Raring / Digital Ocean Server Setup
Two years after having moved to Linode, coming from Slicehost, it seems that a new competitor is once again at the horizon, namely Digital Ocean. I’d heard good things about them already, especially on...
View ArticleI Almost Switched to Pelican, a Static Blog Engine
Visitors familiar with my blog will notice a pretty big change when viewing this post. The blog’s been due for a redesign for some time now, so a few days ago I finally went through with it. The...
View ArticleA Bukkit Jython Console Plugin for Minecraft
Summary and Changes This post describes how you can create a Python interpreter for a Bukkit Minecraft server, providing access to the full internal API. Commands are issued on a separate console...
View ArticleI Did Switch to Pelican
Just a quick heads up to let you know that this blog will look a bit different — once again! Although indicated otherwise about a week ago, I’ve nevertheless decided to move away from Blogger and...
View ArticlePelican Switch Follow-Up
Phew, all internal links on the blog should work fine now. There are a bunch left which link to the old Blogger pages, but that’s fine I guess; I’ll fix these as they come. I promised to follow-up with...
View ArticleNote To Self: Setting Up VNC Desktop For Remote User
Another one of these things I always end up forgetting: setting up a Linux (in this case: Ubuntu) server so that users can login using a VNC client and get a (slim) desktop. First thing you need to do...
View ArticleConverting Plain Text References To BibTeX (or Endnote, or…)
Update: new post and source code here. So last weekend, I’d almost finished editing a Word manuscript draft to submit to a particular journal, except for one final item on the todo list: converting the...
View ArticleReplacing BibTeX References With DBLP Entries
Update (2014-08-08): commenters on Twitter have notified me about this script which aims to accomplish something similar, without DBLP, however. Fellow researcher Joos Buijs has also started working...
View ArticleWindows 8 Annoyances (and the Sad State of Operating Systems and Everything,...
This was going to be a short “list” post, but expanded to something a little bit larger. Recently, I’ve acquired a shiny new Dell XPS laptop. The exact specs are not important; compared to almost a...
View ArticleSmall jr.js (Junior) Modification
Just a small post. I’ve been using this project lately to set up some quick static-only-but-Markdown-enabled project pages for a while now. Basically, it allows you to set up a static website with...
View ArticleJoomla 1.5 Security Fixes
Although I now have moved on — for most part — from PHP, I am still maintaining a number of websites build on top of Joomla. Ever since Joomla 3.0 was released, Joomla 1.5 has reached end-of-life...
View ArticleList of Apps
I’ve been reinstalling a lot of Windows machines lately (cleaning house and such), and just wanted to jot down a list of apps I’ll install before doing anything else. To get the base system running, so...
View ArticleThis is What the Chinese Cloud Looks Like
Introduction It should not come to a surprise that the Chinese technology giants are — just as their western counterparts, rolling out their respective versions of cloud storage services such as Google...
View ArticleSome Games to Look Forward to in 2015
I though it was just me, what with being busy and older and all, but it kind of looks like everybody agrees that 2014 has been a generally shitty year for gaming. Summarized, the arguments boil down to...
View ArticleRebuilding our Jython Console Plugin for Minecraft
Summary and Changes This post describes how you can create a Python interpreter for a CanaryMod Minecraft server, providing access to the full internal Canary API (CanaryLib). Commands are issued on a...
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Removing Background Color from a PDF Presentation
Ever ran across a PDF export of a Powerpoint which looks like this? Turns out it is not so easy to convert this to printable design (at least not without having access to the original presentation...
View ArticleA Quick Look at Java Decompilers
I’ve been looking at various Java decompilers recently for a project I’ve been working on in spare time. Java code obfuscation is something I have an interest in for no particular reason, mostly...
View ArticleList of Apps (Updated)
Again that time of the year where Windows’s being reinstalled, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated versus last year. (This list last updated in...
View ArticleFixing Flask url_for when Behind mod_proxy
Imagine you have an Apache server set up with a virtualhost configuration listening to some domain, e.g. my.domain:8080 You have a Flask app running at: localhost:5000 You want to add a mod_proxy...
View ArticleProgramming Languages to Try
I routinely use Python, R and Java during my day-to-day tasks, but have been itching recently to get up to speed or try out some of the following languages. This list basically serves as a note to...
View ArticleConverting Plain Text References To BibTeX, Updated
This blog post is an update for this one. I was recently contacted regarding the original post no longer working. Indeed, the scholar.py version used there is being blocked by Google Scholar. Looking...
View ArticleFun with Audiosurf 2 and Mitmproxy
I enjoy firing up Audiosurf 2 from time to time to have some rythmic musical fun. One of the things that has been bothering me, however, is the fact that Audiosurf 2 only integrates with Soundcloud for...
View ArticleHow-to: Send HTML Mails with OAuth2 and Gmail in Python
If you’ve been trying to send e-mails from a program using your Gmail account, you’ll probably have encountered the following error message: SMTP Error: Could not authenticate. Error: SMTP Error: Could...
View ArticleSome Quick Spatial Kriging Fun With Aqicn.org
Our local Belgian media was just reporting on a study showing that air pollution has a negative impact on the cognitive abilities of children (link in Dutch). With that in mind, I was reminded of the...
View ArticleSmoothLife in Processing
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the most popular examples of cellular automaton. However, did you know that Stephan Rafler proposed a version of Game of Life in 2011 which works over a contious domain,...
View ArticleSome Games to Look Forward to in 2017
2016 turned out to be a great year for gaming, with Dishonored 2, The Witness, Doom, Overwatch, Superhot, Thumper, Hyper Light Drifter, Cogmind, Devil Daggers, Furi, Brigador, Age of Empires 2 HD...
View ArticleWord Spellchecking in Python
In case you’d ever want to integrate Word’s spell checking capabilities on top of your Python app, here’s how you would do so: The only requirement is having Word installed (with the language packs...
View ArticleCleaning Up a Gmail Inbox
Update: code is available at https://github.com/Macuyiko/gmail-cleaner. I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated by my overflowing Gmail inbox lately. I’ve been using Gmail as a primary e-mail service...
View ArticleAnd Now, Time for a Rant
I’ve been interested in computing since I was a kid. The ability to tinker with the internals of a machine, the brutalism of DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95’s interfaces (those big grey buttons)… It...
View ArticleNote to Self: Using Tesseract to Extract Subtitles
Say you have video such as this one on Facebook. Most of these come with hardcoded subtitles, which we’d like to extract (for whatever reason). Opening the page in Chrome and inspecting the network...
View ArticleBypassing Android Cert Pinning Using a Rooted Emulator (AVD)
A while ago I was interested in performing some HTTPS MITM analysis on an Android app, without having to rely on a real device but instead using an Android Virtual Device, or in other words: an...
View ArticleNote to Self: Fast Android Screen Capture
Getting a reliable, real-time screen of an Android device is more challenging than one might think, e.g. for the purpose of training a reinforcement learning agent. This post describes a basic...
View ArticlePredicting Voobly Age of Empires 2 Matches
I think that Age of Empires II is probably the game I’ve been playing on or off for the longest amount of time. In fact, it is this game which pushed me to write a custom tool to prevent DirectDraw...
View ArticleList of Apps (2018)
It’s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again. Web Chrome Dropbox Google Drive FileZilla qBittorrent Skype is...
View ArticleDiscovering Interaction Effects in Ensemble Models
Throughout the past year or so, both R and Python focused data science practioners have picked up on a paper by Friedman and Popescu from 2008 entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles....
View ArticleRendering Minecraft Maps with R’s rayshader Package
About two weeks ago, Hacker News was discussing a new R package called brickr, which relies on another relatively new and excellently crafted R package called rayshader to enable its rendering...
View ArticleA Tour of Open MongoDB Instances
Earlier last month, a security researcher called Victor Gevers sent out a tweet stating that he had stumbled upon a number of open MongoDB databases hosting what was apparantly logged chats from a...
View ArticleList of Apps (2019)
It’s time to setup a new laptop, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I normally install right away, slightly updated again. Web Chrome Google Drive FileZilla Optional: qBittorrent install...
View ArticleMy course.fast.ai Notes
tag { background-color: #e8fbff; color: black; border-radius: 4px; padding: 2px 4px; } tag::before { content: "#"; } Like many others, I’m a huge fan of Jeremy Howard’s fast.ai courses. Even when...
View ArticleAnd Now, Time for Another Rant
I was going to spew this out as a Twitter “thread” as is the fashion these days, but I decided against it. Blogging is still cool. Especially once I realized this is not the first time I’ve done this……...
View ArticleList of Apps (2020)
It’s time to setup a new machine, so once again I’m jotting down a list of apps I generally install right away, slightly updated again.ChromeGoogle DriveFileZillaMicrosoft Office (including Skype for...
View ArticleRevisiting Discovery of Interaction Effects
In 2019, I wrote on the topic of discovering which features interact in a model agnostic manner, using an approach from a paper by Friedman and Popescu entitled Predictive Learning Via Rule Ensembles....
View ArticleDoes It Make Sense to Tune the Cutoff of Trees in a Random Forests?
TL;DR: very likely not.A student once asked me whether it would make sense to tune the probability cutoff (a.k.a. threshold) for random forests. Let’s explain first what we mean by that exactly. Assume...
View ArticlereMarkable 2 Screen Capture on Windows 10
I’ve recently bought a reMarkable 2 and am happy with it. Since teaching is still happening online for the most part at the moment, I was curious whether I could use it as a drawing tablet, share the...
View ArticleAdding New Levels to a Keras Embedding Layer Without Having to Completely...
A friend of mine recently asked whether there was an easy way to introduce new levels to an embedding layer in Keras and only training the embedding layer for those new levels, i.e. keeping the weights...
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