About me

I am Dutch, 49 years old and live in Amsterdam.

Interests: science, history, movies, modern art, gaming.

I studied biochemistry and history each for several years, visited art school (Rietveld Academy) for two years.

I work as software engineer at KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) for 23 years now.

See also my Wikipedia web site.

Perl scripts

Wikipedia on the handheld

April 2003 I wrote a lengthy Perl script that converts the Wikipedia to TomeRaider format.
TomeRaider files can be browsed on Palm, Pocket PC and EPOC handhelds and on Windows.

From July till November 2004 I upgraded the scripts to the completely revised TomeRaider 3 release. This project is still in beta phase, pending some crucial TomeRaider modifications and bug fixes.

See also

• Wikipedia:TomeRaider database.
• My site, section TomeRaider for more screenshots and detailed info.

Statistics for all Wikipedias

July 2003 I started to work on Perl script to produce extensive statistics for all Wikipedias. These statistics are now available at the Wikipedia server in 15 languages. They are refreshed weekly, after a new SQL dump (= backup) of the databases has been produced, which serves as input.

EasyTimeline

This script makes it possible to define a graphical timeline using a reasonably intuitive script syntax. EasyTimeline has been incorporated into WikiMedia 1.3 in June 2004 (but can also be used offline). See for examples and syntax description. More on EasyTimeline.

For an overview of all charts (images and code) generated with EasyTimeline on all wikipedias see Timelines Index (index updated weekly as part of the stats job)

HTML validation

I recently started working on a script that scans a Wikipedia dump file, validates all HTML and CSS attributes and produces a list of errors. Output will be published on Project Wiki Syntax page. To be added later: validation of wiki and html table structures.

Examples

Boxer_MRAV
<td colspan=2 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2 bgcolor=#ffdead>

Comparison_of_World_War_I_tanks
<tr align=middle> (21x)
hint: align=middle -> align=center

IRAS:
<th bgcolor=#skyblue colspan=2> (2x)
hint: invalid characters in color #skyblue, use 0-9A-F
hint: invalid #skyblue length, use 6 characters in range 0-9A-F