iPad@MadTv…

R.I.P Sun

Happy Birthday, Jesus!

Installing Canon LBP 3100 on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

Upgrading my Mac from OSX 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 was quite easy - at least more easy than I originally expected. Nearly everything worked out of the box and just a few applications needed some minor tweaking. However, when it comes to printers it’s always a game. If you are lucky and the printer-driver ships with the new version of the operating system, everything is fine. But if not - well, then you might run into problems.

I have one of these printers which are not supported by OSX 10.6: the Canon LBP 3100, a very cheap laser-printer. After upgrading my operating system, the printer was not recognized. Unfortunately the Canon printer-support page did not provide an up-to-date printer-driver and I nearly thought: okay, Nat, that’s it, get you a new printer. But being a tinker when it comes to computers I didn’t give up so fast. And after playing around for some 10 minutes I found a solution which is very easy. However it is not so obvious to find out about that. As I’m pretty sure that there are people out there banging their heads on the wall having a similar problem I thought it would be nice to share my solution with you.

The first step is to download the latest printer-driver from the Canon homepage. I don’t provide a link as by the time you are reading this they might already provide a newer driver. But I’m confident that you can search for the correct driver using your favourite search-engine :)  (just be careful that you download your driver from the manufacturers page only!). Read the rest of this entry »

Story of Stuff

Ich lege dieses Video jedem, der ein bisserl englisch kann und 20 Minuten seiner Zeit erübrigen kann, ans Herz:

Klick mich

Spendet für Wikipedia!

Dear Natascha,

Thank you for your gift of XXXXX to the Wikimedia Foundation,
received on November 23, 2009.

Your donation celebrates everything Wikipedia stands for: the power of
information, freedom, sharing, learning and discovery.   Thank you so
much for helping keep Wikipedia freely available for its 330 million
readers around the world.

Many people love Wikipedia, but surprisingly few know it’s run by a
non-profit.  Please help us spread the word, by forwarding this e-mail
to a few of your friends.

If you have questions about your donation, please send a message to
donate@wikimedia.org.  To learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation,
visit our blog at http://blog.wikimedia.org/ or our website at
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And again, thank you.  I’m really, really happy to have
your help.

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Schnitzelfriedhof

Ohne Worte…

Chinese cuisine

Letzten Freitag gabs chinesische Küche abseits der gängigen Speisen, die unsereiner aus dem Chinarestaurant kennt. Dank Mingyang, die uns eine Reihe verführerischer Gerichte gekocht hat.

Strike!

Dear Authors,

Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that your paper:

Advantages und vulnerabilities of pull-based email-delivery

has been accepted for presentation at AISC-AISC 2010. Instructions regarding
preparation of your final manuscript will follow shortly. Meanwhile please take
careful note of the reviewer comments attached in preparation for final edits.

Thank you again for your contribution to AISC 2010. We look forward to seeing you in
Brisbane in January.

Best regards,

Colin Boyd and Willy Susilo,
AISC 2010 Program Co-chairs

Python-howto: converting a string into a tuple

Recently I had the problem to convert a string with coma-separated values into a tuple. Unlike a list a tuple is an immutable way to represent data, once it is created its values cannot be changed. Googling just brought up some really weird solutions which I either didn’t like or they did not work anyway. So I played around a little bit and came around with a single line solution that should work sufficiently.

Lets assume you have a string with coma-separated values like ‘value1, value2, value3′ and you want to convert it into a tuple (value1, value2, value3). A direct conversion from string to tuple is not possible, however there is a convenient way to create a list from a string using the .split() function. Lists can be easily converted into tuples. And this is basically the solution: convert the string into a list and then into a tuple. Putting it all together into a single line of code we end up with

s = 'bla, blub, blubber'
t = tuple(s.split(', '))
print t
# ('bla', 'blub', 'blubber')

Please note that the argument for the split-method is a comma and a blank. The blank has to be added as the blanks in the string are considered as valid characters. If you just use a comma as an argument, the blanks will be part of the resulting tuples (ie. ‘ blub’ instead of ‘blub’).

So the conversion is not such a big mystery