Last fall, I had been at Aalborg University for nine years: One year in electronic engineering, five years studying software engineering, and three years doing a PhD in computer science. The first six years as a bachelor and master’s student were relatively straightforward and satisfying. The last three years formed my introduction to the academic world.

Being a PhD student in computer science does not mean you are a student of computer science at a high level. Well, you are that, but first and foremost, you are an apprentice of academia. The distinction is important because, while I love computer science, academia is, it turned out for me, not great.

I left the university before having finished my PhD, to work at a private company as an IT consultant. I managed to finish my thesis concurrently with my new job, and I have now defended it successfully. But the last half year has also helped me see more clearly my motivation for switching jobs. It can be summed up like this: Now, I go home from work most days feeling a sense of accomplishment. Before, I came home from work many days with the feeling of having failed.

As a young Windows user, I learned that if you write .LOG as the first line of a text file, then each time you open it in Notepad, it appends the current time and date to the file. That was pretty cool. And useful for logging things, as .LOG implies. Later I became a Vim user and started enjoying all the customization I can do to my editor. Or perhaps I became a Vim user because I enjoy customizing! Either way, I like my date and time shortcuts in Vim. For example:

1

noremap! <expr> ,t strftime("%H:%M")

This means: Map the key sequence ,t (comma followed by ’t’) to the result of the expression strftime("%H:%M") in the insert and command line modes. So if I write “The package arrived ,t”, what I will see is “The package arrived 13:43”, or whatever the time was. I use capital T for further precision (seconds), ,d to insert the date (of course in ISO 8601 format), and ,l to insert date and time together (‘l’ for log, as with .LOG):

1
2
3

noremap! <expr> ,T strftime("%H:%M:%S")
noremap! <expr> ,d strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
noremap! <expr> ,l strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")

At work, I often connect to Windows servers over Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A few times, I have been met with a blank white screen, typically after changing screen resolution in the Remote Desktop Connection options.

The first time this happened I spent a lot of time googling to no avail, so now I will put the solution I found by chance here in case it might help someone else. And note that encountering a blank black screen is a different and more frequent problem, the solutions to which didn’t help me with my white screen in the time that I spent on it.

Solution: Alt-F4

An Alt-F4 was all it took to get rid of the white screen. However, if that does not work, you can also try a Ctrl-Alt-End (the remote desktop equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Del), and see if you can work anything out from there. Good luck!

The calendar helped me floss (more or less) daily.

If you are already starting to forget about your New Year’s resolutions, here’s a tip to keep going: Visualize your progress: Put X’s on a calendar on every day you do what whatever you want to do more of. Stick the calendar on the wall or wherever it would remind you of your goal.

Some years back, each time I visited my dentist, she recommended that I floss. And I would decide that this time I would start doing it. But some days later, I started slipping and forgetting about it. It wasn’t until I put a year-at-a-glance calendar on the bathroom cabinet door that the habit stuck.

Putting a mark on a calendar is not rocket science, but the satisfaction of marking a completed task and of seeing your progress is a mental reward that can make a big difference. If you want to try, I made a one page 2016 calendar you can print (LibreOffice/odt, Word/docx). (It was easily made with the open source ncal utility, invoked as ncal -bh 2016.)

My girlfriend introduced me to Eric Wastl’s Advent of Code, a programming puzzle Advent calendar. The best advent calendar I’ve had in my adult life! (If you’re planning on playing it, this article is one big spoiler for Day 5.) I compare declarative programming puzzle solutions on readability and speed.

The year was 2002 and I had started gymnasium (≈high school). My parents had bought me the graphic calculator required for our maths classes: Casio fx-9750G PLUS. It was white and green and curvy and Casio — not dark and rectangular and from Texas Instruments, as a calculator was expected to be. Soon, however, this happy-looking thing became my companion on my journey into the world of programming.

The Django web framework has a management command to check your code for various problems. For example, it checks that your database CharFields define the max_length attribute, and that you have not set DEBUG = True in deployment. This is good for catching various mistakes in using the framework before the problem shows up in production. And for your own business logic, you have unit tests. But there are still many things to not mess up, and they are easy to forget if they are not incredibly easy to check. So I wrote a script to check every problem I could think of in one go.

E is the most common letter in many European languages. In English it makes up 12–13% of all letters written depending on source (see for example Wikipedia or Practical Cryptography). The second place is T with around 9%. In Dutch, Danish, and German, ‘E’ goes as high as 15–17%. But should it really be this common?

Lithuanian is a very old language with connections to Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. This quote is attributed to French linguist Antoine Meillet:

Anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant.

Lithuanian Embassy Flag by Mr.TinDC is licensed under CC BY 2.0

This is in itself very interesting, also because Lithuanian is less well-known, and has survived bans and attempts of being eradicated in the past. I also have a personal connection to the language because it is the native language of my girlfriend and her family. I am trying to learn it, and while I (slowly) do so, two things stand out to me:

The first is that in Lithuanian, when you read a word, you know (almost) how to pronounce it. This is very different from for example English and Danish, where the connection between writing and pronunciation is complicated and fraught with exceptions. See for example ghoti, pronounced “fish”.

The second is that Lithuanian uses seven cases, which means a word has seven different forms depending on its role in a sentence. A remnant of a case system is seen in personal pronouns in English: I helped her, and she helped me. “I” and “me”, as well as “she” and “her”, have the same “meaning”, but a different form depending on roles such as subject and object. In Lithuanian, every noun and adjective changes depending on role. And these roles include cool things like being a location or an instrument or means of doing something!

For my research I needed to implement a discrete Fourier transform in the C-like programming language of the UPPAAL model checker. One option would be to port an existing C library such as FFTW, but for a proof of concept, porting a large, powerful library would be much slower and less instructive than implementing a simpler algorithm myself. Programming rant coming up.