If you’re a student at the University of Copenhagen, you’ll probably have noticed that we recently switched to new, horrendously hard to remember usernames for logging into punkt.KU (affectionately known as license plates).

In order to better cope with change, I present to you a few tools to help make the transition smoother.

Absalon

A fun fact about the new license plates is that they also act as the username you use for logging into Absalon. Note that the password you use for logging in still has to be found out in a very round-about way, however.

This annoyed me a little, as I now had to memorize a very hard to remember username, since Absalon has decided that no password manager is allowed to remember logins for their site. Because of this, I wrote a small Chrome extension which allows one to store the login information. (Among other small fixups.)

In addition, Martin Dybdal has written a page-mode for Conkeror that does something similar.

punkt.KU login

Another friend of mine, Mathias Svensson, was tired of having to either remember his license plate or click through a link from the front page in order to log in to punkt.KU. As a result of this, he made a short, simple page for easy logon with your CPR-number: punkt.coq.dk.

Note that while I do in fact own coq.dk, it is Mathias and not I who runs punkt.coq.dk.

Quickly, one starts running out of levels to solve, however, so I’ve decided to make a small collection of additional levels you can play. Mind you, I have not solved all of these myself, so the unsolved ones may very well not be solvable in the space allotted. Caveat emptor.

Output 1 by Sebastian
Difficulty: Easy
Solutions:
0:03, 0:04, 0:09, 0:19, 0:19 by Sebastian

The Swap Job by Sebastian
Difficulty: Easy
Solutions: 0:04, 0:06, 0:03, 0:03, 0:09, 0:05 by Sebastian

Modulo by Sebastian
Difficulty: Medium
Hint: Look at Wikipedia if you don’t know what modulo is.
Solutions:
???? by Sebastian (Works, apart from what I’d call a bug in Manufactoria)

Three Sorts by Sebastian
Difficulty: Unknown
Solutions:
Solved by Thomas NB

Countdown by Sebastian
Difficulty: Unknown
Solutions:
Solved by Thomas NB

Don’t be a square by Sebastian
Difficulty: Unknown
Solutions: None yet.

Consectutive Action by Sebastian
Comment: What I want is the largest number of consectutive reds or blues. So RBBBR would return 3, RRBBR 2 and BRBRB 1.
Difficulty: Unknown
Solutions: None yet.

The Great Divider by Sebastian
Difficulty: Probably quite hard
Hint: Look at Wikipedia if you don’t know what GCD is.
Solutions: None yet.

R-B Progression by Sebastian
Difficulty: Probably quite hard
Solutions: None yet.

Now, luckily, most simple extensions can be installed directly with no problem in Chrome, but a few of them sadly can’t.

One of the ones that couldn’t was YouTube Title Adder, so I thought I’d go and port it to Chrome.

Now, a few hours later, I can present you with a new, and slightly improved, YouTube Title Adder for Chrome.

Features are the same as the original script:

• Labels YouTube links.
• Adds button to allow inline viewing of the videos.

If you’re still not convinced, look at these screenshots of it in action:

Download

You can download the bot here.

Do note that it will not run without Skype installed, and it will operate on your account. You can still use your account while the bot is running, however.

Features

A selection of different “plugins” you can enable/disable at will.

The plugins are:

• 4chan Plugin – grabs a random image from /b/.
• Acronym Maker Plugin – generates a random explanation for an acronym.
• Bash.org Plugin (NEW) – returns a random quote from the bash.org quote database.
• Cypher Plugin – lets you use miscellaneous cryptographic cyphers (currently only the Caesar cipher).
• Dice Plugin – lets you roll dice.
• Dictionary Plugin – allows for dictionary lookups.
• Google ImageSearch Plugin – performs a Google ImageSearch and returns a random result.
• High-Low Plugin – lets people play High-Low with per-chat scorekeeping.
• Lolcat Plugin – returns a random lolcat.
• Penis Plugin (NEW) – responds to penile discussion.
• Porn Plugin – gives a random porn link.
• Quote Plugin – lets you act as a quote database.
• Random Link Plugin (NEW) – returns a random link.
• Something Awful Plugin (NEW) – automatically tells information (subforum, thread title, original poster) about links to threads on the Something Awful Forums.
• UrbanDictionary Plugin – looks up a word on Urban Dictionary.
• WaffleImages Plugin – links to a random image hosted on WaffleImages, a SA-only imagehost.
• Wikipedia Plugin (NEW) – gives a random Wikipedia link.
• YouTube Info – automatically tells information (video name, uploader, rating, …) about links to YouTube.

Getting started

• Simply go to the download page and follow the instructions to install it.
• If you have trouble starting it, make sure you accept the authorization request Skype displays.
• Enable whichever plugins you want.
• Enter “!help” in a Skype chat window and you’ll see a list of the active commands.

• That’s all there is to it.

  Bugs/suggestions

  If you’re having trouble with it crashing on 64-bit Windows; try installing SQL Server CE 3.5 SP 1; it’s supposed to help.

  If you think you have a good idea for another addition, or that you’ve found a bug, then please let me know at the UserVoice page.

  Screenshots

  

  Screenshot of v1.1.4.0

If you are a student at the University of Copenhagen, chances are that you’ve had a run-in with a service called Absalon. For the uninitiated, Absalon is based on a system called it’s learning, which is a “virtual learning environment“. As a student at KU might also know ISIS, which serves pretty much the exact same purpose.

Now, one of the things that annoyed me quite a bit is that way you are supposed to log in to this system is by first going to punkt.ku, logging in there, clicking Absalon, which then pops up in a new window. The reason that this annoyed me can mainly be summed up in these following troubles:

• For one, if I bookmark anything at Absalon — let’s say a course page — and I click that bookmark, I get a session time out. I must then proceed to go to a completely other site in order to log in. In short, my bookmarks are useless.
• Secondly, it opens in a new window (or tab) when you try to open Absalon from punkt.ku.



• And finally, there is a bloody log-in box on the page, why shouldn’t I be allowed to use that?

Well, as it turns out, you actually can use that log-in box, but in order to do that, you need to find the username and password for your account. If you look at the picture above, a way of doing that should pop out — the “Forgotten password?” link. Before we can use that, however, we need to find out which email address is associated with the account.

The email field

In order to do that, you have to log in to Absalon the old fashioned way; through punkt.ku. Once you have done that, there should be a “My Settings” link in the top right hand side of the page. From there, you click on to “Change settings”, which contains the email address associated with your account.

With that in hand we can proceed to get our log-in information. Copy down the address and log out. Absalon doesn’t like you, so it doesn’t return to the main page when you log out, so you will have to go there yourself. Now, open the “Forgotten password?” page, make sure that “KU” is selected in the membership drop-down, and enter the email address, exactly as it was on the “My Settings” page.

After sending that request, you should be sent an email containing both the username and the password of your Absalon account, and after that you will never have to go to punkt.ku to log in to Absalon ever again.

Spheres drawn in papert

You can now relive the past, for Thomas Edward Figg, or tef as he calls himself on Something Awful, has made a JavaScript-based Logo interpreter. Now you can watch the Koch snowflake, the Hilbert curve or whatever else your mind happens to think up unfold itself before your very eyes — without having to leave your browser window!

So I urge you, click on any of the examples I linked before — or if you’re extremely lazy, click here:

papert – logo in your browser

If you want example code to run, I can suggest checking out the Something Awful thread on papert by the developer himself.

I had begun to write a small description of it myself, but I located this in the source code of the official site, commented out, and after reviewing what I’d written myself, I prefer this, so here it is:

Good Copy Bad Copy explores the state of limbo the world is in when it comes to copyright.

Western media conglomerates and rights owners desire one world order, while ‘pirates’ and cultural movements in the third world invent their own rules. Rules that even the West might have to play along with.

In a Pittsburgh living room, DJ and producer Girl Talk composes catchy pop hits on his laptop. In the span of 30 seconds he samples Elton John, Notorious B.I.G and Destiny’s Child into a new song. But, who owns the music? Who owns the artists? Piracy is booming all over the world – from Nigeria to Brazil, while Hollywood and the record industry fight to stem the tide.

Directors:
Andreas Johnsen
Ralf Christensen
Henrik Moltke

I strongly urge you to click the link and go watch GOOD COPY BAD COPY, as it is very well put together and an excellent documentary overall.

Now, being quite a fan of Firefox, I decided to read through this.

This read will not help you stop fighting with your lover over who’s doing the washing up but there will not be any questions left concerning which is the best web browser in the world. To avoid being accused of subjectivity I will give you some points that NOBODY will be able to argue with because everything in this article will be true and verifiable.

So be it, I thought, I’ll go check out those errors. For these tests, I will be using the latest version of Firefox (3.0.1) and Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 to compare.

1. The guys talk about standards. Then, why is it that FireFox cannot deal with <div> tags?

   Well, let’s look at the issues he mentions. First up is Superbreak.com, where the footer allegedly is different between IE and Fx.
   

   

   Superbreak on IE

   

   Superbreak on Fx

   So, what difference do I see? Well, I don’t really see much, to be honest. On Firefox there are separators between the links below the copyright message, which obviously is intended behavior, so that would count against IE.
   Upon closer inspection in Firebug, I see that he must be talking about how the top 2/3rds of the short summary text describing Short Break can’t be clicked on.

   

   'footertext' as seen in Firebug

   This makes perfect sense, however, because they decided that, in order to be “search engine friendly“, they wanted to move that blurb up to the top of the source code and use absolute positioning to move it down to where it needs to be displayed. Then, later, when the “footertext” div (which is highlighted in blue on the picture) is drawn, it is drawn on top of the blurb, rendering a large part inaccessible.

   Just because it’s the intended effect of the website coder, doesn’t mean it’s the correct way to render it. I’ll have to deduct points for IE on this one, too.

   The next site mentioned is Squidoo, but I won’t really talk about that, because I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I could create a page just fine in Firefox, and edit it afterward as well. No clue what the problem there’s supposed to be.

2. 2. Captcha – it is a small script webmasters install on their blogs to keep the spamming bastards away. To prove you are human, you are asked to enter the digits displayed on Captcha. Some of these scripts won’t work with FireFox and instead of having a site buzzing with comments, you wonder, hey, where’s everyone gone? Nowhere, they’re hanging around and trying to comment via FireFox and it’s not working. Wanna try? Go to http://www.themallblog.com/ (hey, I just made you popular) and try commenting with a FireFox and then try the same with Internet Explorer. How did you like the difference?

   I just posted a comment without any problems. From Firefox. Bit odd way of not working, what with it working and all. Ah well. Next point.

5. 5. Your personal ambitions. You don’t like Internet Explorer because it comes from Microsoft. You hate Microsoft because it is a brainchild of Bill Gates. You hate Bill Gates because he is more successful than you and he’s filthy rich.

   No. I dislike Internet Explorer because:

   • It doesn’t handle PNG alpha transparency.
   • It doesn’t let me serve my XHTML blog with the correct MIME type.
   • It has 10 outstanding unpatched Secunia security advisories. To compare, Firefox has zero, as does Opera.
   • For some odd reason, it takes seconds from middleclicking on a link till the new tab opens in my IE. In Fx, it opens instantly.
   • If you recall my favicon article, IE doesn’t support data URIs, while just about any other browser does.
   • …

   The list could go on, but I have to stop somewhere and pick a browser, now don’t I?

6. 6. You’re using an illegal piratical copy of Windows, hence you cannot download the latest version of Internet Explorer and you just have to settle for a free browser. It is easier to bury a thing you cannot afford than to work hard in order to afford more. When an owner of a Yugo says Rolls Royce is a shit, it is quite understandable because it makes him feel better… at least for a little while.

   My laptop came with Windows XP Professional, which I am using. That install of Windows XP Professional also came with IE, which I am not using.

   Just because you have to pay more for something doesn’t make it better. If you don’t realize this, I cannot help you. Except by offering you a brand new Wii, shipped to your house (free ship–oh wait, $100 shipping), for $20,000. That’s right, you heard me, $20.000, it’s the unbargain of the century.

7. 7. All rumours that Internet Explorer is being overtaken by FireFox are just a fake. It is still around 58% for IE and 32% for FF.

   32% was in March/April of last year. Right now it’s 52% to IE and 42% to Firefox. Yup, I sure don’t see Firefox gaining ground here.

8. 8. Extra strain on web designers. You will be surprised but the majority of web designers don’t give a fig about the web standards, XHTML, HTML strict, transitional, whatever. In fact, if you look at Google search result pages you will se that many Top10 pages are a mess of a code. If you are a web designer that doesn’t do clean code, you have to walk and extra mile to cater for FireFox users. With Internet Explorer it is simpler – if you have some basic knowledge, you will quickly construct pages without gaps, zaps, flaws and other artefacts. Then you go and view your flawless page on a FireFox and alas, why there’s this gap?

   Yeah, I’m with you on this one. There’s no point in making your pages work for more than half of your readers. They’re using a non IE-browser, so they don’t have any money anyway, according to point 6.

9. 9. Stability. Majority of us still use Windows. Internet Explorer is built specially for Windows and it is fully integrated. When it comes to stability and integrity, Internet Explorer gives you more and crashes less frequently than FireFox.

   I’m really loving the lack of sources, especially for this one. I’m reminded of a playground argument.

   “My browser crashes less than your browser!”
   “Nuh-uhhhh, cause my daddy made mine just for me”
   “Well, my daddy bought mine for ten bajillion dollars, so its better, haaah!”

10. 10. Safety? Oh, give me a break. Even FireFox themselves have said that there was no magic bullet to ensure safety on web. In fact, during the previous years Microsoft has been faced with less number of safety flaws than FireFox. In the end it is not the browser but the anti-virus software that determines whether you are safe on the web or not. It is a good anti-virus package (not free soft) that stops adware, kills hacker attempts and destroys the virus attacks. And it is your common sense that provides an extra safety. Majority of web surfers will click on a button that says: I am the red button, click me to get a virus. It is not my assumption, it is the fact. FireFox will never be safe because it has tens of thousands of add-ons freely distributed and out of control! Many of them are malicious, the rest of them are coded by teenagers and just build up and crash.

    Fact: Neither Opera, Firefox nor Safari have had any extremely critical vulnerabilities from 2003-2008. IE? Well, see for yourself.
    Fact: Firefox blocks a lot of attack and phishing sites with a big red warning that is pretty hard to ignore.
    Fact: Firefox addons are marked as experimental until they have been reviewed by a staff member of addons.mozilla.org. You cannot install experimental addons without registering, logging in, asking to see experimental addons, then agreeing to a safety warning. All other addons can be installed without any problems without an account.
    (Anecdotal) Fact: Firefox 3 hasn’t crashed on me.

Now, since this is all so true and verifiable, please respond to this post with some actual sources behind your statements. Thanks.

Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot is an internationally acknowledged and recognized mathematician. He originated the field of fractal geometry, and showed how fractals occur in many diverse places, both in nature and mathematics.

Dr. Mandebrot published The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982), recognized by The American Scientist as one of the most influential science books of the 20th Century.

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY was privileged to spend time with Dr. Mandelbrot. He discusses

• How fractal geometry help explain the problems of today
• Examples of fractals in nature and in engineering
• “Mathematical pictures”
• The relationship between fractal geometry and human nature
• The relationship of fractal patterns to human archetypes

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY – Energy, Environment, Cancer Research, Nanotechnology » Fractal Geometry – Mathematics and Nature

Nothing too mathematically complex, but still a nice bit of talk about fractals, their uses and his inspiration.

Favicons in action

Sure, you could trust a host such as TinyPic or ImageShack, but you never really know if they’ll take it down or whatnot.

The solution lies in using so-called “data URIs“. The way this works is, you make an URI that actually contains the data of the image, hence the name.

“Now, how would I go about making such a ‘data URI’, wiseguy?” you might ask. Well, it’s pretty simple, you drop by Sveinbjorn Thordarson’s DataURLMaker (he’s got to be Icelandic — gotta love their names!), upload the icon you picked, and voilá, it gives you…an img tag?

But wait, this image tag isn’t an orginary image tag (image tag?), it stores the image data in the src attribute

<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" width="16" height="16">

So what we do is, we pull this data URI out of the img tag, and put it into a link tag, like we would a normal shortcut icon URL.

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0 ...etc..."/>

Unlike me, you paste the whole code, of course; I just thought I’d spare you readers having to see that code again.

Moving back to the matter at hand, all that is left is to stuff that link tag into your header — or if you’re a blogger, the header of your template — et voilá, you have yourself a favicon that’s guaranteed to be there whenever your page is.

The icon will then work in most browsers, but sadly not in Internet Explorer 7. Why? Don’t ask. Just don’t. Tends to make your life easier when it comes to IE.

If you want simple proof that it works, well, look at the favicon of this page and the source code just above this paragraph.

If this has piqued your interest in getting a favicon, might I recommend favicon.cc, a Web2.0 favicon maker — which even supports this method!