Educational

Since I started learning Chinese I've collected quite a collection of books on the subject. These include textbooks, dictionaries, books on grammar, calligraphy, culture, history and a couple of novels (although it's still rather challenging to read those). Some I bought on-line, but a lot of them I bought in Taiwan and China where books are dead cheap. Here are two of my favorites.

Last week saw the launch of the first version of ZhongWiki. A wiki for people learning Mandarin Chinese. It's still in it's infancy, but I have a feeling it might become a great site and possibly a vibrant community.

I have somewhat neglected my English speaking audience, I must apologise. I've recently moved to Taiwan to study Mandarin, and my travellers journal will mostly be published on the Dutch side of this blog.

Before I left to Taiwan my grandmother gave me a beautiful little camera, and I've been taking pictures like a madman and posting them to my Flickr account. I would like to include these pictures into my blogposts, but I would like to use a specific HTML template, so I can easily style them with CSS, like so :

Met de zomer en de vale gieren in het land zijn ook de fruitvliegjes onherroepelijk terug, verlekkerd op uw voedselresten en kwekend als padden in Australie.

Just so you know:

• == a.k.a. value equality
• eql? a.k.a. value and type equality
• equal? a.k.a. object identity
• === a.k.a. case equality

Object identity should never be overridden. It compares object ids, always.

When overriding, start with value equality. If you're not doing type conversions then you can simply add "alias :eql? :==". I was surprised to learn that eql? doesn't call == or vice versa (by default).

Update: I cleaned the code up a bit and added more comments.

I was looking for a fast algorithms to search for matching strings. Boyer-Moore seems to be a good choice. It has the peculiar property that it gets faster once you're looking for longer strings. Wikipedia: Boyer–Moore string search algorithm. This site also has a good explanation with graphical examples: Boyer-Moore algorithm

In mijn vorige post bezong ik reeds het lof van de dynamische programmeertaal Ruby. Tijdens mijn studies tot informaticus heb ik kilometers Java code voortgebracht. Het is dus een beetje mijn digitale moedertaal. In deze post leg ik de twee programmeertalen naast elkaar.

Mijn meest recente hobby draagt de ronkende naam Ruby. Deze uit Japan afkomstige programmeertaal is snel de wereld aan het veroveren dankzij het populaire (en gi-gan-tisch gehypte) webframework Ruby On Rails. In de hoop een stukje van mijn enthousiasme over te brengen een kort overzicht van enkele typische Ruby features.

It's possible to run Internet Explorer on Linux (you know, that unsafe inferior webbrowser from Microsoft that the majority of internet users choose to use). In fact it's very easy thanks to the wonderful IEs4Linux script.

The script will download and install IE5.01, IE5.5 and IE6. I tried it on my Ubuntu machine and it works flawless. Here's what you need to do:

Here's a little trick to help you debug your Java programs. When an Exception occurs and it's not caught somewhere, you get a stacktrace to help you locate the problem. When you do catch an Exception you can still call printStackTrace() on it. But what if you just like to see the call stack?