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
Were you one of the kids who spent their days messing around with Logo, drawing whatever odd shapes came to mind?
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:
If you want example code to run, I can suggest checking out the Something Awful thread on papert by the developer himself.
Surfing around the web randomly, you occasionally stumble upon some decent timewasters. This time, I stumbled upon something that was a bit better than that. GOOD COPY BAD COPY is “a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture”, released for free to the Internet by its Danish creators.
I had begun to write a small description of it myself, but I located this in the source code of the official site, commented out, and after reviewing what I’d written myself, I prefer this, so here it is:
Good Copy Bad Copy explores the state of limbo the world is in when it comes to copyright.
Western media conglomerates and rights owners desire one world order, while ‘pirates’ and cultural movements in the third world invent their own rules. Rules that even the West might have to play along with.
In a Pittsburgh living room, DJ and producer Girl Talk composes catchy pop hits on his laptop. In the span of 30 seconds he samples Elton John, Notorious B.I.G and Destiny’s Child into a new song. But, who owns the music? Who owns the artists? Piracy is booming all over the world – from Nigeria to Brazil, while Hollywood and the record industry fight to stem the tide.
Directors:
Andreas Johnsen
Ralf Christensen
Henrik Moltke
I strongly urge you to click the link and go watch GOOD COPY BAD COPY, as it is very well put together and an excellent documentary overall.
