A day’s worth of sodium in a single serve. I need to start bringing food into work.
Archive for the 'General' Category
Theory regarding the Dan Kaminsky DNS attack
Posted in General, workfriendly, dns on Jul 10th, 2008 Comments
A colleague in my team at work has a theory regarding the nature of the much-hyped Dan Kaminsky DNS attack (which he’ll be revealing at Black Hat this year). Take it away Rob…
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 […]
The Factor Attraction
Posted in General, programming, factor on Nov 23rd, 2007 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 […]
An intuitive guide to exponential functions & e
Posted in General, workfriendly, maths, math on Nov 22nd, 2007 Comments
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!
More factor: tabular to triples
Posted in General, programming, factor on Oct 11th, 2007 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. […]
A poor man’s scheme profiler
Posted in General, programming, scheme, gambit on Jul 25th, 2007 Comments
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’ […]
Coding when you’re tired and unmotivated
Posted in General, programming on Jul 23rd, 2007 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 […]
First dynamically balancing walking robot
Posted in General, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly, ai on Feb 27th, 2007 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 […]
Multithreading links
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, concurrency on Feb 22nd, 2007 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 […]
Scheme development environment
Posted in General, programming, scheme on Feb 21st, 2007 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 […]
Transactional Memory is the wrong path to concurrency
Posted in General, workfriendly, concurrency on Feb 8th, 2007 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 […]
Microsoft to support OpenID
Posted in General, OpenID, workfriendly, identity on Feb 7th, 2007 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 […]
Low simplicity and High simplicity
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming on Jan 11th, 2007 Comments
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’.
The path from specificity to usefulness
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples, microformats on Jan 8th, 2007 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 […]
Wordpress permalink probs
Posted in General, Blog, workfriendly on Dec 21st, 2006 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 […]
Gowers Review of UK intellectual property released
Posted in General, workfriendly, DRM on Dec 7th, 2006 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 […]
Music DRM on its way out?
Posted in General, workfriendly, DRM on Dec 7th, 2006 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 […]
Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) Resources
Posted in General, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly, ai on Nov 15th, 2006 Comments
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 […]
Web Startup monthly profits
Posted in General, workfriendly on Nov 9th, 2006 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 […]
