Home of the Mathemaniac

You may already know imgur, an image host you can use freely for whatever you please.

An interesting fact about them, however, is that each picture given a name consisting of only 5 alphanumerical characters. This leaves for roughly 916 million different names. As it turns out, there appears to be around 90 million uploaded images^[1], which means that if we randomly guess a name for a file, we have an about 1 in 10 chance of actually finding an image.

Those odds are pretty good, so I wrote a small application which does just that.
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1. ^[1] Rough estimate based on empirical observations. ↩

Quines are a wonderful thing. A quine is a program, that when run produces its own code as output. Now, in most interpreted languages you can read your own code through means of I/O — I’d consider that cheating: We can do much better than that. We’ll do it without anything but a clever theoretical result. (And maybe a little bit of code to make it work in practice.)
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A Hasse diagram generated in Mathematica.

It’s that time of year again; the new students have started at DIKU and start their careers as computer science students with the course DiMS — Discrete Mathematical Structures, taught from the book by the same name.

Part of the curriculum is learning about Hasse diagrams, which in essence are a way of easily visualizing the relationships between different elements under a partial order.

Now, a student came and asked me about how to draw these diagrams in Mathematica, so I got some code working which did just that. The resulting diagram, is the picture used for this post.
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When you’re a student, you’re usually on a tight budget, so the chance to get something you need at a steep discount usually falls on good soil.

Luckily, the marketing departments of many large software corporations know this, and wants to get you hooked on their applications, leaving us students very happy.

First of all, it’s worth checking if your school or university participates in the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance, or MSDNAA for short. If that is the case, you may be eligible to get free copies of Windows, Visual Studio and much more. Simply head on over and search for your school to see if you can get lovely free software. If your school does show up in the list, ask your local IT department if it’s possible to get an account. (If you study at DIKU, you can sign up here.)

Microsoft provides another way to get free software called DreamSpark. DreamSpark provides free access to lots of free development software for students at participating schools, in a manner similar to that of MSDNAA. Sadly, University of Copenhagen does not appear to be a part of this deal, but your university might be; simply go to the page and follow the instructions to log in.

Next up is OnTheHub, with which your school might have struck a deal to provide cheap software from Microsoft, Adobe, VMware and more. Simply head on over to their search page, and see if your school is listed. University of Copenhagen has a deal with VMware, for instance, which means we get free copies of VMware Workstation, among other things. In case nothing is available for your school, you can also take a look at their store, which may contain something useful.

Additional deals that aren’t quite as major, but still notable:

• Upgrade to Windows 7 Professional for only $30.
  If you don’t have Windows 7, then trust me, it’s worth upgrading to.
• Get Office 2010 Professional Academic Edition for $80.
  This is the full Office pack, by the way, not some trimmed down “Only Word, Excel and Access” one.

If you’re a student at the University of Copenhagen, you’ll probably have noticed that we recently switched to new, horrendously hard to remember usernames for logging into punkt.KU (affectionately known as license plates).

In order to better cope with change, I present to you a few tools to help make the transition smoother.
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These last few days, most of the people I know’ve been playing Manufactoria, a game revolving around fixing up robots in a turing machine-esque manner. (If you’re at all into programming, I suggest you check it out. Also, rate it high!)

Quickly, one starts running out of levels to solve, however, so I’ve decided to make a small collection of additional levels you can play. Mind you, I have not solved all of these myself, so the unsolved ones may very well not be solvable in the space allotted. Caveat emptor.
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I recently switched browser to Google Chrome, and one of the things I started missing from Firefox was a few of the Greasemonkey scripts I had installed.

Now, luckily, most simple extensions can be installed directly with no problem in Chrome, but a few of them sadly can’t.

One of the ones that couldn’t was YouTube Title Adder, so I thought I’d go and port it to Chrome.

Now, a few hours later, I can present you with a new, and slightly improved, YouTube Title Adder for Chrome.
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I’ve been working a bit on a Skype bot lately, and it seems about mature enough by now to be ready for a release.

Download

You can download the bot here.

Do note that it will not run without Skype installed, and it will operate on your account. You can still use your account while the bot is running, however.
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If you are a student at the University of Copenhagen, chances are that you’ve had a run-in with a service called Absalon. For the uninitiated, Absalon is based on a system called it’s learning, which is a “virtual learning environment“. As a student at KU might also know ISIS, which serves pretty much the exact same purpose.
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Spheres drawn in papert

You can now relive the past, for Thomas Edward Figg, or tef as he calls himself on Something Awful, has made a JavaScript-based Logo interpreter. Now you can watch the Koch snowflake, the Hilbert curve or whatever else your mind happens to think up unfold itself before your very eyes — without having to leave your browser window!

So I urge you, click on any of the examples I linked before — or if you’re extremely lazy, click here:

papert – logo in your browser

If you want example code to run, I can suggest checking out the Something Awful thread on papert by the developer himself.