Posted in workfriendly, coffee on Mar 20th, 2008 1 Comment »
Motivated by Tom Moertel’s ‘A coders guide to coffee’, I’ve been experimenting with roasting my own coffee on the cheap. Here’s my equipment bought to date:
- Bodum 5679 C-Mill Electric Coffee Grinder
- Rival popcorn popper (cost me a fiver from ebay).
- Aeropress brewer
- Digital oven Thermometer 100169 E19
N.B. I didn’t start off roasting: a […]
Posted in workfriendly, ssh on Mar 12th, 2008 1 Comment »
Uncovered an awesome ssh trick today. At work we use ssh extensively to run stuff on remote unix and windows servers, using SSH agents to handle batch job authentication. That’s all sweet because on unix you don’t need to install client software on each box, and you don’t need a root account - just copy […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, factor on Mar 10th, 2008 No Comments »
Dan Ehrenberg completes a second short post on garbage collection, expanding on his excellent ‘Quick intro to garbage collection‘ post. Although Dan’s focus is on research prior to implementing a better collector for the factor language, the lucid explanations and chatty style make this a must-read for anybody with a passing interest in language runtime […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, testing on Mar 6th, 2008 No Comments »
Is it just me or do whitebox unit tests really bog you down?
I do pretty much all my coding in a test-first stylee; it’s the only way to code if you’re snatching 20mins here and there for spare time projects. Much of the time these tests serve as scaffolding to keep me on the […]
Posted in workfriendly, maths, math on Feb 21st, 2008 No Comments »
Learning Maths suddenly got easier when Kalid entered the scene. Better Explained has a ‘A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers‘ that’s every bit as penny-droppingly fantastic as his guide to exponential functions and e.
Trigonometry is great, but complex numbers make ugly calculations simple (like calculating cosine(a+b) ). This is just a preview; later articles […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming on Dec 12th, 2007 No Comments »
Jeff Atwood’s blog is a good source for collected quotes. He’s at it again in his latest post: Are you a Doer or a Talker?:
In software, some developers take up residence on planet architecture.’
‘Working code attracts people who want to code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding.’
In my experience talkers gravitate […]
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 workfriendly, programming, scheme, factor, forth on Sep 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Last year I embarked on somwhat of a journey to find a better language for my home projects after getting a bit frustrated by python’s lack of blocks and general cruftyness. After a couple of months of trying various different things I settled on Gambit Scheme for my spare-time data indexing project. A minimal core […]
Posted in workfriendly, javascript, ajax, browser on Sep 17th, 2007 No Comments »
JQuery is a javascript library providing a browser API in the functional style. In particular it supplies a CSS style selector language which makes the code for manipulating DOM objects simple and terse.
Simon Willison does a great job of introducing the library and explaining why it’s so cool. For a taster, here’s jquery line which […]
Posted in Semantic Web, workfriendly, search on May 17th, 2007 No Comments »
This link showed up on programming-reddit today. I’ve been reading Tim Bray’s ongoing blog for quite a while, but this piece from 2003 predates my discovery of it. And that’s a big shame because it is quite simply the most brilliantly readable overview to the whole topic of ‘large scale search’ that I’ve ever come […]
Posted in workfriendly, haskell on May 2nd, 2007 2 Comments »
Neil Bartlett (who used to work at Dresdner Kleinwort, my employer) dropped me a mail to mention that he’s started a London Haskell User Group, and that the inaugural meeting on 29th 23rd May will include a talk by none other than Simon Peyton Jones of GHC and Software Transactional Memory fame!
Definitely one for […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming on Mar 17th, 2007 1 Comment »
I found this SQL Injection Cheat-Sheet today (thanks reddit!). A must-read for anybody writing (or hacking into) web applications with a database.
Posted in workfriendly, programming, algorithms, hashing on Mar 8th, 2007 No Comments »
For the computer scientists in the room:
Google techtalks rock, and this one about recent advances in retrieval techniques was especially interesting to me.
In particular it includes a remarkable recent observation for the improvement of hash tables: Hash table loading and performance can be dramatically improved simply by using more than one hash algorithm in […]
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Feb 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Pascal Costanza nails the point of macros.
(and illustrates why lispers actually like lisp’s strange syntax so much)
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, 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, 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 […]
