With this variation on a famous statement by the philosopher Descartes,
I would like to express that the act of writing about what happens in my life
is important to me.
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.5° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 16.8° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. This is the fourth day in a row, and
probably the last, with a new record high temperature. The highest temperature
for tomorrow is 17.9° Celsius which was measured in 2019. With a predicted
highest temperature of 15.4° Celsius it is not likely that it will be
broken.
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.3° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 14.4° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. When walking, we still found some snow in
a ditch along the road, which is a strange experience with the extreme high
temperatures of these days.
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.0° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 15.1° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. Quite surprising swing of weather, because
two weeks ago was the start of a cold period where the temperature remained
below zero Celsius for almost a week. Conny
and I continued our search for border poles in
Drenthe. The poles we encountered are:
At 12:41, pole 152 (D), which we only saw from the otherside of the river
on Saturday, January 23.
At 13:11, pole 159.
At 13:17 we saw pole 160 from a large distance.
At 13:28, pole 157 (N).
At 14:09, the remains of pole 156-II (N).
At 14:14, pole 156 (N). It looks like pole 156 (D) has disappeared.
At 14:23, pole 156-II (D).
At 14:37, pole 156-III (D).
At 14:51, pole 157 (D).
At 15:56, pole 160-II. (A yellow PVC pole.)
At 15:38, pole 160-I. It looks like the foundation, a stone platform
supported by wooden piles, has been rebuilded completed.
At home, Conny made curly kail hotchpotch with a
spice mixture, consisting of onion powder, celery leaf, paprika powder, ground
mustard seed, caraway seed, savory, thyme, basil, garlic powder, ground white
pepper, ground black pepper, ground nutmeg, turmeric, ground cumin seed, ground
bay leaf and ground coriander. It tasted nice.
Conny and I decided to walk along the border
near the city of Overdinkel. We first made a stop at the border between the village Glane
and Gronau to find a border pole we missed last
year May 31. When we parked our car, Conny
noted stone that looked like a border pole and when walked over, was indeed
the border pole 856-E. After we found the border pole we came for, we walked
in the other direction and found one more pole. From there we drove to another
location and walked a long distance along the border. At a tree, just after
border pole 3-I, that had recently fell down, we had some lunch. The poles we
encountered are:
It seems that the battle against COVID-19 is
a lost battle. Take for example, the scientific publication
Mechanistic
transmission modeling of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship
demonstrates the importance of aerosol transmission, which suggest that it
is very difficult to stop the spread of the virus. As expected, the virus is
mutating and possible avoiding antibodies against earlier infections including
antibodies produced by vaccinations. And now the first hybrid has been found,
which combines the mutations from two variants, B.1.1.7 and B.1.429. There is
no reason why this will happen again. Some specialist are stating that
a cytokine storm
plays an important role in people getting seriously ill from a COVID-19
infection. Maybe more effort should be put in treating that. One such possible
treatment is the EXO-CD24 drug found by Prof. Nadir Arber. The effectiveness of
this drug has not been scientifically established yet by means of double-blind
study with sufficient number of cases.
I watched the first half of the video Platform Experience - On demand (in Dutch) on the Thinkwise channel. Thinkwise is a developer of low-code development platform, a platform that they for 16 years used to
develop solutions for their customers, but in the past two years are marketing
as a development platform. During the presentation, they said that the
documentation is available online. I looked up their data modeling and was a
little disappointed that it is table oriented. It was interesting to read
the data modeling guidelines. It is interesting to read about strong
entities, weak entities, link tables and inheritance tables, but it shows that
the table oriented approach is an implementation of a more abstract way of
modeling data. It seems they do advocate composite, and possible large, primary
keys, which could not always be the best implementation solution. But it seems
to work for the kind of applications that they target.
In the afternoon, Conny and I walked along the
roads called Moorveenweg, Hegebeenkweg, Berktepaalweg/Kwekerijweg,
Riethermsteeg, and Ontginingsweg. The name of Berktepaalweg refers to the
marke stone called Berktepaal. But this
stone is not along this road, but along the road called Moorveenweg which runs
parallel to it. The road called Bertkepaalweg was only extended to the border
between the municipalities of Enschede and Haaksbergen around 1937. So maybe
the road was called like this, because it was going into the direction of the
Berktepaal. We saw many animals tracks in the snow, most of which seems to be
from rabbits and/or hares and maybe also deers. Conny took a picture of what
looked like a hare in the distance and one of what looked like a deer in the
distance. We also saw many examples of snow shaped by the wind. Surprising
how just a small tree can lead to dunes in the wake of the tree. The picture above is of such a dune. I suspect that turbulence plays some
role in the development of these dunes.
Today is the first day of the year 4718, the year of the ox according to the
Chinese calendar. The spring festival has begun.
This is both the year of Andy and I, meaning that
this year we will have our 24th and 60th birthdays,
respecitively. Today is also a palindrome
date when written like 12/02/2021 (DD-MM-YYYY), 12-2-21 (DD-M-YY), and 21.2.12 (YY.M.DD).
At 23:52, I bought the book Environments written by Frans Haks, Egbert
Switters, and Swip Stolk in Dutch, published by Studium Generale
Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht in 1968. I bought it online from De Slegte, Antwerpen
for € 100.00.
Today is a double date when the date is
written in the format MM/DD/YY or YY.MM.DD: 02/10/21 or 21.02.10. The next such
date is on December 11 this year. This is the third mention of a special date for this year.
Today, there is going to be some more snow. A bigger
problem is that the temperature is going to drop and stay below zero (Celsius),
which causes the snow to stay. Often, snow happens at the end of a cold period
in the Netherlands. Now it is at the start of a cold period. The last
predictions are that the temperature will stay below zero for at least a week.
This morning, it took me a quarter of an hour to get the car out of a parking
lot. I have some snow dunes in my back garden.
My estimate is that during the day (since yesterday evening) about 4cm of
snow fell.
It already started to snow yesterday evening. This
morning, I tried to measure the height of the snow on a table outside. It is
difficult to establish the amount of snow that fell because there is a strong
wind which blows the snow away. I measured the snow height on two spots and
concluded that about 15cm of snow has felt during the night. It is still
snowing and it will continue snowing during the day, the night and also
tomorrow according to the weather predictions. According to the weather
predictions the coming weeks the temperatures will remain below zero (Celsius),
meaning that the snow will not melt away and stay on the fields for a long
time. My estimate is that during the day another 3cm of snow fell.
The weather predictions are becoming more and more convincing that we here in
the Netherlands are heading for a winter period. For Sunday, about 10 to 20
cm of snow is expected, followed by a week of
cold temperatures. At the end of the week, there could be 10 cm of ice in the
North of the country.
In the past weeks, I worked on an reimplementation of IParse in JavaScript as an online
interactive parser for educational purposes, which I am going to use this
for workshop that I will be giving for TkkrLab on Saturday, March 20.
At 13:42:16, I bought the following boos from the Taschen:
Oliver Byrne. Six Books of Euclid written by
Oliver
Byrne and Werner Oechslin, written in English, French, and German,
published by Taschen Gmbh in December 2020,
ISBN:9783836559386, for € 15.
Contemporary Houses. 100 Homes Around the World written by Philip
Jodidio in English, French, and German, published by Taschen Gmbh in 2020,
ISBN:9783836583954, for € 35.
These are not the type of books that I would normally buy, but because I have
bookshops (as non-essential shops) have been closed since December 15, I could not resist the urge to buy
some books.
Conny and I travelled along the Schoonebeker
Diep at the border of Germany, which is actually the part of the Grenzaa river, which starts in Germany, that is on the border. We
followed it in search of border poles. Because
the border is in the middle of the river, border poles were placed in pairs at
both sides of the river, where the exact middle of the two poles signifies the
position of the border. In some cases, only the pole on the Dutch side is left.
We followed the book Op zoek naar grenspalen and maps from
Topografische atlas van Drenthe proved very
helpful. There is a biking path along a large part of the river. We traveled
by car and could not follow the river over the whole distance but had to use
the road from Coevorden to Nieuw-Schoonebeek. We failed to locate the border
pole 152-I. We made a short walk through the center of Nieuw-Schoonebeek. We
found the following border poles (and two shields on a bridge).
At 13:27, pole 151-V (N), which had fell sideways.
At 13:31, pole 151-V (D).
At 14:07, pole 151-VI, which had fell sideways.
At 14:30, pole 152 (N). We saw pole 152 (D) from a distance on the other
side of the river.
At 14:55, shield 152-II on the bridge.
At 14:57, shield 152-III on the bridge.
At 14:59, pole 153 (D).
At 15:02, pole 153 (N), which had fell backwards.
At 15:18, pole 153-I (N).
At 15:19, pole 153-I (D).
At 15:25, pole 154 (N).
At 15:27, pole 154 (D).
At 15:59, pole 155 (N).
At 16:03, pole 155 (D).
Afterwards, we traveled to the Germany village Neugnadenfeld where we visited
two graveyards. During the second world war it was the location of a prisoner
of war camp with primarily Russian soldiers. Because Russia had not signed the
First Geneva
Convention, the Russian solders were not protected by it. As a result of
this, many died and were thrown in a mass grave. After the war, members of
the Moravian Church
from Germany and other parts of (Eastern) Europe were granted the establish a
village at the location of the camp. At their graveyard people are buried in
order of their date of death and the graves have simple and similar looking
tombstone. There is a rahter strong constrast between the two graveyards.
In my experience as a software engineer for many years, I feel that software engineering is still heavily relying on craftmanship to such an
extend that it barely can be called engineering. With engineering, I understand
a well defined process to arrive at a reliable solution for a well specified
problem by applying a standard set of methods. Of course, software engineering
is operating in a context where the problem specification is volutile and
usually not well understood from the start of a project. But that can also be
seen as a motivation for a more enginering based approach to quickly respond to
changing requirements. Currently, most software development is done by writing
code, which contains the specified problem and its implementation mixed in
such away that it is often not possible to see which is which. So far, not many
tools have been developed for a more engineering approach to software
engineering. Almost every day new programming languages are proposed, but most
of these are just new combinations of language construct in other languages
and/or an alternative way to implement them. Most of these languages end a
silent death. Most of the software engineering of today is related to data
management, where multiple people operate on a shared data repository, either
through websites or dedicated applications. Although there are some
no-code
development platforms they usually work with simple data models. There are
some low-code development platforms that are more promesing. (One that I know
of is the one developed by ThinkWise.) I believe that these platforms can only succesfull if they are
based on rich semantic models. These kind of no/low-code platforms implement
just one implementation strategy from a high-level specification to an
executable platform. What I am thinking of is the development of languages that
specify how a high-level specification can be implemented using lov-level
programming languages. I understand that this is a very hard problem. I have
started developing a data specification language, which I called DataLang, a
name that also has been used for similar approaces. An introduction to this
can be found here.
The authorities reported that the spread of the VUI - 202012/01COVID-19 variant in
the Netherlands is no longer contained. They estimate that now about 10% of the
COVID cases are the VUI - 202012/01 variant. I am not surprised about this. The
authorities have over and over failed in this respect. They are expecting that
by April it will be the dominant variant leading to next wave and advising the
government to take new measures. The government is thinking about a curfew from
20:00 till 4:00. The experts of the RIVM should have realized that the new variants with higher infection
rates were to arise and plan ahead to counter this. As far as I know, they did
not do anything. They even did not enough screening of variants to detect the
development of mutations. And once the new variant was discovered, they failed
to scale up testing to contain this variant. It seems that they only thing
they did was to estimate the spread of the new variant in order that they
could adise the government with respect to measures to be taken. That can be
seen as a clever strategy to avoid their primary responsibility to contain the
spread of infectious diseases. Over and over again our government has failed
to contain the spread of the virus by means of testing and contact research. It
is only since a few months that people who do not have symptoms can be tested.
Yesterday, on the news there was an issue about how today a snow front would go over the country from the west to the east. Yesterday
morning, I already saw some small snow specks fall from the sky, some of which
stayed on the roofs of the houses. In the evening, I made some curly kail hotchpotch (with no fried pork but with smoked sausage). Only
in the evening, it started to snow and some of it on the roads. At least about
2.5cm of snow fell during the evening, based on my own measurement. The coming
days the temperature is going to rise and the snow is expected to quickly melt
away.
On March 20, I am going to give a (online) workshop on parsing. The workshop
will start of with a overview of parsing and than explain the decision I took
for implementing IParse. In
the second part of the workshop, will consist of writing some simple grammar
for IParse and test it on input. I am thinking about discussing RawParser, a reimplementation of IParse in 'raw' C, in the last part of
the workshop. In the past months I have been working on RawParser and trying to
add extensive documents to explain how it works, but I do not feel very happy
about all the restrictions that C imposes on the order and level of detail
you have to provide. A few days ago, I came across Build Your Own Text Editor and was rather charmed by it approach. It is
generated from a collection of Markdown files and a steps.diff file with the help of a program
called leg. This made me
thinking about using Markdown as the primary source of the code and write a
program to generate a C program from a collection of Markdown files. I think it
is possible to make the program smart enough to reorder the Markdown code
fragments and to allow a mechanism for extending the code without having to
include many instructions where to include which piece of the code as in
CWEB, a computer programming
system created by Donald Knuth and Silvio Levy as a follow-up to Knuth's WEB
literate programming system. I have started this approach on
RawParser/doc/grammar.md file. As a positive side effect, working
on this did result into some improvement of
RawParse.c itself.
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If I did not count wrong, this site
consists of 994 HTML-files with a total size of 23,017,762 characters,
having 49,281 internal links and 11,955 external links to (more than) 3,974 websites.
(At least 737 of the external links are broken.)
Furthermore, it contains 218 C/C++ program files with a total size of 4,837,619 characters,
9 MySample scripts with a total size of 75,004 characters,
3 PASCAL program files with a total size of 35,259 characters.
and 2 Python program files with a total size of 3,764 characters.
There are 67 text files with a total size of 739,138 characters.
With respect to images, this site containts 1290 JPEG images
(total size 56,935,217 bytes),
146 GIF images (total size 3,765,046 bytes),
94 PNG images (total size 2,280,364 bytes), and
2 BMP images (total size 3,727 bytes).
With respect to sounds, it contains 14 WAV files
with a total size of 389,002 bytes and
1 MP3 files with a total size of 70,182 bytes.
It also contains 43 PostScript files (total size 308,387 bytes),
2 LaTeX files (total size 132,020 characters),
11 PDF files (total size 12,472,212 characters),
22 zip files (total size 2,487,335 bytes),
3 gzipped tar files (total size 52,345 bytes),
45 SGF files with
a total size of 85,019 bytes,
119 KML files with
a total size of 4,775,603 bytes,
and 2 EXE files with a total size of 38,340 bytes.
It also uses 16 JavaScript files with
a total size of 683,887 bytes,
This leads to a total size of 113,767,575 bytes.
Copyright
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Creative Commons License is applicable. You may not use this
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I consider all computer programs to be copyrighted by me under the
GNU General Public
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program fragments) from other sources are excluded from this, and should
be considered as copyrighted by their authors.