I See Dead Code

Metro 2033 is a game that gets its atmosphere right. While the narrative is entirely forgettable and somewhat trope-infested, the design and the mechanics managed to make the player feel ill at ease all the time. With almost no HUD, a feeble headlamp and weapons that need to be manually pumped/recharged or offer the choice [...]

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After a bit more than 2½ years, I upgraded the my desktop system. Back in 2009, I built my machine around the MSI P55-GD65, a Core i7 860, 4 GiB (later 8 GiB) Kingston HyperX T1 DDR3-1600 (clocked at 1333 MHz) and a Sapphire HD 5870. All in all, I could not have been happier [...]

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Q: “How many constituent trees fit on a single A0 poster in style?” A: “886”

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Beginnings After the bleak, joyless work of releasing software, plugging holes of preventing users from clicking buttons they should not have clicked in the first place, writing unctuous documentation and release notes and wrapping code into neat little installers with tiny bows and bells that gently tingle when touched, there are few things as profoundly [...]

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It is possible to write custom GTK widgets that have “native” scrolling support, as opposed to just shoving them into a GtkViewPort and forgetting about them. Apart from having mastered a small coding challenge, as it turned out to be, this also gives you greater control over the scrolling itself, like making sure that certain [...]

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Even before I started working at UZH, I got my new hardware. Back in February, when I visited Zürich to look for rooms, I was offered to choose a new notebook for myself. Since I already have a large notebook (at least that’s what I consider my 14.1″ T61) and toyed around with the idea [...]

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Going through a computational linguistics program will bring you in touch with Zipf’s Law. Its core claim: In a corpus, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank. Translated into less-wordy terms, it means that some words (events) occur very often and many words only occur a few times, or only once. [...]

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Yesterday, I merged the frame semantics branch, which I have been working on for my MSc thesis, into my personal repository. Since such a grave step always demands introspection, I looked at all 513 commits I ever to to the TreeAligner repository and created a little statistic on commit times. The picture contains a 24h [...]

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Some participants of this semester’s „Computational Linguistics” course (which is a code word for „10 different lecturers guide you through the wonderful world of algorithms and theoretical foundations of CoLi”) obviously lack a life and willfully extended their own homework assignment, writing small toolkits for finite state automata. Surprisingly, all those toolkits were written in [...]

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Sometimes I wonder what the hell I might have been thinking while writing code like this1 : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 def uncurry(f): return lambda t: f(*t)   def longest_common_prefix(Sa, Sb): return len(list( takewhile(uncurry(eq), izip(Sa, Sb)))) I bet the tenses are all wrong again. [↩]

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