pwnt.be

Als hij niet oplet, wordt Bart De Wever nog de nieuwe Milquet. Telkenmale de man zijn mening te kennen geeft, wordt hij erop afgerekend. Vandaag in De Morgen:

[De Wever] vond […] het, live in Terzake, “kras” dat Albert vorige week op vakantie was, dat de koning zijn taak vervolgens had “uitbesteed” aan Didier Reynders en dat de vorst zonder hem te consulteren ook nog eens De Croo had durven uitsturen.

En dat mag klaarblijkelijk niet. Want ja…

1. De koning mag gerust op vakantie gaan tijdens de meest hopeloze regeringsvorming in jaren, waarin iedereen al lang doorhad dat hij eerstdaags de rol van deus ex machina zou mogen vervullen.

2. Didier Reynders is informateur geweest, dus het is evident dat hij opnieuw aan zet is. Nog één stap terug en we krijgen herverkiezingen — mij niet gelaten!

3. Herman De Croo beledigt openlijk Bart De Wever en vindt het niet nodig dat terug te nemen, dus het is evident dat hij nauw betrokken moet zijn bij een regeringsvorming met de N-VA.

Jongens, alsjeblieft hè zeg.

While utterly useless, the recycle bin hard drive Engadget (among others) mentions is just marvellous. As it fills up, led’s light the “can” from the bottom up, informing you of how much space is available. Cute, really cute.

Tempo recycle bin hard drive

They don’t mention how it’s powered, so I assume they conveniently omitted the presence of a cable—or a tiny battery. But how many of you have 250 GB worth of stuff in the recycle bin anyway?

Damn you, Apple. Damn you and your sad attempts at Windows software development. I understand if a Safari beta isn’t great when it comes to usability, but, for a company that spends so much time on its HIG—and rightly so—you sure as hell did a terrible job with the UI for QuickTime, and I can only assume iTunes is the same, because I sure as hell don’t want that piece of crap media player on my machine.

Yes, the menus look awful. Yes, if your system language is different from the one you chose in Regional and Language Options, only half the application is localized. And, yes, the fonts look blurred, because ClearType is unbeaten for everything non-DTP, period.

But probably the worst feature in both QuickTime Player and Safari for Windows is Apple’s horrid implementation of my beloved Maximize feature.

Before all you Mac fanboys start the whole “Maximizing is for chumps” tirade, I’ll give you my version.
I maximize the majority of my windows. I even have my mouse’s only extra button mapped to maximizing or restoring the active window. It makes perfect sense and it doesn’t mean I am not multitasking. I can only look at one thing at a time, even though I am doing several things at once. This really is a nuance Cupertino needs to wrap its head around. Of course, they like to waste screen real estate to justify having dual 30″.

That being said, whether or not you like maximizing is not even the point. On Windows, it’s part of the experience and therefore Apple should start implementing it properly like everybody else. And wanting to stick to your own theme is not an excuse, because they aren’t the only people doing it.

What’s wrong with their implementation then? At least three things.

One. If I hit the Maximize button in QuickTime Player, it doesn’t maximize. The window just stretches and respects the video’s aspect ratio. That’s not what I asked for.

Two. Every decent visual style or theme, be it on Windows, KDE or whatever, has a maximized window’s control buttons in an easily reachable corner—on Windows, it’s the top right, evidently. But on a Mac, thanks to fucking Finder, Exposé and whatnot, all the corners are taken, so you need to navigate precisely to the god-awful colored balls. On Windows, if you want to close the active window, provided that it is maximized, you just throw your mouse to the top right corner blindly and click. I don’t know about you, but I find myself doing that a lot.
Now, you’d think Apple would understand the benefit of this in Windows software and support it in theirs. Well, surprise, surprise: they do not. And they’re not even consistent about it.
Maximized or not, the top right corner of a QuickTime Player window is dead, so you need to navigate to the X before you can close it. Yes, this is annoying to me—but not as annoying as Safari’s implementation.
On Safari, not only does the click not affect Safari itself, but thanks to the utterly obsolete rounded corners, you actually close the window behind it, which obviously does respect Windows’s tradition. Simply unacceptable.

Three. Like I said, I have a Maximize button on my mouse. That button behaves exactly like the one in the active window’s titlebar, except in Apple’s applications, because, well, they’re Apple.
You see, Apple’s applications blatantly ignore the window manager and just provide their own buttons. Just right-click on the taskbar button of QuickTime Player or Safari. The developers still bothered to support minimizing QuickTime Player from its context menu, but in Safari’s, every option is disabled, even though you can still sort of get them to work if you’re willing to use your mouse and click on Apple’s poor excuse for titlebar buttons.
And again, obviously, the behavior is different in QuickTime Player than it is in Safari. Because, even though the context menu option to maximize the window is disabled, my mouse’s button still activates the feature. Surprisingly, in Safari, it works as expected—no, really! In QuickTime Player, however, it makes the window fill the whole screen, which includes covering the taskbar. I guess I should at least be happy it ignores the video’s aspect ratio.

Honestly, amateurs. I can’t believe they’re getting away with this. And I can’t believe they keep acting so smug while doing so. If using Apple software on Windows is supposed to convince people of the greatness of OS X, then by all means, Apple, keep it up.

My tag cloud is sort of boring. Except for the ultra cool slider—similar to the one in Chirpy!—it doesn’t have anything spectacular.

I’ve been looking for ways to make tag clouds look like actual clouds, or at least more spacious. Anson Parker’s circular thingamajig looks fancy, but, without text labels, it defies the purpose of a tag cloud.

So today, I came up with my own version. Granted, it doesn’t look like a cloud either. It’s based on concentric circles. A tag’s weight—i.e. the number of associated posts or whatever—determines its distance from the center. I suppose it’s more fun if you like chemistry. Unfortunately, I’m a physics guy.

Tech specs: pure HTML and CSS, with ECMAScript, based on MooTools. So yes, it should be cross-browser. It adapts to window resizes and everything. All heavily in beta.

Since the scripted part is compressed like crazy, you’ll need to use this URL if you’d like to see the original version.

It’s no secret that I love foobar2000. I mean, look at all the stuff I’ve written about it so far! Also notice how seamlessly I worked my search feature into this post.

Anyway, there’s something I don’t get. Obviously, I always want to be using the latest version of foobar2000. While I try to keep track of new releases, I sometimes neglect to, in which case I have to compare version numbers. So I put foobar2000.org and Help → About side by side and …

… I am once again reminded of the fact that foobar2000 must be the only application that does not list its own version number in the About window. Sure, it’s everywhere else: bring up Preferences and it’s in the title bar; it’s even in the main window’s title bar and status bar while nothing is playing, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often down here.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a huge inconvenience. Eventually, I’m sure I’ll remember where to look. It’s just a weird choice. Like being gay. No, wait.

As you’re well aware by now, you can search my blog posts by clicking on the little magnifier on the bottom right. This feature was already pretty decent, if I do say so myself, but today, I added some extra niceness: search queries are now highlighted.

This may seem trivial to implement, but, in fact, requires quite a bit of black magic. After all, we’re dealing with XHTML, which means we can’t use nested tags for highlighting. In addition, since it’s a whole word search, tags may be in the middle of words, e.g. to emphasize a single character.

For future reference, the algorithm I used is the following:

1. Split the HTML into tags and character data. For example, the string

   <p>Hello, <em>world</em>!</p>

   would result in an array containing

   '<p>' 'Hello, ' '<em>' 'world' '</em>' '!' '</p>'

2. Next, hold on to the tags from the array above, and create a new string where you replace all the tags with an arbitrary placeholder, e.g. a null byte. In the example, you’d get

   \0Hello, \0world\0!\0

   Update: In addition, do the same for HTML entities; otherwise, the entity codes might get split up.

3. Now for the tricky part. Create a regular expression that will match all the words you need, but work the placeholder into it so that it may occur between each pair of characters. For example, if you wanted to match both “hello” and “world”, the regular expression would be

   /(h\0?e\0?l\0?l\0?o|w\0?o\0?r\0?l\0?d)/is

   The i switch stands for case independence; the s switch expands the expression over multiple lines, which isn’t necessary for this case.

   That won’t cut it though. That is to say, it will also match parts of words, e.g. “worlds”. To prevent this, you use lookbehind and lookahead. In my case, I put

   (?<![\p{L}\p{N}])

   in front and

   (?![\p{L}\p{N}])

   at the back, which, for the example, results in

   /(?<![\p{L}\p{N}])(h\0?e\0?l\0?l\0?o|w\0?o\0?r\0?l\0?d)(?![\p{L}\p{N}])/is

   Obviously, you’ll never actually get to see the expression as it should be dynamically generated.

4. The worst part’s over. Now, the basic idea is to apply the generated expression to the string with null bytes from the second step, replacing each match with its own value, surrounded by whichever bit of HTML you wish to use for highlighting—in my case, <em class="highlight"> and </em>.

   Another caveat though. To avoid getting nested tags, you need to split up the highlighting whenever a new tag starts. Fortunately, tags are all represented by null bytes, so surrounding each null byte in the matching string with a closing and opening highlighting element gets the job done.

5. Almost there now. The highlighting itself has already happened, but the original tags still need to be restored. This is probably the easiest step: just replace all null bytes with consecutive elements from the array of tags from step 2 and you’re done.

My eventual implementation is in Pwnt_Highlighter. If you wish to use it, go right ahead, but like everything else on this site, it’s licensed BY-NC-ND. Neat improvements are always welcome.

One final note: since my site uses MySQL’s Unicode features, the matching still isn’t 100% accurate when you use international characters. That is to say, MySQL thinks é and e are the same character, while PHP disagrees. The result is that, for example, the database layer will match “résumé” and “resume” for the same query, but since PHP does the highlighting, it will only match what you entered literally.

I noticed this a long time ago, but I suppose I’m the only one. Look at the Kubuntu logo:

The Kubuntu logo

Never mind the bitchass glass effects and drop shadow. Focus on the spacing between the letters K and U, and compare it to the other letters. I suppose they really like to emphasize that even the logo is just an extension of Ubuntu.

Or, as O’Toole puts it …

“Typography? Aesthetics? What's that and how can I apt-get it?”

That being said, I am writing this on my Kubuntu laptop.

Another addition I would like to see in MooTools—or, better yet, ECMAScript in general—is the equivalent of Java’s String.equalsIgnoreCase(String) function. Sure, a first implementation is trivial:

String.extend({
  'equalsIgnoreCase': function(str) {
    return (this.toLowerCase() == str.toLowerCase()
      && this.toUpperCase() == str.toUpperCase());
  }
});

… but if you want it to be a little more efficient, you’ll avoid inspecting both strings in their entirety first and use String.charAt(int) instead. If your motto is ‘Code is Poetry’, you’ll end up with something like …

String.extend({
  'equalsIgnoreCase': function(str) {
    var i = -1;
    if (this.length == str.length) {
      i = 0;
      while (i < this.length
      && this.charAt(i).toLowerCase() == str.charAt(i).toLowerCase()
      && this.charAt(i).toUpperCase() == str.charAt(i).toUpperCase()) {
        i++;
      }
    }
    return (i == this.length);
  }
});

Since ECMAScript is weakly typed and doesn’t have a Character class like Java does, the actual comparison still uses string functions. I wonder how much this influences the algorithm’s performance.

Update: I added the String.toUpperCase() calls, because Java’s implementation has them too. I’m no expert when it comes to international characters.

Since I’ve got tags now, I’m going to start a new chapter. From now on, I will be blogging in my native language Dutch when relevant. Dutch posts will all receive the tag ‘Nederlands’. English will remain the primary language of this blog.

Dames en heren politici, legt u mij nu eens uit wat u daar drie weken heeft uitgespookt op Hertoginnedal. Behoed ons voor een nieuw Verdrag van Rome, maar…

1. Aan de Vlaamse politici: Hoeveel onder u geloofden er drie weken geleden nog dat de Walen Franstaligen de minste toegeving zouden doen op communautair vlak?

2. Aan de Waalse politici (dewelke de Nederlandse taal machtig zijn): Bent u bekend met het woord ‘democratie’? Hoelang plant u deze schertsvertoning nog vol te houden?

Maakt u zich geen zorgen, waarde lezer: ik zal niet vervallen in een tirade over hoe de Waal op onze rug leeft. Neen, ik zoek het een paar kilometer dichter bij huis, want wie ‘staatshervorming’ zegt, zegt ‘tsjeef’ en wie ‘tsjeef’ zegt, die zegt ‘Leterme’.

Vazal van het eerste uur Bart De Wever én concullega Bart Somers waren er vandaag alweer als de kippen bij om te benadrukken dat Yves een goede formateur is, maar dat er met de Walen Franstaligen nu eenmaal niets aan te vangen valt. Conclusie: zelfs de beste formateur zou nog het onderspit delven. En wie ben ik om daar iets tegen in te brengen?

Natuurlijk valt er met die verdomde Walen Franstaligen niets aan te vangen. Hoe zou u zelf zijn? Om De Morgen te citeren:

Grote institutionele hervormingen inzake fiscaliteit, justitie, gezondheidszorg of de spoorwegen zouden volgens Di Rupo gevaarlijk en schadelijk kunnen zijn voor de Franstaligen.

Tot 10 juni klonk het of Leterme die verdomde Walen Franstaligen een paar toontjes lager zou laten zingen, maar eens belast met de regeringsvorming, ijvert diezelfde Leterme voor een tweederdemeerderheid voor een staatshervorming waar iedereen beter van wordt. Kom kom, Yves, laat ons een kat een kat noemen: het is hoog tijd dat de machtsverhoudingen in dit land worden rechtgetrokken en dat gaat nu eenmaal niet zonder slag of stoot. En dat weten die verdomde Walen Franstaligen ook wel.

Is dit schrijven bedoeld als een constructieve oplossing voor het communautaire debacle? Neen, ik ben geen politicus. Het is louter mijn bedoeling het onnut te benadrukken van een campagne die, uitgenomen dat duivelse “goed bestuur”, uitsluitend draaide om de staatshervorming. Misschien heeft het de modale Vlaming (terecht) wakkergeschud, maar we zijn nu 2 maanden verder en veel vooruitgang is er nog niet geboekt.

Zelfs al ben ik dan Vlaams-nationalist, ik vind het volslagen idioot om uit de verkiezingsuitslag te besluiten dat Vlaanderen zich uitgesproken achter een ingrijpende staatshervorming schaart. Is tsjeef door het kartel een synoniem geworden van flamingant?
Als de Vlaming zich echt zo bekommerde om de belangen van de deelstaten, dan was er wel eerder een signaal gekomen. En ook dát weten de Walen Franstaligen ook wel. Hou nu dus maar op dat imago te cultiveren van de separatistische Vlaming! En laat er geen twijfel over bestaan dat die boodschap is bedoeld voor beide zijden van de taalgrens.

Hoe moet het nu verder? Ja, als we dat eens wisten. Een dikke 2 weken geleden, toen iedereen die niet op Hertoginnedal vertoefde, al wist op wat voor fiasco we afstevenden, schetste Lijst Dedecker volgend scenario:

Over een week slaat iedereen de armen in de lucht, want ‘We geraken er niet uit!’ Volgende stap, want Leterme werkt wel degelijk stap voor stap, is de Koning: Sire, Help Ons, want het land is in gevaar! Zie, de vakbonden zeggen het ook, en de mensenrechten lopen gevaar, en de stookolie slaat op. Sire, help ons uit de crisis!

Kijk, noemt u dat nu gerust dramatisch; ik doe dat immers ook en ik heb überhaupt voor die mensen gestemd en zou het opnieuw doen. Het politieke klimaat verplicht een oppositiepartij zich er nu eenmaal toe zich te profileren middels boude uitspraken. Kijkt u echter even voorbij de scherts, dan ontwaart u vast een akelig accurate weergave van de huidige omstandigheden – met een week vertraging dan wel.

Wat voorspelt datzelfde artikel verder nog? Een nog grotere ‘Non’ tegen het communautaire, tegen roomsblauw en tegen de vooruitgang. Want zo gaat dat nu eenmaal in ons federale Belgenland. Het wordt allemaal afwachten, maar gelooft u er nog in?

En, Yves, waar ben je nu met je goed bestuur?

As you may recall, I purchased a Lite-On LH-20A1S a while ago. As it turns out, that wasn’t entirely accurate.

In fact, the device identified itself as the illustrious DH-20A1S. While there is no mention of them on the Lite-On website, the DHs appear to be rebadged versions of the LHs, which I assume makes them targeted at system builders. Never having bought any Lite-On equipment before, I don’t know if it’s okay for Codima to sell a DH model separately, let alone call it an LH.

That being said, after some Google-fu, I can be pretty sure that the DH-20A1S is in fact identical to the LH-20A1S. There is however an inconvenience: since it identifies itself as a generic DVD burner, you cannot use Lite-On’s firmware updaters. And by “cannot”, I mean you can, but you need to grab modified ones from codeguys.rpc1.org and use the Flash Utility from that site. After a reboot, you’ve got yourself a real Lite-On, with the latest firmware—which is a good thing, because pretty much every piece of DVD packaging tells you to consult the manufacturer of your burner for the latest firmware.

I guess that’s what I get for buying cheap affordable hardware.