Blog
424 Blog articles in total, showing 21 to 30
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June 2016 reading
Eco is brilliant, and I think this is one of his most enthralling novels since Foucault's Pendulum. As in that book, conspiracies abound — freemasons, jesuits, that sort of thing — though this time in nineteenth century Europe. How …
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The foundational questions that inspire computer languages
I came across a very amusing image the other day, dealing with the questions that various popular programming languages seek to answer. There is a nice thread on reddit with some extra suggestions to include in the list too.Here is a transcription.Python: What if everything was a dict?Java: …
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9 lines of code, 9 billion dollars
Six years ago Oracle, the database company which acquired the Java programming language when Sun Microsystems went titsup in 2009 started a lawsuit claiming that Google, by using some of the Java APIs in its Android operating system.After trying to licence Java from Sun in 2005 …
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Micropuzzles and generating Pythagorean triples
Micropuzzles is a charming book from the early 1980s by a chap called J.J. Clessa. It is a sort of forerunner of Project Euler, containing little puzzles aimed at computer hobbyists who have acquired those newfangled micros and are looking for something challenging to do with their machines.The …
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On losing my father
My father, Chris Harvey, died two weeks ago on Friday, 29 April. He had had cancer for some time. The end was quick. So quick that his family weren’t able to get there before he died. Just the day before he had been sitting up in his chair smiling and joking with the medical staff and his visi …
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May 2016 reading
This novel was leant to me by Nor who was recommended it by another friend. In a sort of rambling travelogue, Sebald ruminates on thoughts and stories that were triggered by wandering round on the Suffolk coastline — Lowestoft, Southwol …
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Setting up unattended upgrades on debian
There is fuller documentation of how to set up unattended upgrades on the debian wiki, but it is sometimes nice to have a super-compact cheatsheet for ones own reference. Others may have a use for it too.First thing to do is to install the necessary unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges packag …
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April 2016 reading
This is very much a literary novel. Whatever that means. I suppose what it means is that it is written in an elegant if somewhat pretentious style and that it works on multiple levels, although it might be the case that one would need to have experi …
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Digits in page numbers and thoughts on optimization
Sometimes solving problems with dumb code involves a simpler expression of a problem than solving the same problem with highfallutin' maths. Sometimes the simpler expression involves more time or space complexity. That might be fine, depending on the inputs we need to process, indeed spending a long …
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How to make an email signature that makes you seem like a dick
It used to be that in order to seem like a dick you had to meet people in real life and act, well, dickish. Not any more. The internet has effectively democratized the ability to annoy both friends and people you have never even met. Indeed it seems now everybody is acting like a dick these days. O …
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