Author Archives: joern
Python unicode doctest howto in a doctest
Another thing which has been on my stack for quite a while has been a unicode doctest howto, as I remember I was quite lost when I first tried to test encoding stuff in a doctest. So I thought the … Continue reading
Posted in Coding
Tagged doctest, encoding, howto, python, raw, russian strings, string, unicode
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How to restrict the length of a unicode string
Ha, not with me! It’s a pretty common tripwire: Imagine you have a unicode string and for whatever reason (which should be a good reason, so make sure you really need this) you need to make sure that its UTF-8 … Continue reading
Setting up a local DBpedia mirror with Virtuoso
So you’re the guy who is allowed to setup a local DBpedia mirror for your work group? OK, today is your lucky day and you’re in the right place. I hope you’ll be able to benefit from my hours of trials and errors 
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Posted in Coding
Tagged database, dbpedia, howto, linked open data, mirror, quadstore, tutorial, virtuoso
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Daylight saving time
Well, you’ll have noticed, in Germany the daylight saving time striked once again… as per Romain I was reminded that many people have a problem remembering when the time is changed in which direction, so here comes my mnemonic (“donkey … Continue reading
Beautiful data visualizations and why we need open data
Today when I attended a talk at LWA 2010 I remembered a nice talk about beautiful data visualization by Hans Rosling, that I want to share with you (it’s worth the time): When I searched for this talk I also … Continue reading
How to convert hex strings to binary ascii strings in python (incl. 8bit space)
As this comes across may way again and again: How do you turn a hex string like "c3a4c3b6c3bc" into a nice binary string like this: "11000011 10100100 11000011 10110110 11000011 10111100"? The solution is based on the Python 2.6 new … Continue reading
Incentives for Creativity
Actually I saw this nice TED-Talk by Dan Pink on Motivation quite a while ago already (see below), but today I was pointed to this amazing animation by Ludger: Here’s the original talk:
Tipp-Ex viral marketing
Well, perhaps you’ve seen it already, but this indeed is a masterpiece of viral marketing worth knowing: Tipp-Ex: NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear: Here is a list of things you can let them do. Furthermore, Wikipedia tells us about … Continue reading
EtherPad: live collaborative text editing
Ever thought that it would be cool to just collaborate with others while writing a document? Well ok, there are wikis but I mean real-time. Not that it’s new or anything (google docs, wave), but EtherPad recently became one of … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged brainstroming, collaborative, editor, etherpad, live, realtime, text, web2.0, wiki
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Bash prompt indicating return value
Lately I’ve fiddled a lot with installing virtuoso on some virtual machines and found myself repeatedly asking bash for the return value of the last command echo $?. I remembered this blog post by Gecko quite a while ago and … Continue reading