iPad@MadTv…

R.I.P Sun

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 »

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
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to a few of your friends.

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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

Spam, lovely spam!

Passend zum Thema meiner Diplomarbeit:

Unbedingt ganz anschauen

Moblin - a new Linux experience?

Recently I learned about Moblin, which is a new desktop for Linux, taylored especially for Netbooks. To be honest, what I saw looks very promising. I don’t wanna say that this could be the Linux killer-app we all were waiting for (like the tale we hear every year that this year is gonna be the year of the Linux desktop), but it could definitely make Linux accessible to a broader audience. AFAIK the Moblin project is supported by Intel, so the support of the greatest chip-manufacturer could also be very helpful.

But why not take a look at Moblin for yourself?

This is one of the most professional adds I have ever seen for Linux. Being a technical person I never underestimated the power of good marketing. And if you look at the features of Moblin it has everything a modern desktop should have: a shiny user-interface, nice graphical effects (not that they important for functionality, but they make it interesting) and it seems that it is easy to use. At the moment I’m very happy with my Macbook and I doubt that I will drop OSX for another operating system on the desktop in the next years, but I will most certainly give Moblin a try. And should I ever buy me a Netbook I’ll most definitely get me one with Moblin installed.

I’m very anxious what will happen to this project? Will it proove successful or will it fail like other projects before? We will see…

Problem gelöst (hoffentlich)

Heute hatte ich die erste Besprechung mit meinen beiden Betreuer wegen des Themas der Diplomarbeit. Das ganze fing ziemlich durchwachsen an und ich befürchtete schon, dass ich ohne Ergebnis aus dem Meeting rausgehe. Zwar hatte ich gestern Nachmittag genutzt und mir ein paar Notizen gemacht, was ich denn gerne machen würde. Aber dennoch lief es anfangs nicht so leiwand, wie ich mir das vorgestellt hatte. Doch dann erwähnte ich ganz beiläufig, dass ich eigentlich gerne auch was größeres coden möchte. Plötzlich hatte Andrew ganz leuchtende Augen und meinte: “This changes everything!” Von einem Moment waren beide Betreuer wie ausgewechselt. Ganz aufgeregt unterhielten wir uns, was man denn alles programmieren könnte. Da war mal die Frage von Andrew ob ich nicht vielleicht einen Compiler schreiben will. Das hab ich dankend abgelehnt, weil ich mir gerne etwas nehmen will, was ich auch schaffen kann  (gut, auch einen Compiler könnt’ ich schreiben, glaub ich, aber drauf anlegen will ichs auch nicht, und das Glück soll man nicht herausfordern). Dann kamen Vorschläge wie Wordprocessing, Spreadsheet und so weiter. Doch da hatte ich die Idee: ich hab immer gesagt, dass ich irgendwann mal gerne einen Email-Client programmieren möchte. Nun, das hier ist die Gelegenheit. Wann werde ich jemals wieder die Gelegenheit haben, das Rad derart neu zu erfinden . Naja… und so ist es der Emailclient geworden. Die beiden sind ziemlich begeistert - offensichtlich haben die hier das gleiche Problem wie wir in Österreich: die Leute wollen Informatik machen, aber nix coden…

<Ab hier ist Geekzone, vermutlich nur für IT-Druiden verständlich>

Somit habe ich mal ein Thema: einen portablen (also betriebssystemunabhängigen) Mail-Client schreiben, der alles drauf hat. Also POP, SMTP und IMAP-Protokolle und dann vielleicht noch anderen Bibabo wie Spamfilter etc.Freilich, das Problem das sich jetzt ergibt, ist die Frage, welche Programmiersprache/Entwicklungsumgebung verwende ich. Die beiden haben mir freigestellt, in welcher Sprache ich meine Codeergüsse schreibe, allerdings ist vielleicht Java nicht die erste Wahl, denn was ist denn da die Herausforderung? Ich selber möchte C/C++ nach Möglichkeit vermeiden, weils kaum eine umständlichere Möglichkeit gibt. Was ich derzeit in die engere Wahl ziehe ist Python - allerdings muss ich da meine Kenntnisse erheblich auffrischen. Ich hab mittlerweile geschaut, ob Groovy da was interessantes bietet, aber was Sockets angeht, greift Groovy eigentlich nur auf Java-packages zu, und dadurch wird der größte Vorteil von der Sprache negiert - die Kürze des geschriebenen Codes.

Die nächsten Tage werde ich daher meine Pythonkenntnisse auffrischen und erheblich verbessern und dann werd ich mit dem Coden anfangen. Für die geschriebene Thesis werde ich dann schon ein interessantes Thema finden.

Mein Computer im Labor

Hab ich doch tatsächlich nach Neuseeland kommen müssen, um den größten und schnellsten Computer den ich jemals hatte, mein Eigen zu nennen. Ein 24″ iMac mit 2,8 GHz Core 2 Duo Prozessor und 3  GB Ram….

Gut, der Speicher könnte ein bisserl mehr sein, aber alles in allen ist dieses Gerät zum Coden like Hell! Das hier ist übrigens mein Arbeitsplatz für die nächsten 4 Wochen, dann ziehen wir in ein neues Gebäude um. Dort wird es sogar echte Zentralheizung geben, hier ist es ja eher etwas kühl, im Keller…

Computer…?

Recently Wolfram Alpha, a new kind of answering service on the internet was published. It was announced that it would be a totally new approach in how you get answers to your questions. Unlike engines like Google, who just show a list of hits that contain keywords you provided in your search it is actually a “thinking” search-engine. Like the computers in Star Trek, were you just name a question and the computer gives you the correct answer.

Great, I thought. Brilliant idea - lets try it. Well after the few searches I was more than disappointed. From the keywords I provided it was almost 80 % of the time not able to puzzle out what the question was about, showing either a message like: “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” or a result I wasn’t expecting. Only totally unambiguous keywords produced a correct result, and even then there was a chance that the result would not be what I expected. Keywords I provided: computer science, computer, apache, Vienna, Apache, PHP, Otago, Pi, knowledge, wolframalpha, wfrp and warhammer. Only Vienna, Pi and wolframalpha produced results I expected. Other keywords produced a result I wasn’t expecting, for instance when typing in computer I was expecting an explaination, what a computer is. WolframAlpha showed me the information about computer-magazine.

So at the current time I’m not sure what I should say about WolframAlpha. I’m aware that you cannot directly compare it to search engine, but its most obviously the first thing everybody tries to do. The idea behind it is great, but it is far to early to judge about it. Perhaps in a couple of years the technology might become better, but in the meantime I see no value in using it.