A third recommendation

An important value of public sector information is the increased transparency in government decision making. A European Union directive only affects member states and not EU institutions. We are therefore at risk of missing out on increased transparency in EU institutions that the PSI directive may bring to governments in the member states. Also, government transparency is often considered to be a contributing factor in reducing corruption.

Therefore, it would be great if there was a plan, similar to the PSI directive, that made sure that EU institutions also started providing machine readable data in order to increase transparency and reduce the risk of corruption.

Currently, it seems to be up to each institution to do what they want. Maybe that is why the Publications Office of the European Union decided to charge  10,000 EUR for access to electronic versions of the EUR-Lex database (that contains the directives and other legal acts). This move makes it difficult for new actors in the legal information industry to include EU data in their products which leads to reduced competition.

I will be working with IT standardisation issues and the next revision of guidelines for public websites.

Problem 1

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Brute force version below.

n = 1
sum = 0
while(n < 1000,
      if(n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0, sum += n)
      n++
)
sum println

Or, as a one-liner after a suggestion from Ola:

(1..999) select(n, n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0) fold(+) println

Problem 2

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, … Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

sum = 0
fibs = [0, 1]
current_fib = 0
while(current_fib < 4000000,
    current_fib = fibs[0] + fibs[1]
    if(current_fib % 2 == 0, sum += current_fib)
    fibs[0] = fibs[1]
    fibs[1] = current_fib
)
sum println

Problem 3

The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29. What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143?

Using brute force for this one. Faster and more elegant would have been the Rho algorithm.

start = 600851475143
num = start
factor = 2

while(factor * factor <= num,
    if(num % factor == 0,
        factor println
        num = num / factor,
        factor++
    )
)

if(num != 1, num println)

Problem 5

2520 is the smallest number that can be divided by each of the numbers  from 1 to 10 without any remainder. What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?

First, as the numbers 1 to 10 are factors in the numbers 11 to 20 we only need to check divisibility for the the latter. Starting of by setting up methods for greatest common divisor and least common multiple. Brute forcing this by looping over an incremented number will not work in the current version of Ioke (takes a couple of hours). Brute forcing it in Ruby took a couple of seconds.

gcd = method(a, b,
    if(b == 0, a,
        gcd(b, a % b)
    )
)

lcm = method(a, b,
    (a / gcd(a, b)) * b
)

(11..20) inject(number, n, lcm(number, n)) println

Problem 18

Find the maximum total from top to bottom of the triangle below. This solution also works for problem 67 (a much bigger triangle).

By moving from bottom to top, calculating each cell’s maximum sum and replacing the value with it we’ll end up with the total in the first cell in the triangle.

triangle = [
[75],
[95, 64],
[17, 47, 82],
[18, 35, 87, 10],
[20, 04, 82, 47, 65],
[19, 01, 23, 75, 03, 34],
[88, 02, 77, 73, 07, 63, 67],
[99, 65, 04, 28, 06, 16, 70, 92],
[41, 41, 26, 56, 83, 40, 80, 70, 33],
[41, 48, 72, 33, 47, 32, 37, 16, 94, 29],
[53, 71, 44, 65, 25, 43, 91, 52, 97, 51, 14],
[70, 11, 33, 28, 77, 73, 17, 78, 39, 68, 17, 57],
[91, 71, 52, 38, 17, 14, 91, 43, 58, 50, 27, 29, 48],
[63, 66, 04, 68, 89, 53, 67, 30, 73, 16, 69, 87, 40, 31],
[04, 62, 98, 27, 23, 09, 70, 98, 73, 93, 38, 53, 60, 04, 23],
]

;; We replace cells from the bottom up by finding the max sum for each
;; position in the triangle.

current_row = triangle length - 2

while(current_row > -1,
    pos = 0
    while(pos < triangle[current_row] length,
        triangle[current_row][pos] = triangle[current_row][pos] + \
        ([triangle[current_row + 1][pos], triangle[current_row + 1][pos + 1]] sort)[1]
        pos++
    )

    current_row = current_row - 1
)

triangle[0][0] println

Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow).

Custom apps have major implications for usability so I decided to roll my own. I wanted to try out Fluid, the Prism-like app to contain web apps in their own process/window, to see if it is possible to build a complete open source ad-free twitter client in a single web page only using javascript and HTML.

So, I cuiled for a jQuery twitter plugin but had to google it to find it. Some minor modifications to the code by the fine folks at SeaOfClouds and adding a method to post new status messages gave this native-looking OS X twitter client (HUD-style to the left, default style to the right and HUD avatars style below):

Thank’s to the twitter json api it was trivial to query my own friend feed and display it in Safari. Then, I used Fluid to create a self contained OSX app that displays my static HTML page. Googling a nice application icon makes it much better-looking in the taskbar. I decided to call it “Twoot”. Twoot consumes little memory and plays nice with embedded URLs (they open in a new Firefox tab).

Unfortunately, Fluid does not allow you to distribute the created app so you will have to roll your own by:

1. Download and install Fluid.
2. Create a folder called “twoot” in your home directory.
3. Download the twoot html, js and css files from github and place in the twoot folder.
4. Edit twoot.js and set your twitter username and password. (Enter credentials in the basic auth form when launching app the first time).
5. Open Fluid and create a new app by pointing to the twoot.htm file (e.g. file:///users/you/twoot/twoot.htm) and set a nice icon.
6. Save the app as “Twoot”.
7. Your new twitter client is ready! Run it and resize as required, set the window to floating, kill tabs etc. Change the twoot.css and html file to customize it further.

Simple API:s are wonderful for usability!

…research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer every day. I discovered that over time, I have added so much attention-stealing stuff to my main work environment that I feel constantly interrupted. You get growl notifications, tweets, new email sounds, new email icons, RSS feed notifications and IM alerts. When you are reading stuff on the web you are constantly bugged by the latest in advertising technology.

So, starting a couple of weeks ago I decided to remove attention-stealing stuff from my work environment. A short list so far:

1. Disabling Growl notifications for everything but really important stuff. Done!
2. Turning off new email notfications for Outlook (on my Windows computer at work). Done!
3. Reduced ads in internet content by installing Adblock plus in FF3. Done!
4. Removed MailPlane icon from taskbar. Set “Do not disturb” mode in MailPlane. Done!
5. Turning off IM for long periods of time during the day. Done!
6. Scheduling RSS reading to specific time slots during the day. Hard!
7. Turning off notification sounds in Windows. Done!
8. Hiding the windows taskbar to get rid of spinning mini-icons in the right-hand corner. Done!
9. Turning off yellow alert popups from stuff in the Windows taskbar (like “A network cable was disconnected” – who the hell decided that that was a brilliant idea!?). Not sure how yet.
10. Creatign a consistent editing environment for blogs and wikis with the Universal Edit Button. Done when they’ve fixed the Delicious extension incompatibility.

I am feeling a lot more focussed already. The biggest improvement was from turning of new email notifications in Outlook at work.  I guess the experience is similar to what people are getting from the pomodoro technique.

The next step is to reduce clutter in my blogs to stop annoying other people. Mark Pilgrim gave some interesting tips in a blog post a while ago and I have implemented some of them already. Who the hell needs a visible RSS link (or RSS for that matter, now that we have Atom)? I am thinking about removing the whole category list as well. Do people ever click items in the category list?

It would be great if all apps could share a standard API to set a “do not disturb mode” toggable via a keyboard shortcut or a small timer app that allowed you to schedule this mode throughout the workday.

$a = 0;
$b = "eggs";
$c = "spam";

yields:

a == b
b != c
a == c
a == d
b != d
c != d

(Please note that d hasn’t been defined). In the comments, people freak out and tell him that this behaviour is defined in the documentation. I guess that makes it even worse.

Trying the same thing in Ruby:

a = 0
b = “eggs”
c = “spam”

a == b
=> false

b == c
=> false

a == c
=> false

a == d
NameError: undefined local variable or method ‘d’ for main:Object from (irb):7

Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.