Technical inconsistencies blog

It took more than 9 months (9 months and four days to be precise), but Elia Lanzani is now here.

I was honored to have been invited at NoSQL matters Dublin 2014 as a speaker.

Lot of bookmarks this time: postman A command-line utility written in Go for batch-sending email.

As announced (you heard it here first!)

I need to be on vacation in a house without internet connectivity1 to catch up with what is happening on the web.

I am thrilled to announce that I will speak this next July (25th and 26th, to be precise) at Pydata Berlin 2014, about Python and pandas as back end to real-time data driven applications.

In case you’re in the Netherlands (or nearby!

Depends on what you think about this snippet of code:1 let square y = y * y; limit = 100 in [(x, y, z) | y <- [1..limit], x <- [1..y], z <- [1..limit], square x + square y == square z] It finds all the right triangles with integer sides smaller than limit

Learn Web Development From Scratch - SlideRule Udacity’s awesome course, CS 253 - Web Development, by Steve Huffman, forms the backbone of this course. spiped Spiped is a utility for creating symmetrically encrypted and authenticated pipes between socket…

My first machine was some IBM 286, which a neighbour gave to my father when I was a kid.

git-prune-merged Prune all those pesky branches that you have already merged, both locally and from remotes.

A short list of links I’ve bookmarked this week This is why OneNote is awesome: Maybe a bit over the top, but there are truly a lot of reason to use OneNote as your note taking app; kandan: An Open Source Alternative to HipChat; CSS Diner: CSS Diner is a…

A la Brett Terpstra, a short list of links I’ve bookmarked this week Neovim: vim’s rebirth for the 21st century.

Here’s an interesting project by Peter Bengtsson of Mozilla to get an overview of the pull requests for a given github repository.

I’ve finally bit it and started using Twitter bootstrap for my website and the blog.

In the past few weeks I’ve written a couple of blog posts at the GoDataDriven blog: Convert chararray user ID’s to integers with pig: here I explain how to use pig’s RANK function; Merge Mahout output from different algorithms: in this post I lay out a po…

The other day I set up the App.net Comments widget on this blog.

This is my professional advise, and if you need more proof, here is a Detective giving the same advice on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?

It has been almost two years since my last blog post.

If you always wanted to automate the tedious process of exporting your collection of papers in Papers to BibTeX here’s an Applescript that does that: {% gist 8471281 save_bib.scpt %} To use it, you should invoke it when the focus on Papers is on the colle…

You have to admit that, even though most of the news point and can be found elsewhere, Hacker News (HN from now on) is a pretty amazing place.

This is a true story about Dutch doctors.

When we got our first computer, 20 years ago, we managed our backups with floppy disks.

A new shiny app by Brett Terpstra, creator of NValt.

Ben Brooks asks: if you would have to rebuy all of your software, which would be the order of buying?

Well, the screenshots speak from themselves.

I really like Growl.

It’s time to pick up a whiteboard marker and think fresh.

If you wish to keep an offsite Time Machine backup in a place which you don’t consider safe (for me it’s my office: although I’m the only one working there, my collegues could in principle get it when I’m out), then this link is for you.

Also, now added to the places I like to visit, two for joy, in Amsterdam.

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list.

I hate computers.

This is kind of a prediction, since at the time I’m writing this, Papers 2.0 is not out yet.

See, I started in this business because this is what I wanted to do.

Everybody these days is chatting about the forthcoming iPad 2.

Check this out if you use LaTeX.

If you have problems with Illustrator and PSfrag, that’s probably because you can’t have psfrag replace tags with more than one character, once you saved the EPS with Illustrator.

Art is a generous action—it’s when a human connects to another human and makes a change.

Well, why would I wanto to do that?

Nice article by Garry Reynolds on presentation openings.

Very nice article by Shawn.

Just as the meaning of Japanese cuisine goes far beyond sustenance, the significance of the bath goes far beyond merely washing.

Great article from Garr about the lessons we can learn from bamboo.

As written previously, here’s the second post about writing scientific articles.

As a PhD student for FOM I’m offered to follow some soft-skill courses during my career.

While leaving Amsterdam behind me, driving, I was listening to Radio 1.

If you work a lot with emails, then you should watch (or hear) this talk by Merlin Mann.

Today I stumbled upon a Lifehacker article which explained how to change the background color in Adobe Reader, when displaying PDF (which could alleviate the eyes’ stress if reading a lot).

To add a shortcut for the Menu Item Copy as PDF you have to do the following (with a Mac) go to /Applications/Mathematica/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/TextResources/Macintosh and edit the file MenuSetup.tr changing the line MenuItem["PDF", FrontEnd`CopySpecial["P…

To use Leiden ezproxy with Leiden university you have to do the following.