There are a few approaches to blocking ads. Adblock Plus seems to have become the most popular. It uses Firefox’s content policies interface and you can read more about how Adblock plus works on the FAQ.I have been playing around this week with another approach to Ad blocking, which is do …

I am working my way through a book called Types and Programming Languages, by Benjamin C. Pierce at the moment. I’ve just started the chapter on lambda calculus and I thought it would be fun to be able to include the λ character in my notes. I realize that this sounds a little like displac …

Is there a nice way to split a multi-page PDF into its constituent pages? Its a question that comes up more often than you would think. Of course you could point some proprietary software at it, or you could do the job by hand. But there is a lovely free software way to do it, so you would be sor …

The last day of my seven languages odyssey has been without doubt the most brain frying of all. I needed to spend about four days of fairly intense study to get close to a viable maze solver. Even now I doubt very much that its anything more than a naïve and buggy implementation. Still, the good …

Well, I thought that I’d have the time to do all the extra credit excercises for Haskell Day Two. But as it turned out I got stuck on the justify some text question. I guess this sort of question gets easier, but I couldn’t get the structure I wanted — a list of two tuples of …

Day two of the Haskell section has been once again very challenging for me. I’m sure that some of the conceptual territory would be easier to navigate were I a proper mathematician. But, after some head/keyboard bashing and rather more than my usual couple of hours allotted to Seven Languag …

The final of the seven languages is Haskell and so far it feels nice. Gone are Clojure's brackets and back to front syntax. Haskell is much more Erlang-esque, which may just be the module declarations and the list comprehensions. It even feels a little perlish with ::s and $s here and there. Tate …

I suppose it was inevitable after my cockiness on day two that day three should be a challenging one. I felt very stretched; mostly I was getting stuck on syntax, though. The actual coding was great fun. I’ve come rather to like Clojure; I definitely think it’ll be one of the languages I …

Today’s excercises seemed a little more straightforward than in previous languages. I may be simply getting brainier, of course. I doubt that. It is something of a lightning tour that we take through Clojure; a lot of stuff gets covered in a little time. The chapter covers recursion, incl …

There's been a brief hiatus in my Clojure week. Mostly due to me being knackered after some hardcore work days. In the last instalment I got my basic VimClojure environment set up. After that particular mission Day One’s excercises seemed almost trivial. I expect things to become more diffi …

This turned out to be a three pipe problem; all I wanted to do was not to run OpenBSD's send mail daemon, yet still be able to send mail from that box. It turns out that there's a simple answer in the post Improving Sendmail Securi …