LaPingvino

Now you can tip on my posts with Changetip. Because this works with bitcoin, you can even tip me ridiculously low amounts, for example to test, going as down as hundreds of a eurocent's worth. Also, tipping me via Disqus should work just as fine, as well as tipping other commenters on my or other's posts.

Read more about changetip and leave me some bits if you like to hear about this service!

Best regards,

I am very proud to have been able to help to release this music. And we are not done yet: Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Shazam, Deezer and much more are to come, including the option to buy physical CDs on-demand and with the artist!

Het is al weer een poosje terug, maar ik heb echt een prima USB-scanner behoorlijk goedkoop op de kop weten te tikken via Marktplaats. Super resolutie, prima beeldkwaliteit, betrouwbaar. Waarom was deze dan op Marktplaats gezet? Simpel, het is een ouder model en er worden geen nieuwe drivers meer voor gemaakt (voor wie geïnteresseerd is, het is een Trust Easy Webscan 19200). De laatste drivers zijn voor Windows XP.

Gelukkig blijven Linux-drivers gewoon werken, dus onder mijn Linux-systeem kan ik dat ding zolang blijven gebruiken als dat de USB-aansluiting blijft werken en het ding niet stuk gaat.

Dilma cultiva um povo livre com um mercado económico. Aécio representa as empresas grandes e cultiva um mercado em que vivemos. Pense bem o que realmente quer...

Do jen mia unua afiŝo en Esperanto. Mi rakontu pri mia sperto en la Poliglota kunveno en Berlino.

Ĉi-jare mi estis en Berlino por renkontiĝo grandparte organizita de Esperantistoj, sed ne mem Esperanta. La celo? Kunigi homojn kiuj parolas plurajn lingvojn kaj ŝatas lerni kaj praktiki tiujn lingvojn. Iusence oni povus diri ke tiu grupo ĝuste ne estus la celgrupo de Esperanto. Tamen ni rimarkis ke multaj homoj interesiĝis pri Esperanto pro nia ĉeesto kaj rolo en ĉi tiu plurlingva kunveno.

Multaj plurlingvuloj havas la ideon ke Esperanto ne estas bezonata por ili, ne estas interesa (grava kialo, ĉar nur interesiĝo kaŭzas lernadon) aŭ ke Esperantistoj estas tro propagandemaj. Mi trovis ke multaj tamen pri Esperanto (kaj Tokipono) interesiĝis pro la praktika uzo en la kunveno kaj la komunumo. Eble estas bona rekomendo al tiuj kiuj ŝatus disvastigi la lingvon koncentri sin al tiuj punktoj: nur ekparolu pri Esperanto post kiam oni demandas al vi kion vi parolas kun viaj amikoj, kion vi legas ktp, por ke oni ne plu eĉ povas imagi ĝin kiel neekzistanta lingvo, kaj montru ke vi estas mojosulo per viaj agoj.

Mi renkontis multajn personojn, ankaŭ relative multe parolis angle (kio estas komprenebla afero en tia grupo) kaj precipe spertis ke preskaŭ neniu sukcesis ien ajn iri sen halti baldaŭ por paroli kun iu en iu ajn lingvo. Estis tre impona sperto por ĉiuj kiuj ĉeestis.

La programo mem precipe konsistis el multaj prelegoj. Mi mem helpis pri Tokipona kaj Nederlanda eroj. Aliaj eroj por Esperantisto certe ankaŭ estus rekoneblaj: aligatorejo kaj gufujo en Berlino oficiale enkondukiĝis al la poliglota kulturo, kaj mi certe esperas ke ni ankoraŭ longe povu krei sanan rilaton de divido de spertoj kaj celoj inter ambaŭ komunumoj!

I am working on a rewrite of Komputeko.net. The current website is written in PHP, mostly barely correct, if even, code, hard to maintain, hard to extend, but hey, it works! I am writing the rewrite in Go, and it serves me well. I put the code online on Github (Komputeko on Github) and today I got rid of a very stupid bug in my code base.

The case is that I found a lot of duplicates in the results shown on the screen. To find the source of the bug, I checked if something in sorting went wrong; nope, sorting is not perfect as it is now, but it is surprisingly fast and it didn't magically add entries. So I started to measure the difference in input and output at several points, to find out that I checked for the appearance of the keyword and at every appearance, which can be several, I added that row to the result. In the end it seems I managed to blow up the used database this way in some orders of magnitude, at least more than 10 times! Adding a little flag so I add the result only once instead of every time for results found quickly solved this.

I needed an other commit to fix the bug I introduced here that involved not resetting the flag for every pass of the for loop...

Then when profiling the code (manually, one time I would have to use the Go tool for it, but my code is quite small so this is pretty efficient manually at the moment) it turns out that the bottle neck is in the HTML rendering. Of course I should move this all to the template anyway, but it's good to be reminded of this "hard way".

Anyway, the code is up on Github, so I welcome all feedback!

Let's write a little about who I am. At the moment I am 25 years old and looking for a job. I have worked as a programmer already, but I didn't do university, so I miss most "mainstream" programming "knowledge". What is worthwhile I tend to pick up anyway and what is not I am probably just glad to have avoided, but in practice this does pose some problems: most development companies around here look for C#, because it is taught at school there are "plenty" C# devs around, so me, not having any real background in C# won't have any real chance getting in there.

And now I am looking for a job.

My last job was at Teleperformance, doing Tech Support for one of the biggest around, Microsoft. I have to say, you can say a lot, but Microsoft is a nice company to work for, even if just outsourced. That doesn't take away that I use Linux at home of course.

The latest time I am trying to finally get a bit of a grip in Open Source, at least just programming myself and putting it online. This is mostly possible because I am getting more of a grip on Go. At my first big programming job I used Common Lisp, and while I know it is pretty hard to get a job with Common Lisp again, among other things because it is actually pretty old (but really good, believe me), Go is getting more traction nowadays and it basically has the things I love from Lisp with a big bucket of pragmatism, type safety, speed and concurrency. As I came to Lisp via Clojure, this is something I love to see in a language.

I have written little things here and there, and I have tried to start some blogs before, but now that I have a domain of my nickname, I decided I will use it to write just about anything that interests me. At the moment that is (but of course I wouldn’t necessarily limit me to) Open Source, Go, Esperanto, Real Democracy, Polyglotism, and I could write about any of those (or anything else really) in any of the languages I speak. The languages I am most likely to use for basically anything are English, Dutch, Esperanto and Portuguese, as I use these every day. You might spot the occasional post in Toki Pona, Spanish, French, German, Ido, Italian, Chinese or Russian though. Those last 3 I don’t really speak yet, but I did start with them, so better be prepared ;).