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I found myself working again on the UI for my startup. As my Javascript library, I use Mochikit. One of the reasons for that is that it’s the Turbogears builtin, and I came to like it. The other is that it’s really easy to create DOM objects with it. In any case, Mochikit has really…

A few weeks ago, I had to work out a database design for my startup. I had a bit of a hard time deciding on a design direction, but after thinking about it, I settled on a design I was happy with. While I was still making up my mind, I discussed the problem with…

My partner and I started to work on a website a few months ago. We have a working prototype, and we are always improving it. My work is mostly concentrated on a smart Python backend, and on a Javascript front-end, while a thin controller acts as a messenger between the two. Lately, I’ve worked on…

A few years back, I was in some course where they also taught me some Matlab. One of the exercises was to draw the Sierpinski triangle using a method of progressing a point randomly. I was quite surprised at the time, because I thought the Sierpinski triangle was more of an analytical thing: you drew…

I felt like it’s about time I tackled the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, in Ascii-Art. Heck, the Mandelbrot fractal is on the logo of this Blog! However, being the most well-known fractal, this issue was tackled already, with satisfactory results. Still, I took the ten minutes required to draw them in Python, using numpy: def…

Python 2.6 and 3.0 are upon us. I helped a friend set up the new Python environment for research and development, and we thought about constructing a PythonPack: a compilation of packages every home should have lying around.

Not too long ago, I helped someone with some research work, and one of the research tools was also used from the Python interactive prompt. The interface used was handy enough for development: intuitive, readable, short, and useful. Still, for interactive research it wasn’t handy enough. To improve the script, I decided to use a…

Lately I’ve been developing a website. One issue that I’ll probably need to address in the near future is “persistent predicates”. By “persistent predicates” I mean the problem of treating predicates as data. Consider the following situation: you are developing some big rss reader/aggregator and you want to allow users to specify handling rules. How…

About a month ago, someone I met asked me if I could give him C programming lessons. To protect his privacy I won’t talk about him much, besides saying that he is a serious guy and he doesn’t know programming at all. The first thing I did was give him a general explanation of what…

In a previous post I said I’d talk about 4**(4**(4**4)). First, about the number. I first saw it mentioned in a math lesson back in high-school, when the teacher wanted to demonstrate estimation abilities. He wrote it on the board, like so: 4444 and then asked students to estimate how big that number is. Turns…