Honestly, I don’t understand how somebody can prefer PDF to HTML for on-screen viewing. Really? That is possible? If you’re one of them, can you help me understand?

Here in Denmark, we’ve just had an election, and the previous government has been replaced. A newspaper article [lang=“da”] looks back at what people liked and disliked about what the previous government did. I have trouble believing, much less understanding, that 68% consider increased surveillance to have had a positive effect for Denmark, 16% believe the effect to be neutral and 16% believe it to be negative. Wow. The people who believe that our society is better off when the government monitors us more out numbers people like me 4 to 1?

NSA proposes Accumulo NoSQL database to Apache, writes The H.

This is a big deal (at least in my book) because it demonstrates that the NSA does not believe in security by obscurity.

Really cool list of 34 Cleverly Designed Inventions. I especially liked the USB connector, the stair case drawers, and the crawling lamp on the wall. Thanks to the Userfocus Usability Newsletter for the link. The site also has lovely 32 Pictures To Help You Appreciate The Awesomeness Of Nature but I better let you go now :-).

A Danish Minister approves an ad-agency to pose as real users and stuff a forum with bogus posts to kick-start it. I’m appalled, surprised at my own ignorance and worried about the lack of credibility of even government-funded sites.

Why doesn’t every programming language have “Natural Sorting” built in, out of the box? Natural sorting is the way humans sort, where number substrings are sorted numerically, everything else alphabetically:

Sorted “Asciibetically” (normal computer sort)	Sorted “Naturally” (what humans prefer)
foo1bar	foo1bar
foo10bar	foo2bar
foo2bar	foo10bar

Notice how 10 comes before 2 in asciibetical “normal computer sorting” ? Haven’t we all seen user interfaces that like that? Its just plain wrong. :-(

Dave Koelle’s Alphanum Algorithm sorts naturally, but instead of analyzing each array element O(log(N)) times, I present a modified Perl version that allows for Schwartzian transforms, yielding huge performance improvements.

Did you ever find that while editing files for the web (e.g. HTML, Javascript, Java/Flash/Ruby, whatever) that it would be cool to have your browser reflect any changes as soon as you hit Save in your IDE without having to Alt-Tab to the browser and hit refresh (Ctrl-R)? That way, you could stay entirely in your browser and just move your eyes to the browser as it refreshes automatically showing you the results of your newest changes.

Well, now you can! I’ve developed a pair of tools for that allow this when used in concert. Both are Open Source, of course.

Here is an example of the problem we need to solve: We have SSH access to a network, but want to access an SNMP agent in that network from a local client. We use SNMP here in this example, but it could be any other protocol that uses UDP, such as DNS or TFTP.

We’ll forward the SNMP traffic in a TCP port like this, with “socat” doing the UDP-in-TCP tunneling:

For some reason, it doesn’t seem to be possible to set up a path for your repository when using subversion as: svn+ssh://server/repos out of the box. So you end up having to specify svn+ssh://server/some/path/repos.

But it really isn’t that hard to do. Here is how I do it. Beware that you’re going to be making system-wide changes to how svnserve operates. The basic idea is to replace svnserve with our own version, that calls the original one with a -r parameter.

Imagine we’re in a rocket. We have an imaginary engine, that provides a constant amount of thrust. How much power does such an engine provide? In essence the power depends linearly on the velocity: \[ \begin{align*} P &= \frac{dW}{dt} \wedge W = \int F \cdot ds \Leftrightarrow \\[10 pt] P &= F \cdot \frac{ds}{dt} \Leftrightarrow \\[10 pt] P &= F \cdot v \end{align*} \] And the velocity depends (by definition) on the frame of reference.