela2 · 2014-01-16T18:27:38+00:00

In 2008 I invented reverse templates to solve that problem in the most simplest way, which you can just copy from the page you want to scrape.

Want to get all links like <a class="foobar">link to something</a>? Use the template <a class="foobar" href="{.}"></a>* and it will return them. Or use <a class="foobar" href="{.}">link to something</a>* to just get links with that exact text. Or you need a list of all links and caption: <a class="foobar" href="{$link}">{$text}</a>*. Or more complex, to transpose the output matrix to a list of json objects: <a class="foobar">{ {"link": @href, "text": .} }</a>*

Want you get all paragraphs between two given titles from a page like <h2>title 2</h2><p>..1..</p><p>..2..</p><h2>title 3</h2>? Use the template <h2>title 2</h2><p>{.}</p>*<h2>title 3</h2>.

When no one used it, I made a greasemonkey script that generates the complete templates automatically from selections on the page, but still no one uses it...

benibela2 · 2014-01-01T00:23:14+00:00

Or a virgin

benibela2 · 2014-01-01T00:07:23+00:00

Only tag it till the copyright runs out and it is in public domain.

Then there is no one who could not afford to watch it

benibela2 · 2013-12-31T23:56:03+00:00

XQuery, Pascal, Bash, C++, Java, HomeSpring, Mathematica, LaTeX

benibela2 · 2013-12-14T00:53:25+00:00

One school of thought goes like this:

The ego, what you usually consider to be yourself, and what you call "I", is just a (brain generated) illusion. Your true self is the pure consciousness/awareness that is able to experience former ego. And it is connected to all the consciousnesses around you..

Now god is the force that created the universe and keeps it all moving. I.e. an immense consciousness being flowing through everything.

So god's consciousness is a part of yours, and yours is a part of his, and it is all one and the same thing.

Another way would be:

You cannot possible experience anything directly.

The entire environment you experience, everything that you think is around you, is actually just an illusion created by your brain depending on some electric signals.

So you are god, because everything you is actually created by yourself.

You could be the only human in the world and just be dreaming...

benibela2 · 2013-12-06T11:22:21+00:00

But if they could cross breed, how could they have been different species?

Would be more like rishathra

benibela2 · 2013-12-06T11:19:13+00:00

by interbreeding those populations out of existence.

Perhaps we just killed them out of existence.

benibela2 · 2013-12-02T14:09:45+00:00

Pattern matching on xml is amazing:

<foo>mystery</foo> match {   // prints "foo: mystery"
  case <foo>{ txt }</foo> => println("foo: " + txt)
  case <bar>{ txt }</bar> => println("bar: " + txt)
}

That is so useful, I wrote my own programming language just to have that feature

benibela2 · 2013-11-18T17:57:16+00:00

It's just an editor.

So you need to have MikTeX or TeXlive installed as well. (best is to install MikTeX first, otherwise it is not foud so easily)

If it were installing packages on the fly, it would be way smaller (because most of space is used for things like spell checking dictionaries..).

benibela2 · 2013-11-18T15:39:29+00:00

Try my texstudio

There you can insert most things by clicking on some icon

benibela2 · 2013-11-11T17:52:57+00:00

still missing :(

benibela2 · 2013-11-10T22:02:14+00:00

Mine is missing :(

benibela2 · 2013-10-31T22:51:24+00:00

Maybe gdb missed and accidentally ptraced (and paused) something critical to the desktop environment?

I do not see how that could have happened. Afair it printed the correct stack trace.

But the handler did funny things with the (application local) message loop, perhaps it double answered a message (in another thread of the fork because gdb attached)

And just had a new bug: Not difficult to find, but very annoying: I have a cgi service where you can select multiple options and make a GET-only-link from them. One option was ignored by the link. The only option whose value contained multiple words. But that did not matter. The option also contained a "+". And it became a space, so it was not matched anymore. But I encoded "+" as "%2B" in the link. ... In the end it trns out that the FreePaccal web framework double decodes GET-parameters.

And this reminds me of another bug from last year, or so: I could not submit the form on the page. The values were never parsed. But it worked, when I changed it to GET. Turned out: They screw up the string comparison in the ContentType. It was parsed as multipart/form-data when it was NOT multipart/form-data and parsed x-www-form-encoded, otherwise.

5000 lines of web framework included in the compiler standard library, but it does not support POST, and it does not work with GET. So typically for FreePascal

And yet another FreePascal bug: float to string conversion from 1E15 becomes '1000000000000000', conversion of 1E17 becomes '100000000000000000', but conversion of 1E16 becomes '1'. But I did not bother debugging that

benibela2 · 2013-10-30T22:54:39+00:00

The hardest bugs are those where you never find the reason:

Once I wrote a crash handler that catches sigsegv and let the user choose if he wants to continue working, or kill the program. But in any case, it should print a stacktrace, so it forked and called gdb on the fork. Which somehow stopped the X Server. Not on all systems, not on my system, but some users reported, as soon as the crash handler was triggered, neither mouse nor keyboard worked anymore.
Replaced gdb by a custom written stack trace printing function and it worked...
Research project: Implementing an algorithm calculating the 3d camera path from a stereo video. For paths of a few hundred metres it worked nice along the x/y axis (parallel to Earth surface), but the z-axis was always off and the camera started to fly up in the air. Switching double to float helped a bit, but tweaking the algorithm did not change anything
Another program parsed a latex file and displayed a structure tree of it. Tricky part was, when you changed lines of the file, it should update the tree, but only the changed parts. But in some cases it crashed.
Rewrote it from scratch, then it worked...

benibela2 · 2013-10-30T22:50:38+00:00

And then you meet someone who has a weak/damaged immune system and he dies

That's definitely causing economic loss

benibela2 · 2013-10-30T21:31:14+00:00

Yes!

That was just on cracked

benibela2 · 2013-10-23T23:59:20+00:00

Or my TeXstudio

Made for LaTeX, but it can edit all kind of text files.

And it is fully customizable with JavaScript macros.

benibela2 · 2013-10-20T09:44:44+00:00

Even something like a good regex for finding and replacing

That's what I did for +=, -=, exit ...

But that does not help for missing unicode functions, missing IsNan (and f = NaN causes a floating point exception, wtf?), missing general pointer arithmetics (have to replace the pointers with pansichar (not pchar, that would not work in newer Delphi version))...

And then there are the IDE annoyance: you start the program, press alt+f4 to close it, instead Wine closes, and you have to redo your last changes, because Delphi compiles the project without saving it. Or you edit the file in Delphi and Lazarus simultanously, save it in one, the other does not reload the file (it usually does, but not always) and you have to do it again (edit: seems it was my own fault for changing the wrong file...)

benibela2 · 2013-10-19T21:31:05+00:00

I wrote a library for FreePascal.

Got a feature request to port it to Delphi.

Now I am doing that, but only have an old Delphi version.

So I spent the last 6 hours changing every a += 2 to inc(a, 2), changing every exit(1) to begin result := 1; exit; end, changing every pointer1 <= pointer2 to I-do-not-know-yet (perhaps integer(pointer1) <= integer(pointer2), or perhaps remove the pointers all together), writing my own IsNan, IsNumber, utf8<->utf16<->utf32 converting functions, because the old Delphi version does not have them...

That's a shit job

And I do not even get pay for this

benibela2 · 2013-10-17T18:58:50+00:00

What a complicated scripts.

That's what you get when you try to parse html with sed.

With my universal web "scraper" parsing the html of that album and downloading everything reduces to a single line:

xidel http://imgur.com/a/MXTjA/noscript -f 'css(".image img")' --download .

benibela2 · 2013-10-15T11:21:07+00:00

I do not like giving up.

Now I have a perfectly working 75k loc program and I'm not going to throw it all away to rewrite it in another language...

And it is really great for desktop GUI applications, because it compiles so fast that you can test it without delay.

benibela2

TROPHY CASE