Questions Nobody Asked..

The title is a reference to “Cooking for Engineers”, originally a blog post which spun off into a whole site.

Champion In a previous post, I used a simulation to predict how long it would take to complete the Champion of the Sinnoh Region secret mission.

15 years ago, I was unemployed.

When Pokemon first took the world by storm, I was 8 years old.

I woke up from a dream with a question in my head – can we generate any probability with a coin and a six-sided dice?

I signed up for Letterboxd. trakt One of the first options, on creating a letterboxd account, is importing data from other services - one of them being trakt.

I shaved my head.

A while ago, I found a pattern for a tunisian crochet scarf that I kinda liked.

A temperature blanket is a crochet or knitting project where one makes a blanket over the course of a year, doing a piece a day with the colours based on each day’s temperature.

Advent of Code 2022 was a bit of a miss for me.

Background A temperature blanket is a sort of physical infographic.

Background At a high level, what we have is a Django-based server, with celery for running tasks.

Spring cleaning Around this time of year, I get an urge to clean out my room, get rid of junk, old books and DVDs.

Here is a solution to day 1 (both parts) in 52 characters of AWK {a+=($0>x);b+=($0>z);z=y;y=x;x=$0}END{print a-1,b-3} Okay, this is going to take some unpacking… Background This is my 4th year doing Advent of Code.

What I wanted to talk about today is my approach to designing a piece of software, by looking at three projects I’ve worked on 1 But before we get to the example, lets lay out the approach find the ‘core concept’ that is, when you strip it down to the most

SQLite This is a pattern I’ve used a couple of times now.

A wild PR appeared!

This is a direct follow on to the Modularity Madness blog.

Or, the not-so-fast Fourier transform, and what we take for granted in Python.

The Motivation Since I learned rust, I always want to use it more.

Are you ten years ago Ten years ago, I did a pair of blogs called Life by Numbers, and Life by Numbers: End of Year Review, in which I reviewed a load of stats that I had collected (or that had been collected) about myself.

As expected, as the puzzles get harder, it’s not so easy to solve them with one-liners.

This is my third year doing Advent of Code.

When people ask how I got into programming, I usually tell them “mostly for maths stuff”.

The other day a coworker asked me to look at a python script he’d written - make sure there weren’t any major issues (“little ones are ok” - his words).

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I’ve recently been working on a new project at work.

A little while back, I decided to rewrite an old python tools of mine in rust.

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the type annotations.

In the previous post, I talked about implementing python-like logging in bash.

One of the great sins in programming is trying to write code in one language like code from another language.

qs = lambda l: l and qs([x for x in l[:1] if x <= l[0]]) + [l[0]] + qs([x for x in l[:1] if x > l[0]]) Quick Sort This is based off an implementation I saw in haskell, it went something like qsort :: (Ord a) => [a] -> [a] qsort [] = [] qsort (x:xs) =…

YouTube channel, College Humor, has a game show series called 'Um, Actually' - a game of nerdy corrections, and general nerd trivia.

Background At work, we've been working on a Python API for IBM's Spectrum Scale (GPFS) filesystem.

Time was when I needed a hair cut, I'd go at noon on a weekday, when the barber's is typically empty.

A few months ago, my friend was telling me about this mobile game he wanted to make.

In a previous pair of blogs, I designed some clock widgets for Android, using Zooper.

Let's suppose, for the sake of arguing, that I'm unemployed.

In the last blog I talked about making a binary clock widget (for Android) using Zooper, and I made a claim about how individual binary digits can be extracted from a decimal number - what follows is an explanation/proof of why it works.

A long while back I wrote a couple of blogs about clocks.

I was watching this year's RI Christmas Lectures, and it reminded me of this game I had when I was much younger.

If you're a long time follower of this blog you'll probably have noticed I haven't posted much in the last two/three years.

I know this blog is a little late to the game.

File this under things I think about when I'm trying to get to sleep.

So it's been about a year since I last blogged.

The other week I was waiting for my tram, reading Metro, and I see this article - Treegonometry: Formula for perfect Christmas tree discovered In other word, a set of equations that will tell you, for example, how much tinsel, or how many baubles are 'req…

When I'm at university, I have to get the tram twice a day.

There are several ways to divide a burger evenly between three people.

So recently I'd gotten really into this TV show - it's called 'Life', and it's a 'murder of the week' crime drama starring Damian Lewis.

So I was reading this response to a Daily Mail opinion piece about those 'gay cure' bus adverts, and I see this quote (from the Mail article) “Since only about one percent of us are [gay], homosexuality is obviously a departure from the norm...

I did some stuff like this before.