My first Flickr Photography, that was noticed by somebody else!

I knew, I just had to wait long enoug.

The Complexity of Songs

I know, this is a classic one, but there might still be some people out there, who haven't seen this: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_complexity.pdf

State of the Art

Having solved the main technical issues (see previous entry), the main text was almost writing itself. I even gut some further ideas for other LOFS lessons (most of them were about TeX, LaTeX and Metafont, as I recently read Donald Knuth's excellent book "Digital Typography". If you've got some time go read the extraordinary articles about "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" or "The Letter S"!). The main work was finding some nice (not too easy, not too hard) exercises for most students and some really interesting (and also hard) exercises for all the nerds out there.
This leads me to another issue: The lesson about Brainfuck is most probably not suitable for most computer science classes, as it is quite technical and mathematical and needs a lot of patience and riddle-solving skills. So I made that quite clear in the introduction to the LOFS, hoping no teacher will be as foolish as to try that one with a class that doesn't like a nice mathematical puzzle.
The other main problem was, that Brainfuck is in some areas rather poorly defined. What happens if you're on memory position 0 and make a step backwards with < ? Some interpreters will just overflow to the maximum memory positions others will accuse you of ill programming. There's a lot of other uncertainty of this kind, I think I will have to address this in the main text, as I'm not willing to settle on one single Brainfuck IDE.
By the way, I quite like this one: http://koti.mbnet.fi/villes/php/bf.php. Internet-based solutions are always best in school, as you're not having trouble with some IT guys who don't want to install the software you'd like or all the other compatibility issues

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too

Well, it's been a long time since my last post. (of course I've been busy working on my LOFS-Project. Remember? That's why I started this blog). The most important result up to now is generating a table of ASCII characters using LaTeX only (because I was to lazy to copy it). So here's the result:

\documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{article}

\usepackage{forloop}

\begin{document}
 {\tt
 \newcounter{symbol}
 \begin{tabular}{|rr|rr|rr|rr|rr|}
 \hline
 Nr. & Symbol & Nr. & Symbol & Nr. & Symbol & Nr. & Symbol & Nr. & Symbol\\
 \hline
 \forloop{symbol}{33}{\value{symbol} < 126}{%
 \arabic{symbol} & \char\thesymbol&%
 \ifthenelse{\value{symbol}<125}{\addtocounter{symbol}{1} \arabic{symbol} & \char\thesymbol&}{& &}%
 \ifthenelse{\value{symbol}<125}{\addtocounter{symbol}{1} \arabic{symbol} & \char\thesymbol&}{& &}%
 \ifthenelse{\value{symbol}<125}{\addtocounter{symbol}{1} \arabic{symbol} & \char\thesymbol&}{& &}%
 \ifthenelse{\value{symbol}<125}{\addtocounter{symbol}{1} \arabic{symbol} & \char\thesymbol\\ \hline}{&}%
 }
 \\ \hline
 \end{tabular}}
\end{document}

Things not to do

1. Walk into a guitar shop with plenty of Christmas money in your pocket.

Home Sweet Home

The Future of Copyright Law

One of the most interesting article I've read for a long time was Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industries. Looking at the title you might think it's an article about mangas, but actually it might be glimpse into the future of copyright law. In Japan fan-produced mangas (called Dojinshi) are extremely popular. Usually characters from a "regular industry manga" are taken and a new story involving them is written and then sold.
You might now expect that the copyright holder of this characters will sue the hell out of them, but they don't. Basically there consists a kind of mutual agreement calld anmoku no ryokai. The dojinshi creators publish only a limited number of editions, so the industry isn't at risk of losing to much and hence lets them publish. There's also a large number of benefits the manga industry gets: a free customer care program, a pool of new talents and cheap market research program (just look what characters are popular in the dojinshis and you'll now what goes on in the manga scene).
Another point is, that the current copyright law is designed for a read-only culture, but as it seems now, we are shifting to a read-and-write culture (think Web 2.0) and there are some issues concerning copyright which have to be solved. So the final question is, whether the Japanese model might be the future of copyright law?