The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Other languages

cartesian product … stuff about computing mostly

cartesianproduct.wordpress.com

Stuff about computing...mostly

Other languagesC++Linux / UnixGeneral

’10’15’20’25
Posts
1,065 from 5 Dec 2010 to 28 Aug 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://cartesianproduct.wordpress.com/feed/

2026 1

  1. Thinking about what to do here

2023 1

  1. Further thoughts on Forth (and Riscyforth in particular) and Life

2022 16

  1. Game of Life animation
  2. Conway’s Game of Life, in Forth
  3. Write-only? A simple program translated from C to Forth
  4. Does “coding” have a future?
  5. Evidence suggests vaccination does cut spread of Omicron
  6. New release of Riscyforth
  7. The unreasonable ineffectiveness of arithmetic with floating point numbers
  8. Floating point, finally
  9. Trusting the world of floating point
  10. This summer’s to-do list
  11. On Moldova
  12. How I actually extended Riscyforth
  13. Managed or unmanaged: funds and football
  14. Adding dynamic linking to Riscyforth
  15. Getting Covid
  16. Getting the POSTPONE word to work in Forth

2021 24

  1. Mo Salah, penalties and artificial intelligence
  2. Riscyforth at one
  3. Winning the evolutionary war?
  4. More on the Riscyforth versus Gforth shootout
  5. Covid: what do we do now?
  6. Forth code optimisation revisited
  7. A book recommendation
  8. The actual optimised code
  9. Optimising my Forth code
  10. Riscyforth: an update
  11. A great Christmas present?
  12. Riscyforth: the work goes on
  13. A moment of doubt?
  14. A RISC-V single board computer
  15. Having trouble building the riscv64-unknown-elf- toolchain?
  16. First year as a software engineer
  17. Coming soon: RISCYFORTH
  18. Why I bought a fax machine
  19. Alexa, tell me what changed your mind
  20. A puzzle from Donald Knuth
  21. The long haul
  22. Still out there
  23. After neo-liberalism: back to Bell Labs?
  24. The missing link and closing schools

2020 31

  1. Final visit to my US elections model
  2. UML: an apology
  3. The five minute rule etc., redux
  4. How good was my US elections model?
  5. Updating the five minute and the five byte rules
  6. What did happen to Comp Shop
  7. Honesty about vaccination
  8. Programmatic adventures in the hyperbolic plane
  9. And the projective representation of the hyperbolic plane
  10. Representing equal distances in the conformal representation of the hyperbolic plane
  11. In praise of Roger Penrose
  12. Overflow in unsigned arithmetic in C
  13. Modelling the US Presidential Election in R
  14. Still pondering over BASIC
  15. Any use for an NSLU2 device?
  16. BINSIC – Sinclair BASIC emulator – is back
  17. Updated: A day (wasted?) with Groovy
  18. Beards and spandrels
  19. Progress is not the only option
  20. Coin tossing conundrum
  21. What computer output is supposed to look like
  22. Ten Great Ideas About Chance: A Review
  23. Bayes and the billiard balls: and what’s the probability the Sun rises tomorrow?
  24. What’s the evidence your numbers are faked?
  25. Labour leadership model update
  26. Updated Labour leadership model
  27. Another go at modelling the Labour leadership election
  28. Mathematically modelling the overall Labour result
  29. Mathematically modelling the Labour leadership nomination race
  30. Convolutional network (again)
  31. The problem with parallelisation

2019 4

  1. The Sleeping Beauty Controversy
  2. A PhD poster
  3. Correct mathematics but still strange
  4. Flirting with disaster

2018 4

  1. Mathematicians: please help!
  2. Puzzle about an M/G/1 queue
  3. I love binary trees
  4. A fractal in the real world

2017 24

  1. Procrastination time: what does this mean?
  2. Human-powered time travel is real
  3. How to export from LyX to LaTeX
  4. A very first draft…
  5. Getting a job
  6. Giving up on the convolutional network?
  7. Conv-nets are hard
  8. More and more spam reviews on Amazon
  9. Can you get a useful result with a random convolution filter?
  10. Strange reviews on Amazon
  11. Free software to chop up your JPEGs
  12. Even more about neural networks
  13. Learning more about neural networks
  14. First results from the “musical” neural network
  15. Back to neural networks
  16. Game of Life in Scratch
  17. Do you want to learn about coding? Free book offer!
  18. Crazy ideas you have in the bath
  19. Failing software – again
  20. Switching to Opera
  21. Let’s talk about sex (dolls)
  22. Proprietary software as a false economy
  23. Open source alternatives to “Junior Librarian v3”?
  24. Reviving this blog … with a question about binary trees

2016 17

  1. Your assembly is my domain-specific language
  2. From “The Foundations of Mathematics”
  3. Delays in a binary memory tree queue
  4. Springer and Scala
  5. Bots for #Brexit
  6. Is cosmology completely broken?
  7. Is Groovy dying?
  8. Will affluence replace Christianity?
  9. Let us now praise insufficiently famous men: Claude Shannon
  10. I refute it thus?
  11. Love and Math: a review
  12. The maths and physics of walking in the sand
  13. Struggling with coin tossing paradox
  14. Is dark matter locked up in primordial black holes?
  15. Primes are not random
  16. The opportunities of AI
  17. Russia Today (@RT_com) broadcasts fiction, not news

2015 20

  1. Wormholes and quantum entanglement
  2. So, dear reader, I wrote a Gauss-Jordan solver
  3. Running a half marathon
  4. Interstellar
  5. Reaching a decision
  6. Further thoughts on the simulation task
  7. Struggling
  8. The agony and the ecstasy of debugging
  9. Take your injuries seriously
  10. Chase down that bug
  11. Struggling to return to form
  12. Hard fault count drives performance
  13. How much memory do you need?
  14. Why stop at twelve?
  15. Squashing the LRU bug
  16. Curiouser and curiouser – the case of the LRU bug
  17. LRU queue strangeness
  18. There is no such thing as “alternative medicine”
  19. Not fit to hold public office
  20. Nobody has proved P=NP

2014 118

  1. The limits of university power
  2. The death of Dr Dobb’s
  3. Simulating global and local memory on OVP
  4. Predicting political outcomes with neural nets
  5. The delights and frustrations of assembly programming
  6. A timerless CLOCK algorithm
  7. Picking which page to remove
  8. Why I owe @slugonamission a (or several) large drink(s)
  9. Referenced in an academic text book
  10. Latest Microblaze puzzle
  11. Computer programming centre-right lovers of Swedish meatballs
  12. The Imitation Game
  13. Of course turning on the MMU breaks your code!
  14. First working assembly code in 33 years
  15. Next time you are told spelling and grammar matter…
  16. Scale of the task
  17. Start of something big
  18. Lessons from the Scottish referendum
  19. Alfred Verdun Cooper, computer pioneer
  20. The gravitational perpetual motion machine?
  21. An unchanging quantum universe
  22. Not even an April Fool
  23. Pointers versus references
  24. Going atomic … or concurrency is hard
  25. A probably entirely naïve question about the principle of relativity
  26. The real reason why you haven’t been polled in #indyref
  27. (Scottish) opinion polls – a reminder
  28. All in the mind?
  29. Islamism is bad for your health – and not just in the obvious ways
  30. The Scottish referendum: taking a stand
  31. Could someone explain this contradiction to me?
  32. In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman
  33. If you want bad advice, ask a London taxi driver
  34. Was new maths really such a disaster?
  35. A horror story with a happy ending (hopefully)
  36. Forty five years on
  37. Curses on ncurses
  38. Do I qualify as a LISP hacker now?
  39. Time to write a signal handler?
  40. Going on the run
  41. Traffic generation options
  42. Leslie Huckfield case exposes Wikipedia’s weaknesses
  43. Proving Heliocentricity
  44. Copernicus was wrong (maybe)
  45. Racey code can damage your (mental) health
  46. A vision in yellow
  47. The intelligent computer has arrived
  48. When Apple made mainframes
  49. A better demonstration of the product rule
  50. My start up idea
  51. Perhaps “you” will live forever after all
  52. After paging?
  53. C, C, glorious C
  54. Passing by reference in C++ – a downside
  55. Universal Credit: the fiasco continues
  56. Time to improve the image of non-drinkers
  57. Product rule
  58. Integration by parts
  59. Deconstructing Max Tegmark’s argument against a simulated universe
  60. Why is this not treated as a scandal?
  61. If you are feeling flush
  62. Do other PhD students do this too?
  63. Reading something shocking
  64. The amazing @shanley
  65. Looking for a mate? Better get musical then
  66. None of the easy things work
  67. Which bit of a 4k page does your program use?
  68. Looks like one hope/theory knocked on the head
  69. When I am going to beat Mo Farrah and Usain Bolt: the weakness of linear projections
  70. OPT and LRU compared for multithreaded code
  71. If only I had the time…
  72. It seems Chomsky was right (and what it might mean?)
  73. Deductive debugging
  74. The trouble with Copenhagen
  75. She’ll die soon, but everybody dies
  76. Why we’ll never meet aliens
  77. Doesn’t look like much
  78. Sometimes, admitting defeat is the very best thing you can do
  79. Why Candy Crush is so difficult – and popular?
  80. Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”
  81. A multithreaded “optimal” page replacement algorithm
  82. Russia Today is a garbage TV station
  83. Trying to stay calm
  84. Raspberry Pi ideas wanted
  85. Plunging deeper
  86. I write C++ like a C programmer
  87. On an Airbus 380, the toilet is a safety critical system
  88. 1 March 1971
  89. Losing it
  90. Patient, heal thyself: what to do after you leave the gym?
  91. Wanted: a better C++ book
  92. Slogging it out
  93. Why the internet was invented
  94. Modern standards of grammar do not make you kill yourself
  95. Gay genes and the Daily Mail
  96. Computing for teachers….
  97. From two years to two hundred minutes
  98. The joy of .CXX
  99. The disruptive impact of a knowledge-based technology
  100. Things learned this week: 7 February 2014
  101. Bitcoin is a political project, not a technological one
  102. The bad news about the Black Death
  103. Climate change is back
  104. Learnt this week … 31 January 2014
  105. Poisson distribution puzzle
  106. Learnt this week… 24 January
  107. Supernova in Mill Hill
  108. Three steps forward, but one step back?
  109. Unknown search terms
  110. So, how good are the English premiership top seven?
  111. In search of a word
  112. Polar vortices and climate change
  113. Universal Credit: back to “agile” and closer to death?
  114. A further suggestion that P!=NP
  115. First experiment
  116. A plot that helps explain why the desktop computer industry is in trouble
  117. The world’s fastest computers
  118. Weather and climate (again)

2013 202

  1. A further point about Scottish referendum polls
  2. What not to say about the bad weather
  3. One thing the Scottish referendum campaign can do without: polling voodoo
  4. Mixed feelings about the Turing pardon
  5. A little plug for BINSIC
  6. More on the Riemann sphere
  7. The beauty of the Riemann sphere
  8. In the steps of László Bélády
  9. Give yourself a Christmas present: learn sed
  10. A conundrum for a sed wizard
  11. A beautiful thing no human will ever see
  12. How slow is a fast computer?
  13. Get your books more cheaply – possibly
  14. Lousy wireless on OS X Mavericks
  15. Not so bad to be a computer science graduate?
  16. If you see this, then beware…
  17. y^2 + x^2 = 1
  18. More on the Summa Metaphysica
  19. Quickly deleting multiple lines from a text file
  20. New, improved Hexxed
  21. Going on a bug(?) hunt
  22. How “rip-off Britain” comes to science
  23. And in XML…
  24. New lackeyml DTD
  25. In what sense do photons exist?
  26. Another example of “Delingpole-ism”
  27. On climate change, science is not “impartial”
  28. Schooling, heritability and IQ
  29. Two years in the gym
  30. Free software hex editor
  31. The Summa Metaphysica and all that
  32. Reasoning about a NoC
  33. Astrology: the anti-science acceptable to the educated élite?
  34. Third time lucky?
  35. Read more novels and you’ll be a better person
  36. Maths or physics ‘A’ level student? Then read this book…
  37. Thinking about NoC model
  38. Saving a computer with Xfce
  39. Some questions about group theory
  40. Building a model
  41. Mail on Sunday forced to admit its climate change article flawed
  42. “Dreaming in Code” – a review
  43. Virtual memory and a new operating system
  44. Regression to the mean and climate change stupidity
  45. Mail on Sunday 92% wrong on climate change
  46. Perl: I still love it
  47. Why, oh why, oh why?
  48. Microsoft versus Linux: did we win after all?
  49. Before Hitler got here
  50. DWP still refusing to take responsibility
  51. Lorentz and Einstein
  52. A regular but non-symmetric grid
  53. The Black Death, immigration and Labor Day
  54. Dietary myths debunked by the New Scientist
  55. Searching for a NoC simulator
  56. How to install SystemC on amd64 Linux
  57. Wet and stormy autumn ahead?
  58. Annoyed with @amazon and their b0rked business model
  59. Weight loss: all gone wrong?
  60. How secure is your encryption?
  61. “Crowd sourcing” to play a key role in fundamental physics experiment
  62. A neat contradiction
  63. My one problem with Feynman’s QED
  64. What a brilliant book
  65. Universal Credit: the agony continues
  66. Writing a book…
  67. What ever happened to errata?
  68. Graph cartesian products
  69. A circle inscribing a pentagon
  70. Not such a dunce after all
  71. More astrophotography
  72. Vega, Lyra and the Milky Way
  73. The irrationals
  74. Court blocks the publication of a scientific paper
  75. Twenty years of Windows NT
  76. Computer science in the UK: in the wrong direction?
  77. A moment reached
  78. Turing versus Rosenberg
  79. What PressTV doesn’t tell you
  80. Looks like the prof was right (as always!)
  81. A celebration of science
  82. Some more thoughts on @CodeClub
  83. Computer or maths books for kids – any recommendations?
  84. Best ever computing joke?
  85. Nevile Gwynne talks grammatically correct cobblers
  86. The bad guys die at the end
  87. Books about PhDs
  88. How can I lose that final stone?
  89. What is this “complexity” of which you speak?
  90. A cynical thought
  91. The proof that frightened Pythagoras
  92. How to be a successful PhD student
  93. Incompleteness in the natural world
  94. Gödel, Escher, Bach
  95. Apologies
  96. So, we are not protected by the US after all
  97. Programming languages in the New Scientist
  98. Moon landings were faked?
  99. Yitang Zhang latest…
  100. A (partial) answer to my Goedelian conundrum?
  101. Cambridge University and computer science
  102. End of an era
  103. Turing, Hofstadter, Bach – with some Cherla thrown in
  104. “Agile” is dead?
  105. A bit more on Universal Credit and “Agile”
  106. Universal Credit: government closer to recognising failure?
  107. What makes super computers super? Money
  108. The GIF row
  109. More on P and NP
  110. Making the case that #PartTimeMatters
  111. “Enter any 12 digit prime to continue”
  112. Being a Latin pedant
  113. The alternative to forcing everyone to use IPv6?
  114. A supercomputer on every desktop? Not yet, anyway
  115. Yes, go to Birkbeck
  116. The problem with Wikipedia
  117. Parallella: it’s going to happen
  118. The “elevator pitch”: not so uplifting?
  119. Big data to save the planet? A Question To Which The Answer Might Not Be No
  120. British government to mandate IPv6?
  121. How to frighten yourself
  122. Chemistry sets redux
  123. The Reingold-Tilford algorithm revisited
  124. Improved version of the topology figure
  125. This took me all day, so you had better like it
  126. Universal Credit “death march” goes on
  127. News for the Mail on Sunday: your fridge already switches itself off “without consent”
  128. Life and polyominoes
  129. Schrödinger’s cat: for real
  130. Dear MI5, why don’t you use my hex editor?
  131. What are we going to do about stupid men?
  132. Getting away with it
  133. Pseudo-science take down
  134. Time’s arrow
  135. Some notes on Hofstadter’s Typographical Number Theory
  136. The end of Dennard scaling
  137. Slashdot versus Hacker News
  138. Spaceapps challenge at York
  139. Representing one terabit of information
  140. How I discovered the fundamental theorem of arithmetic by chance
  141. Something I didn’t know before now
  142. How many kilowatt hours have I burnt losing weight? Not that many
  143. More evidence of Bitcoin bubble
  144. Euler’s formula proof
  145. When will the Bitcoin burst happen?
  146. Tinfoil and Bitcoin
  147. The universe is already dead
  148. Centenary of Paul Erdős
  149. Why I love Metapost
  150. Waiting for the Bitcoin bubble to burst
  151. The PyCon row
  152. Success of #downgradedChancellor suggests Parliament has a big TV audience
  153. Vector dot product
  154. Patenting reality
  155. Stephen Fry is wrong about Alan Turing
  156. How many solutions to check?
  157. The EDL
  158. Which VO2Max figure is correct? (The perils of relying on the Internet)
  159. Improved “Life” for Scratch
  160. Discretion and safety
  161. Astrophotography advice please
  162. The Art of Scratch, Code Club and the ICT curriculum
  163. Scratch: why, oh why, oh why?
  164. A question of dimensions
  165. Derivative of any number raised to the power of x
  166. How to get a job as a developer
  167. Frustrated by “Communication and Concurrency”
  168. Situation normal, all fscked up
  169. Another reason why exercise keeps you younger?
  170. Further thoughts on “The Architecture of Complexity”
  171. This is what the end of the world might look like
  172. Watchmakers for evolution
  173. Why I would not want to fly in a Dreamliner (yet)
  174. Two different ways to calculate r-ary Huffman Code
  175. BAYSICK talk in Edinburgh
  176. No progress on PostMeta – yet
  177. Do desktop computers have a future?
  178. Windows 8: the verdict is in
  179. Online translation a new way to learn a language fast?
  180. Proof of the existence of an optimal code
  181. McMillian’s inequality
  182. President Obama’s campaign and free software
  183. Kraft’s inequality
  184. Gamma ray bursts are not that rare
  185. After “comment spam”, comes “like spam”
  186. Summing an infinite series
  187. I have another blog
  188. We lost more than our record shops because of the MP3
  189. Renamed my project Postmeta
  190. New coding project – metaedit – started
  191. New blog theme
  192. The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”
  193. Suicide of Aaron Swartz
  194. A GUI for Metapost?
  195. Hiding in plain silence via Skype
  196. This cannot be good news for Last.fm
  197. Help needed: what is making the wireless card on my Raspberry Pi crash
  198. Another one bites the dust – but files on LVM are saved
  199. The Pentium D is dead
  200. Raspberry Pi stability issues
  201. Raspberry Jam in London
  202. Making a hash of universal credit

2012 285

  1. Wishing you a happy and superstition free 2013
  2. Limits of (blog) growth
  3. Seeing lunar craters with the naked eye
  4. 2012 in review
  5. Infrared astronomy on the cheap?
  6. Surge in spam
  7. Feeling very daunted
  8. Universal Credit: heading for a pile up?
  9. Raspberry Pi as an ethernet to wifi bridge
  10. Took me a week, but I did it
  11. Pykrete revisted
  12. Zipf and SPOTY reprise
  13. BBC Sports Personality of the Year votes modelled as a Zipf distribution
  14. Wireless bridge setup pain
  15. “Go and invent something”
  16. End of term feeling
  17. The Crimea, Urdu and MD5 hashes: a partial reply to Professor Rubin
  18. Similarity, difference and compression
  19. Amazon getting their act together on Kindle quality?
  20. Patrick Moore and politics
  21. Plan 9 blues
  22. Death of Sir Patrick Moore
  23. Raspberry Pi successfully booted with Plan 9
  24. Compute power versus storage on the Raspberry Pi
  25. A Raspberry Pi project?
  26. Finding “new” primes
  27. Unicorns and the Juche
  28. The long tail of a Zipf distribution
  29. How to win at “Deal or No Deal”
  30. Plan9 on the Raspberry Pi
  31. Code Club first session
  32. Possibly the greatest ever statement about programming
  33. A small light gets snubbed out
  34. What Rowland Hill really meant
  35. Proposals for a new English ICT curriculum
  36. Malware and spies
  37. Fog of confusion still surrounds “biggest agile project ever”
  38. Pascal’s triangle and hypercubes
  39. Some questions about the science of magic chocolate
  40. Attrakt.com seems to be working
  41. Another (final) episode in the @AmazonKindle farce
  42. Physics explained by the Rubberbandits
  43. How to use textpath with Metapost
  44. Our lousy past
  45. Tiny BASIC for the Raspberry Pi
  46. Missing coding
  47. Getting booted from Wikipedia
  48. Parallella multicore board
  49. University Education – Free for Everyone?
  50. Another reason to steer clear of @AmazonKindle
  51. Uses for a Raspberry Pi
  52. Into the void
  53. Eta Carinae: humanity’s death sentence?
  54. The great dumbing down debate
  55. Maths ‘A’ level: now for a tough one
  56. Maths ‘A’ level dumbing down: the proof
  57. Bad Pharma by @bengoldacre: the review
  58. What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 — or 3? – MIT News Office
  59. The nine billion names of God
  60. The year of Linux on the desktop?
  61. Support for “Buglife”
  62. Bad Pharma by @bengoldacre
  63. It’s Friday afternoon…
  64. The mathematics of politics
  65. A bug in LyX illustrated (update: it’s a feature)
  66. How do I do this?
  67. Universities target plagiarism but maybe fraud should be the real worry
  68. Who has been given the cash changing problem?
  69. A (partial) reply to @pootblog
  70. Shoe laces and psychopathy
  71. How to destroy our science base
  72. Not a proof that aleph null and the order of the continuum are the same
  73. Subsets of the continuum
  74. Another way of looking at the alephs
  75. ‘O’ levels versus GCSEs
  76. Feeling a little bit thrilled about this
  77. Weasel words from the DWP on Universal Credit?
  78. Unreal Tournament at the forefront of AI research (really)
  79. With zero thanks to @AmazonKindle
  80. The evolution of the astroid pattern on the spirograph
  81. The maths of the spirograph… with the drawings
  82. The maths of the spirograph
  83. A real live GIF
  84. Anyone got any thoughts on the LaTeX companion?
  85. Betamax versus VHS in your browser
  86. What really drives Moore’s Law
  87. The epitome of the modern
  88. Death of Neil Armstrong
  89. The coming HTML5 disaster
  90. Stopping the patent madness
  91. Sticking with wordpress.com
  92. Ketosis, diets and human spontaneous combustion
  93. Burn baby burn: human spontaneous combustion explained
  94. @AmazonKindle have broken their Cloud Reader too
  95. Don’t buy a Kindle to read maths or computer science books
  96. Even if P=NP we might see no benefit
  97. More thoughts on the Kindle
  98. Venn diagrams for 11 sets
  99. The wheels of Aristotle
  100. The Moon
  101. The Great Red Spot
  102. Jupiter, last night
  103. Entropy and randomness in communications, a quick introduction
  104. More than a game: the Game of Life
  105. The problem with Git
  106. More on Huffman encoding
  107. A blast from the past: Huffman coding
  108. Parity check matrices
  109. The decline of the chemistry set
  110. BINSIC plotting working
  111. Memo to self: fighting the Moon is a waste of time
  112. Tim Berners-Lee and NBC
  113. Need to get a tripod
  114. ummm, in retrospect…
  115. Further reflections on the Raspberry Pi
  116. CRCs as matrix maths
  117. Leaving wordpress.com?
  118. Thrash reduction no longer a priority for Linux kernel devs?
  119. Hamming codes
  120. More on parity matrices
  121. Running BASIC on the Raspberry Pi
  122. Dmesg from Raspberry Pi
  123. Parity checks as matrix multiplication
  124. Modulo 2 arithmetic
  125. More on error correction
  126. Smell you later (but I won’t vote for you)
  127. The difference between Hamming distance and arithmetic difference
  128. Convolutional coding
  129. The Gaussian distribution
  130. Still sends a shiver down my spine
  131. In praise of Peter Denning
  132. New comment spam fashion
  133. Some fixes for BINSIC
  134. US Supreme Court looks like one of the biggest losers here
  135. Joke price for a great book
  136. Recommend me a book on pure mathematics
  137. From a real “product description” on Amazon
  138. Russian science in the nineteenth century
  139. Crass stupidity from the National Trust
  140. The halting problem … in verse
  141. Code Club volunteer for (free) hire – can you help?
  142. Raspberry Pi delivered
  143. Q-factor in an LRC series circuit
  144. Tuning an LRC circuit
  145. From The Selfish Gene to Alan Turing: the Enigma
  146. Magenta is not a ‘real’ colour and other mysteries
  147. What they didn’t teach me at ‘A’ level (or at university!)
  148. The Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon
  149. Relive the ZX81 experience on your desktop
  150. Life: rewritten
  151. A problem with Life
  152. Leonardo DiCaprio to play Alan Turing?
  153. In honour of Alan Turing
  154. This man killed fascists
  155. BINSIC almost done
  156. The expressive power of BASIC
  157. How good a pseudo-random number generator is the Fibonacci series?
  158. Cycling in York
  159. A jubilee that matters
  160. Some BASIC I can now run
  161. Progress with BINSIC
  162. And so to York
  163. Read this book!
  164. Regex answer
  165. Just like 1980
  166. And a tougher regular expression problem
  167. A regex puzzle to start your weekend
  168. And now it’s last.fm
  169. Why you should change your LinkedIn password
  170. Line numbers problem solved, after a fashion
  171. Why choice in software matters … a story from the real world
  172. Quiz time
  173. Struggling with line number problem
  174. Using a preprocessor to convert the BASIC
  175. Groovy mandating camel case?
  176. Another software death march begins…
  177. Hexxed usage options
  178. Download the jar – you know you want to
  179. Software testers wanted
  180. The trouble with “The Selfish Gene”
  181. The Moon (again)
  182. Waited 32 years for this…
  183. And on to “The Selfish Gene”
  184. The end of Kevin
  185. An NP-complete problem from the world of embedded computing
  186. The truth about Facebook’s IPO
  187. The problem with Apple kit (part one?)
  188. Poisoning the internet
  189. How should I handle the :q command?
  190. Who needs a free hex editor then?
  191. How many languages can you recognise?
  192. Volume of a ball
  193. A pleasingly retro look and feel
  194. Adding vi-like functionality to Hexxed
  195. Adding keyboard functionality to JTable
  196. Surd but not absurd
  197. How much control can Microsoft exert in the development ecosystem?
  198. Trying to work out why some people think Kevin Mitnick is a hero
  199. Hexxed: starting to look that it might be useful one day
  200. Hexxed – back again
  201. More on FatFonts
  202. FatFonts – coming to an infographic near you?
  203. Bring Up The Bodies and Wolf Hall and a scientific mystery
  204. Geeklist spamming people
  205. Raspberry Pi delivery date
  206. Nasty computer scientists (again)
  207. Power law growth is not the only way on the internet
  208. BASIC as a domain specific language
  209. Mission accomplished
  210. Blink and you probably would not miss much
  211. Thirty years of the ZX Spectrum: the machine that killed computing?
  212. In search of a good book on Java Swing
  213. A reason why kids don’t do programming any more?
  214. Is Groovy back in fashion?
  215. Not even on Wikipedia…
  216. Making some progress with the hex editor
  217. Java. Really?
  218. Odd looking Microsoft logo
  219. OLPC “fails in Peru”: Economist
  220. New version of mkfs.vmufat available
  221. In praise of K-9 mail
  222. OS/2: killed by Bill?
  223. Thin slicing Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”
  224. A (final) speculation from “The Hidden Reality”
  225. Not even Newt could beat this one
  226. Computer science in English schools: the debate rages on
  227. Why you cannot always trust social media: a practical example
  228. Why isn’t the universe of infinite density?
  229. Cosmologists’ problems with aleph-null and the multiverse
  230. The Copernican principle and the multiverse
  231. No (well, not much) kernel hacking on a Sunday
  232. Mild roasting delivered
  233. Touch paper lit…
  234. Pushing to a remote git over a non-standard port
  235. A meme you can believe in
  236. A question for a cosmologist about brane death
  237. More delays for VMUFAT
  238. Spoke too soon (of course)
  239. VMUFAT: almost done (I hope)
  240. GitHub message confirmed genuine
  241. “Github” message a scam?
  242. Homemade bread in Belfast
  243. Comrades, let’s optimise!
  244. Leap years plus BCD are a nasty combo
  245. “One of the finest engineers of the open source movement”
  246. Magnetic fields, again
  247. Not one for the Apple fanbois
  248. Computer scientists’ lousy citation style
  249. Seems neutrinos do not arrive before they leave after all
  250. Heartland Institute: an update
  251. Taking down the bug
  252. The end of the CAPTCHA?
  253. A question for a C guru
  254. One of those debugging nights
  255. Woodhouse Memes – the birth of an internet virus
  256. Heartland Institute claim anti-science document is a fake
  257. Climate change deniers aim to scare teachers off science
  258. To upgrade or not
  259. Just two shelves of computer books left
  260. Damian Green: venal or just poorly educated?
  261. Climate change denial explained
  262. Daily Telegraph’s “Make Britain Count” campaign
  263. The truth is not democratic
  264. Have we reached “peak silicon” and what can we do about it?
  265. Not one for @johnrentoul – but could 1 in 6 of us be dead this time next year?
  266. A multiple choice quiz on the Newton-Raphson method
  267. Newton-Raphson method
  268. A better calculator
  269. How fair is my dime, part 2
  270. Is my dime fair?
  271. Richard Stallman plainly lacks any sense of irony
  272. Better algorithms, not better hardware are what make your computer faster, faster
  273. Simple point I had not previously realised about Boolean functions
  274. Calculating the Kronecker product
  275. A K Dewdney, oh dear
  276. Cartesian product or Kronecker product?
  277. Science and the conspiracy: a review of “Ordinary Thunderstorms”
  278. Two cheers for Gove?
  279. Import duties damaging UK electronics manufacturing
  280. “The first algorithm”
  281. Surrendered to the Kindle
  282. Transported directly back to this week in 1974
  283. With apologies to Professor Rubin
  284. This could be a very important case for consumer rights in the UK
  285. What people come here looking for…

2011 305

  1. My (computer science) book of the year
  2. Soviet computer science: once ahead of the west?
  3. A little bit more on the Taylor expansion
  4. Taylor series expansions and L’Hospital’s rule
  5. Filesystem works
  6. Taylor expansion of a probability density function
  7. Working on filesystem code
  8. Death of a bridge
  9. A broadband commons and economic prosperity
  10. How random is random?
  11. Another Euler number proof
  12. An alternative second half?
  13. Good maths or bad maths?
  14. An alternative proof for the derivative of ln(x)
  15. Derivative of ln(x)
  16. Working set heuristics and the Linux kernel: my MSc report
  17. Stephen Twigg hits the nail on the head
  18. The dismal state of computing education in English schools
  19. The more people use “Unity” the less they like it
  20. At last: scientists as the heroes
  21. Differential calculus reminder
  22. Master of Science
  23. Human error and computer error
  24. This blog is now a year old
  25. Very small Turing machines
  26. Stirling’s approximation
  27. The binomial distribution, part 2
  28. The binomial distribution, part 1
  29. Is the time pages are in the working set stochastic?
  30. The tyranny of the arts graduates continues
  31. Email is ill, but is not dying
  32. The cost of soft/minor faults
  33. An example of the poor editing in O’Reilly’s “Programming Android”
  34. Making sense of Android’s complex development process
  35. Review: John Banville’s “Doctor Copernicus”
  36. Hard faults and soft faults in the real world
  37. “bye bye ubuntu you suck now” – so how can I switch to Mint?
  38. Some RegEx stuff
  39. Counting soft and hard faults
  40. Review of “The Black Cloud”
  41. Confused about GNU regex documentation
  42. Going to have to try eclim
  43. Some thoughts on the Linux page cache
  44. 2012: the year of the death of the desktop?
  45. Review of “The Fear Index”
  46. Worth having a look at the O’Reilly site today
  47. Even for the Liberal Democrats this one takes the biscuit
  48. John McCarthy
  49. Thanks to @PootBlog but I still don’t get it
  50. A second thing I don’t understand about magnetism
  51. Things I don’t understand: magnetism
  52. Should we all be worried by Windows 8?
  53. Ubuntu annoyances and some fixes
  54. Is all other science “unpopular” then?
  55. The Great Alan Turing
  56. Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 and getting rid of “Unity”
  57. Dennis Ritchie
  58. My other blog
  59. In praise of StackExchange
  60. Why do people hate Apple redux
  61. LaTeX symbol for the cartesian product
  62. Apple II
  63. Steve Jobs
  64. It’s official: we’re getting bigger all the time says Nobel Committee
  65. Why operating system research matters
  66. Why (maybe) leaves are yellow in Europe and red in North America
  67. Does Google cap query returns?
  68. “Big data” suggests online poker “relatively benign”
  69. Evolution and the second law of thermodynamics
  70. Can science ever win the argument?
  71. Still not buying a Kindle
  72. The second law of thermodynamics and the history of the universe
  73. The future of Britain’s coalition government depends on “agile” methods
  74. Copyright in students’ work
  75. If it wasn’t for those pesky neutrinos
  76. More on the Erdős–Straus conjecture
  77. The Erdős–Straus conjecture
  78. I bought a book
  79. More on Hilbert’s tenth problem
  80. Diophantine sets and the integers
  81. More thoughts about the economics of spam
  82. Microsoft are not the enemy
  83. Done and dusted
  84. An idea I saw on normblog
  85. An abusive reform of copyright law
  86. Roy Spencer – a thought
  87. Climate change paper “should never have been published”
  88. Problems with oprofile
  89. Jobs, jobs, jobs
  90. Is Ubuntu in decline?
  91. The problem with hubris
  92. Coming close to the end
  93. Best book on Linux kernel internals
  94. Do computer science graduates get jobs in the end?
  95. GNU source-highlight, another great toy and tool
  96. Fantastic Android application for LaTeX users
  97. “Hacker culture” drove out women from computer science
  98. Nasty computer scientists
  99. “Let’s enhance that” might work after all
  100. Email: the first social medium
  101. Holiday all but over
  102. Fixing the problem with XSLT 2.0
  103. The most expensive computer I ever bought
  104. XSL problem solved (sort of)
  105. XSL problem
  106. Birkbeck
  107. Astrophotography – an inspiration
  108. The end of Linux Journal
  109. Second-hand maths and computing books
  110. In your face, fan bois
  111. OpenGrok: a reassessment
  112. Firing from the canon?
  113. Skywatcher-127 synch scan telescope
  114. My first R program
  115. Astronomy is still out of this world
  116. Reflections on the riots: part two
  117. Reflections on the riots: part one
  118. Compile time shortens exponentially with increased memory
  119. I love R already, but I have not got a clue how to use it
  120. Earth surrounded by a ring of anti-protons
  121. Good graphing software: any recommendations?
  122. Clamav-milter problem and fix
  123. Testing OpenGrok
  124. So, I bought a telescope
  125. Buying a telescope
  126. KVM: starting the ‘default’ network
  127. Progress on the MSc project
  128. “Ultimate L” explained
  129. Goedel’s Incompeteness theorem surpassed?
  130. New trend in comment spam?
  131. Wireless bridge again
  132. The Germans are coming (possibly)
  133. A further thought on MD5
  134. So, is the MD5 weakness a real world problem or not?
  135. Brokenness of MD5 leads to attack on “The Sun”
  136. More proof that algorithms matter
  137. Wireless bridge, update
  138. In continued praise of “Programming Pearls”
  139. Buying a wedding dress over a mobile?
  140. What’s that coming over the hill?
  141. Computer science: the worst degree?
  142. Eric Raymond on “how to become a hacker”
  143. Using XSLT to manipulate an SVG file
  144. O’Reilly free ebook on HTML 5
  145. Using Firefox version 7
  146. Getting frantic
  147. Writing more code to avoid writing any of the report?
  148. What that working set comparison graph should have looked like
  149. More poor performance from the Open JVM?
  150. The graph is wrong
  151. Working sets compared
  152. Need for speed
  153. Performance collapse in the Open JVM
  154. Back from the dead (almost)
  155. The Oxford comma
  156. First bit of assembler
  157. Thirty years ago today…
  158. Better algorithm found
  159. How did the end of the world experiment go?
  160. Help! Computing power or better algorithm required
  161. Memory demands of a Linux process
  162. Stuxnet
  163. A closer look at xterm locality
  164. Patterns of locality in xterm
  165. The price of syntactical sugar?
  166. Introducing the lackeyml format
  167. Eighteen million lines of XML!
  168. Bridge working
  169. Using old Prism 2 card for the wireless bridge
  170. Wireless bridge: seems I spoke too soon
  171. First “end of the world in July 2011” hit
  172. Wired to wireless bridge in Ubuntu Linux
  173. University of Hertfordshire
  174. “Basically, you would be able to compute anything you wanted”
  175. Linux 3.0-rc1 deb packages for you to try
  176. Linux 3.0
  177. Is the world going to end on 2 July 2011?
  178. The end of the world: an experiment
  179. Exams are over, project remains
  180. Interceptors in Groovy
  181. Meta programming: giving Integers a “fibonacci” property in Groovy
  182. The “use” mix-in in Groovy
  183. Behavioural software patterns
  184. Structural software patterns
  185. Maybe my kids should worry about 2009 BD – but I won’t
  186. End of the world watch
  187. Creational patterns
  188. The “Gang of Four” software patterns
  189. GRASP software patterns
  190. More work on Life.groovy
  191. Life.groovy now available
  192. Game of life in Groovy
  193. Differences between UDP and TCP
  194. XPath tool
  195. First exam
  196. Distribution, commutation and association in database queries
  197. Inconsistent analysis (unrepeatable read)
  198. The long way round?
  199. What’s next?
  200. Another SQL puzzle
  201. A bit of fun: Shawn Urban’s math puzzle
  202. So, the world did not end after all
  203. Burnt out video card
  204. Let’s try that again, shall we?
  205. Solving an old SQL puzzle
  206. O’Reilly XML Pocket Reference: don’t bother
  207. XSLT conundrum solved
  208. How can I do this in XSLT?
  209. Wiki-style maths
  210. Solving a relational query: part 5
  211. Solving a relational query: part 4
  212. Solving a relational query: part 3
  213. Solving a relational query: part 2
  214. Solving a relational query: part 1
  215. Calculating CRCs in hardware
  216. Google wants your voice
  217. Spangles Muldoon and the micro revolution
  218. What ever happened to “Comp Shop”?
  219. LaTeX and O’Reilly
  220. Compukit UK101
  221. Something more on Fibonacci numbers
  222. Further thoughts on “Natty Narwhal”
  223. Ubuntu 11.04: first impressions
  224. Ubuntu 11.04 now on the install phase
  225. Cyclic Redundancy Checks
  226. Ubuntu 11.04 upgrade
  227. Do universities fail science students?
  228. Looks like a great book
  229. Relational division again
  230. Relational algebra problem
  231. Basic symbols of relational algebra
  232. Cardinality of strings … 2
  233. Cardinality of the set of all strings
  234. Some insight on “comment spam”
  235. Does email have a future?
  236. A Brief History of the Future
  237. More computing nostalgia
  238. Running Linux and playing an MP3: on the Dreamcast
  239. More on the Kronecker Delta and Fourier Series
  240. Answering my own question on the Fourier Series
  241. Fourier Series: before I begin…
  242. LaTeX w00t!
  243. Поехали!
  244. Books I recommend for Birkbeck MSc Computer Science students
  245. Red-Black tree generated by memball and treedraw
  246. Red black tree resources and sources
  247. Breadboard 81
  248. Gaphor broken in Ubuntu 10.10
  249. Red-black trees
  250. Itsy-OS kernel: who needs memory protection anyway?
  251. Ondemand scheduling does not work on the Pentium 4
  252. The game of life
  253. Seven years of spamming
  254. Groovydoc issue
  255. The diagonal proof
  256. Linux core dump in “The IT Crowd”
  257. The Joshua Tree, Walter Benjamin and the internet revolution
  258. Flattered by spam
  259. The rubbish written about the “supermoon”
  260. The recursive cash changing algorithm
  261. “Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ”
  262. Pentium D and frequency scaling: help needed
  263. Smaller PNG graphic files from your LaTeX
  264. The end of the world … continued
  265. Something interesting about Fibonacci numbers
  266. The joy of regex
  267. Sexy Maths…
  268. P = NP once again
  269. Getting peace of mind – at a price
  270. The end of the world is nigh: 2 June 2011
  271. The slashdot experience
  272. Gödel, Turing and decidability
  273. Did not quite waste the whole weekend
  274. No proof of P=NP after all (yet?)
  275. Time to ditch Firefox?
  276. Lifecycle of a Linux page … 2
  277. Lifecycle of a Linux page
  278. Changes at Foyles
  279. Slow progress on the project proposal
  280. LaTeX frustration…
  281. A bit of a Groovy gotcha
  282. The lambda calculus and closures in Groovy
  283. Eating humble pie
  284. Coming up… the lambda calculus
  285. Interesting looking book…
  286. Issue with String.tokenize() in Groovy
  287. Redirecting stdOut in Groovy
  288. If other planets were as close as the Moon
  289. The importance of Turing’s findings
  290. Now available to all
  291. Close(r) but no cigar (yet)
  292. Struggling to make up for the art failings
  293. Another book for the wish list?
  294. Found my copy of “Basic Computer Games”
  295. The opposite of science, but could be fun
  296. Possibly the most important news you will read this year
  297. Even more confused
  298. For all you first order/predicate logic fans out there
  299. More people getting it wrong about graphics formats
  300. Broken peer review is nothing new
  301. Bought on a whim but seems like a good one
  302. Old software still available w00t
  303. In defence of BASIC
  304. I failed art at school
  305. Never used a punch card

2010 13

  1. If writing the MSc project proposal is this hard…
  2. What if P = NP?
  3. 530 lines of Javascript
  4. Algorithms matter … a lot
  5. The book I want to write
  6. Some advice you should ignore
  7. Dealing with 0x80600001 errors
  8. XML: any use?
  9. Rediscovering enthusiasm
  10. Making the easy look difficult or is it the other way round
  11. Books on discrete mathematics for computing
  12. Relational division in SQL
  13. Here we go again