Posted in General on Mar 25th, 2008 No Comments »
I finally got my F5D7132 wireless repeater working. The trick was to ignore all the auto-negotiate ‘one push setup’ rubbish and actually connect to the web interface of the device.
I don’t use windows, so the installation CD was no good to me, but I found some docs from Belkin that the NIC for the device […]
Posted in General, programming, factor on Nov 23rd, 2007 5 Comments »
It’s been a couple of months and I’m still slower writing code in Factor than in Python or Scheme. So why am I still writing code in Factor? Well it turns out that the problem is also the attraction:
You can’t hack in factor.
In python you can hack out code in multi-line functions, parking results […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, maths, math on Nov 22nd, 2007 1 Comment »
Stumbled on this intuitive explanation of ‘e’ via a reddit comment today. Absolute internet solid gold - this is the first time I’ve actually understood exponential functions rather than just plugging ‘e’ into a formula.
The rest of the better explained site looks promising too!
Posted in General, programming, factor on Oct 11th, 2007 6 Comments »
I’ve been playing with Factor for a couple of weeks. I’m finding that it takes me quite a bit longer to write stuff with factor than with other languages, but the process is enjoyable and I get the feeling that I’m learning something useful each time. The question is: will programming speed improve with experience. […]
Posted in General, programming, scheme, gambit on Jul 25th, 2007 1 Comment »
Gambit scheme lacks a profiler that can profile scheme with embedded C code. (There’s statprof, but unfortunately it doesn’t profile embeded C). I needed to do this pretty desperately for my triple indexing stuff so I’ve written a simple macro which takes wall clock timings of functions and accumulates them.
You replace ‘define’ with ‘define-timed’ […]
Posted in General, programming on Jul 23rd, 2007 3 Comments »
I’ve been struggling to motivate myself recently. I spent a lot of my spare time in my twenties programming free stuff after work with no trouble at all, but now in my thirties the energy and enthusiasm seems a little harder to come by. Plus Claire and I are expecting a baby any day now […]
Posted in General, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly, ai on Feb 27th, 2007 2 Comments »
I find this sort of thing really exciting: Trevor Blackwell’s ‘Dexter’ robot finally walks!. There’s a video and everything!
From Paul Graham’s post:
There are of course [other] biped robots that walk. The Honda Asimo is the best known. But the Asimo doesn’t balance dynamically. Its walk is preprogrammed; if you had it walk twice across the […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, concurrency on Feb 22nd, 2007 3 Comments »
First up, Ridiculous Fish’s article on shared-memory multithreading makes a good case for why testing often isn’t likely to find mt bugs.
This is one of those ‘how deep does the rabbit-hole go?’ kind of posts, and is well worth a read.
The characterisation of modern CPUs being vastly optimised for single-threaded code is one I hadn’t […]
Posted in General, programming, scheme on Feb 21st, 2007 2 Comments »
I recently had my work laptop nicked while I was in paris, so I’ve had to reconstruct my linux development environment on another laptop. That reminded me that I intended to document this stuff since I had to dig around a bit for it when I first picked up scheme a few months ago.
Things I […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, concurrency on Feb 8th, 2007 2 Comments »
I’m on a sleepy late train home from London to Birmingham (trying to avoid the snow and inevitable rail problems tomorrow). This woke me up:
Patrick Logan says STM “…would be the most tragic turn imaginable for programming in the 21st century.”
Very wrong. And it is scaring me how shiny this thingy looks in so […]
Posted in General, OpenID, workfriendly, identity on Feb 7th, 2007 6 Comments »
Microsoft, Verisign, Sxip and JanRain have announced that they will all support the OpenID protocol in their upcoming products. Kim Cameron has the scoop (but then he would have, being the ‘Chief Architect of Identity’ at Microsoft).
Looks like we might have our web identity winner. Maybe, finally, this will be the year of web […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming on Jan 11th, 2007 1 Comment »
Michael Feathers makes, I think, an important step forward in assisting fruitful programming language debates by providing new vocabulary to talk about simplicity.
He adds another dimension (literally!) by introducing a continuum between ‘low simplicity’ and ‘high simplicity’.
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples, microformats on Jan 8th, 2007 2 Comments »
I tried to comment on Seth’s post, but I think the comments on his blog are a bit broken at the moment (the capcha question wasn’t rendering, so I couldn’t answer it!). I guess I’ll trackback instead:
The path from specificity to usefulness that Seth describes was exactly the trip I took attempting to implement semantic […]
Posted in General, Blog, workfriendly on Dec 21st, 2006 No Comments »
Apologies to anybody that got a 404-not-found on my last post. It seems that sticking the word ‘blog’ in the subject causes the post permalink to fail on my wordpress setup. No idea why (and no time to investigate at the moment!) - I’ve fixed the previous post by hacking the permalink directly.
(maybe it’s the […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, DRM on Dec 7th, 2006 No Comments »
Tom Coates comments on the review, commissioned by Gordon Brown to look at intellectual property rights in the UK:
if I’m reading it correctly, it contains recommendations that individuals should have the right to make private copies of their music, that copyright terms should not be extended and that there should be a general provision that […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, DRM on Dec 7th, 2006 No Comments »
Nick Carr’s thesis is:
- IPod music sales plateaued in Q1 this year
- so apple starts losing it’s leverage with music companies
- but music companies will want to sell music that plays on IPods
- so unprotected mp3s seems the way to go
But won’t this lead to rampant piracy?
No. Because there’s already rampant illegal copying. Most […]
Posted in General, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly, ai on Nov 15th, 2006 1 Comment »
I’ve been thinking about AI again recently.
This time I got motivated by watching a couple of videos of Jeff Hawkins talking about his HTM (Hierarchical Temporal memory) ideas. Actually this has been a common theme for me recently - motivated speakers on podcasts and videos are much more likely to get me interested in something […]
Posted in General, workfriendly on Nov 9th, 2006 No Comments »
Ryan Carson has posted the monthly profits for dropsend, a web startup he created in 2005. I saw Carson talk about the costs of starting dropsend at the future of webapps conference earlier this year, so it’s interesting to see how it’s doing. It’ll also be interesting to see how much he gets for it […]
Posted in General, Blog, workfriendly, blogging on Nov 9th, 2006 No Comments »
At last! Now you can use your own domain name with the excellent wordpress.com service.
Actually this is pretty old news now - I almost missed this because I was on holiday and only just noticed it because Scoble has started using ’scobleizer.com’ in his permalinks.
Personally I think this is huge; recently a few people have […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme, refactoring on Oct 8th, 2006 No Comments »
I’m still perservering with Gambit scheme, and progressing pretty slowly it has to be said. The first thing I’ve been missing is the lack of refactoring tools for scheme.
I wrote the basic python refactoring functionality in bicyclerepairman a long while ago, and having it as part of my daily toolset has strongly influenced the way […]
