O for Oxygen, 0 for Zero
[reading:Bjørn Lomborg, "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming"; recently Charles Stross, "The Jennifer Morgue"] Shocking. The reporting of science in the media has always...
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Remote Reset
[reading:Neil Gaiman, "Eternals"] Someone at work was complaining the other week about the difficulties of testing with the OSE board. The board needs to have the reset button pressed after each test,...
View Article--work-properly
[reading:Jean Hugard & Frederick Braue, "The Royal Road to Card Magic (revised edition)"; recently Henning Nelms, "Magic and Showmanship: A Handbook for Conjurers"] Today's --work-properly option:...
View ArticleDay 74
[reading: Scott Meyers, "Effective C++ (3rd edn.)"] I'm reading "Effective C++" again, with the publication of a new edition, and I'm struck by an observation. It's startling how much of the advice in...
View ArticleDay 328
A trifle bizarre. After a bunch of investigation, I eventually narrowed down a synchronization problem to the following mini test program: #include <time.h> #include <stdio.h> int main() {...
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Day 342
[reading:Dave Sim, "Cerebus"] [Edit 7-Nov-2007: I've since found a couple of goodexplanations.] In my photography course yesterday, I found myself explaining how flash sync speeds work. To my surprise,...
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Plenty Of Blood
Finally getting around to booking Titus Andronicus at the Globe, so here's your cut-out-and-keep* guide to Shakespeare's bloodiest play:*OK, not really.
View ArticleHow do I exit thee? Let me count the ways
[reading:Tom Holt, "Alexander at the World's End"] Today I've been trying to sort out the interactions between the various different mechanisms for generating and catching errors in Windows. With the...
View ArticleThe Truth Mines
In the Truth Mines, though, the tags weren't just references; they included complete statements of the particular definitions, axioms, or theorems the objects represented. Every tunnel in the Mines...
View ArticleOne Year In
[reading:Seamus Heaney, "North"] Just noticed: it's a year since the original idea for the company.
View ArticleEditing Hacks
[reading:Tom Stafford & Matt Webb, "Mind Hacks"] Started reading "Mind Hacks", which looked interesting in the bookshop but the formatting is already starting to annoy me. In that respect, it's the...
View Article&numl;
[reading:Derek Young, "Rock'n'Roll Dancing"] Here's a question: is there a Unicode character for an N with an umlaut? (Triggered by eating a splendid dessert of Gü brownies and Häagen-Dazs ice cream,...
View Article*knolp*
[reading:William Faulkner, "As I Lay Dying"; recently Neil Strauss & Bernard Chang, "How To Make Money Like a Porn Star"] Now that I've got Djangoinstalled and running, I've been setting up my...
View ArticleMind Hack #39
[reading: Jón Árnason, Alan Boucher (translator), "Icelandic Folk Tales"] One of the MindHacks that doesn't include an easy demonstration is Hack 39, where you're less likely to notice a trigger event...
View ArticleDjango Su
It's always a sign of good design when adding a new feature turns out to be easy. In the Djangoauthentication system, I wanted a way for an administrator to view the site as if they were a particular...
View ArticleThe Spine is Evil
[reading:Skippy Blair, "Disco to Tango and Back"; recently: Simon Lovell, "How To Cheat At Everything"] Drat; forgot to add extra space on the inside margins of my current typesetting project, so I had...
View ArticleThe Joy of UNIX
UNIX credo: you can do anything from a single command line (as long as the line is allowed to be arbitrarily long). Case in point: generating a white noise audio file sox -t sl -r 44100 -c 2 /dev/zero...
View Articleinline_related_objects
[Edit, Feb 2008: fixed typo—changed extra_content to extra_context] Today's neat Django trick: getting the create_update generic views for a model to display entries from a subsidiary model...
View ArticleBogo-Permute
So here's today's random question, apropos of, er, nothing. What's the performance of the following incredibly-poor algorithm for randomly permuting a list of numbers? def bogo_permute(in_list): N =...
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Denied
[reading:Michael Spivak, "Calculus"] Bugger. It turns out that the Apple rep who told me on the phone that the new iPod Classic would work with Mac OS X 10.3.9 was lying. I don't really want to have to...
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