All articles, newest first

  1. Knuth visited, Brains Limited
  2. Set.insert or set.add?
  3. Define pedantic
  4. Hiding iterator boilerplate behind a Boost facade
  5. Equality and Equivalence
  6. Binary search revisited
  7. Man or man(1)?
  8. Binary search returns … ?
  9. Think, quote, escape
  10. Beware the March of IDEs!
  11. Pi seconds is a nanocentury
  12. Bike charts by Google. Using the google chart API for something ... different
  13. When you comment on a comment
  14. Power programming. What makes a language powerful? The programmer!
  15. Python, Surprise me!
  16. Next permutation: When C++ gets it right. An investigation into a classic algorithm for generating the distinct permutations of a sequence in lexicographical order.
  17. Python on Ice. A review of the Python 2, Python 3 language fork. Python 3 has met with some resistance. A moratorium on further changes to the language is being imposed, to smooth the transition.
  18. Steady on Subversion. Despite the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems, I'm sticking with Subversion. Here's why.
  19. Favicon. Why my favicon is a jigsaw piece.
  20. Code Rot. What happens when we stop tending to our code? It decays. This article investigates why.
  21. A useful octal escape sequence
  22. Converting integer literals in C++ and Python
  23. Inner, Outer, Shake it all abouter. Encapsulation is about allocating responsibility and easing utility rather than protecting data.
  24. Blackmail made easy using Python counters. A programming puzzle and a discussion of Python's evolution.
  25. Could OCR conquer the calligraphylion? A note on the challenge which Arabic script sets for optical character recognition engines.
  26. Undogfooding
  27. Tony Hoare’s vision, car crashes, and Alan Turing. The highs and lows of Europython 2009. A personal review.
  28. Partitioning with Python
  29. Oulipo and the Eodermdrome challenge. The word EODERMDROME is itself an eodermdrome. Can you find any others?
  30. Run-length encoding in Python
  31. DEFLATE: run-length encoding, but better. An investigation into the extended run-length encoder at the heart of the Zlib compression library.
  32. Copy, load, redirect and tee using C++ streambufs. The C++ iostream library separates formatting from lower level read/write operations. This article shows how to use C++ stream buffers to copy, load, redirect and tee streams.
  33. Generic documentation
  34. The Rings of Saturn
  35. Software development checklist += 3
  36. Review: Expert Python Programming
  37. Patience sort and the Longest increasing subsequence. How a simple card game provides an efficient algorithm for finding the longest increasing subsequence of a given sequence.
  38. OCR. Wrong characters, right meaning! (chuckles). When OCR gets the characters wrong but the meaning right.
  39. Good maths, bad computers
  40. Longest common subsequence. An investigation into the classic computer science problem of calculating the longest common subsequence of two sequences, and its relationship to the edit distance and longest increasing subsequence problems.
  41. Ordered sublists. A brute force approach. A brute force solution to the longest increasing subsequence problem.
  42. A race within a race
  43. Maximum of an empty sequence?
  44. Emoticrab invasion, CSS breakdown. CSS positioning doesn't always work in a Feed reader.
  45. Spolsky podcast causes exercise bike incident
  46. comp.lang.name? Python was named after a comedy troupe. This note discusses what makes a good name for a computer language.
  47. Could a Python eat an elephant?
  48. Seamless sequence output in Python 3.0
  49. Tell me about … Virtualization. An attempt to describe virtualization, why it's useful, and when to consider using it.
  50. Perl 6, Python 3
  51. Steganography made simple
  52. What’s in the box?
  53. A Little Teaser. Keen Eyes? You’ll See! Follow the clues to reveal the hidden message.
  54. Books, blogs, comments and code samples
  55. Your computer might be at risk. A hard drive failed this weekend. Guess what, it hadn't been backed up. Here's how I went about recovering the data, and some thoughts on the future of computing in general and operating systems in particular.
  56. Negative, Captain
  57. Driving down the road of innovation
  58. Sums and sums of squares in C++. Reduce is a higher order function which applies a another function repeatedly to a collection of values, accumulating the result. Well known to functional programmers, reduce is also a standard C++ algorithm.
  59. BIG G little g - What begins with G? Capitalisation: Google or google?
  60. Removing duplicates using itertools.groupby. An interpreted Python session showing itertools in action.
  61. Merging sorted streams in Python. Did you know that Python's for loops can have an else clause? Here's how it can be used in a stream-merging function.
  62. Launching missiles and other unhappy accidents. Launching a missile is an example of a dangerous programming side-effect. Bus accidents are used to motivate team-work.
  63. Life, user manuals, recursive pictures
  64. Looping forever and ever
  65. Syntactic Sugar
  66. Macros with halos
  67. Entertaining Documentation
  68. iBlame Exchange
  69. Distorted Software. What does software look like? This article suggests that architecture diagrams get the emphasis wrong.
  70. tag.wordaligned.org
  71. Rewriting String.Left()
  72. Me, Myself and OpenID. Setting up a personal OpenID server using phpMyID
  73. Nonce Sense. Cryptography
  74. Fixing header file dependencies. A simple script to check header files are self contained
  75. Running Sums in Python. A Python program to generate the running sum of a series.
  76. Eurovision 2008 charts
  77. Curling for web sites. A script using curl and bash to detect when a website status changes.
  78. Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way. Listen when your compiler grumbles, but sometimes you should ignore its suggestions.
  79. Accidental Emacs. A list of Emacs modes and tricks I use all the time but discovered by accident.
  80. Scatter pictures with Google Charts
  81. Takewhile drops one
  82. Stop the clock, squash the bug. Which is better, a clock which loses a minute a day or one which is stopped? An investigation into how we find and fix software defects.
  83. Hunting down globals with nm
  84. Programming Nirvana, Plan B. Simon Peyton Jones discusses functional programming, Haskell, and promotes a radical route to programming Nirvana at ACCU 2008.
  85. Fun with Erlang, ACCU 2008
  86. White black knight then black white knight. Yet more on drawing chessboards
  87. Drawing Chess Positions. A follow-up article on scripting graphics.
  88. Ima Lumberjack, (s)he’s OK. Gender-neutral technical writing using fictional names.
  89. Drawing Chessboards. An article about creating graphics programmatically.
  90. Tracing function calls using Python decorators. Developing code to trace function calls using Python decorators.
  91. Sugar Pie. Approximating pi by scattering sugar.
  92. The Price of Coffee. Offering something for nothing and getting paid nothing for it. Leap day ramblings.
  93. Top Ten Percent. The most efficient way to sort the top 10% of a collection.
  94. Top Ten Tags. Choosing the right algorithm to select the N largest items from a collection.
  95. No www, yes comments, no categories
  96. Lexical Dispatch in Python. Dispatching to functions based on their names
  97. Essential Python Reading List. An essential Python reading list. I've ordered the items so you can pause or stop reading at any point: at every stage you'll have learned about as much possible about Python for the effort you've put in.
  98. Attack of the Alien Asterisks. Unusual font rendering on Windows
  99. From Hash Key to Haskell. A note on keys, characters, smileys, digraphs and Haskell.
  100. Erlang Erlang. A parallel processing problem.
  101. Animated pair streams. Another look at the functional programming problem of generating an infinite sequence of pairs. An example of using the Python Imaging Library to generate an animated GIF.
  102. ACCU Conference 2008. A preview of ACCU 2008.
  103. File shifting using lftp and rsync. Sometimes it's easier to shift files using the command line, rather than a GUI.
  104. Too big or too clever? Steve Yegge says that, for large applications, size is an enemy best controlled by dynamic languages. Alex Martelli says a language can be too dynamic for a large application. Who's right?
  105. Maybe we live in a scripting universe. Comments on Larry Wall's 11th State of the Onion address.
  106. The Maximum Sum contiguous subsequence problem. A stream-based solution to a classic computer science problem.
  107. So many feeds, so little news. So many feeds, so little news. A reflection on internet consumption.
  108. Elegance and Efficiency. Must elegant code be efficient? This article investigates.
  109. Not my links
  110. Ever wish you’d branched first? A short article describing how to branch a Subversion working copy based on the development trunk.
  111. Zippy triples served with Python. How do you generate previous, this, next, triples from a collection. A stream-based solution in Python.
  112. Paging through the Manual using Access Keys
  113. Anti-Social Build Orders. An article advocating zero-tolerance for anti-social build offences.
  114. Metablog. Reflections on 14 months of blogging, and why I'm no longer using Typo.
  115. RTM vs STW
  116. Seeing with a fresh pair of ears
  117. Reversing Hofstadter’s Law
  118. Lock but don’t but
  119. Mistargeted ads
  120. svn help patch
  121. Big City Skyline Puzzle. Comments on a novel computer science puzzle. When machine resources are scarce, a compiled language offers precise control.
  122. Ongoing Peer Review
  123. Paralipsis
  124. Fixed Wheels and Simple Designs
  125. A yen for more symbols
  126. PyCon UK: statistics, pictures and perennial problems
  127. Pitching Python in three syllables
  128. What apple gets right
  129. The Granny—Stroustrup Scale
  130. Koenig’s first rule of debugging. The problems caused by the C++ compilation model, dependencies and cryptic compile diagnostics. If an expert like Andrew Koenig can’t get it right, what hope for the rest of us?
  131. Shameful Names
  132. He Sells Shell Scripts to Intersect Sets. The Unix command shell contains a lot of what I like in a programming environment: it’s dynamic, high-level, interpreted, flexible, succinct. This article shows the Unix tools in action.
  133. Collaborative documentation tools
  134. Space sensitive programming
  135. How green you are
  136. When web search results get read out of context
  137. A world without version control
  138. In, on and out of boxes
  139. Pragmatic fashion
  140. Robot wars
  141. The Third Rule of Program Optimisation
  142. Why Python programmers should learn Python
  143. Source open, problem closed. An example of the open source advantage.
  144. How many restarts?
  145. Evolving Python in and for the real world
  146. Turing Tests and Train Trackers
  147. Feeding an internet addiction
  148. Oberon, Cromarty, Lisa, Waggledance, Ariel
  149. Introducing Java
  150. Perlish Wisdom
  151. Awesome presentations
  152. Google Reader
  153. PyCon UK
  154. The Heroic Programmer
  155. An ideal working environment
  156. The Trouble with Version Numbers
  157. High altitude programming
  158. Python keyword workaround
  159. Charming Python
  160. Why Software Development isn’t Like Construction. What’s the best metaphor for software development? Steve McConnell prefers “construction”. I disagree.
  161. Shells, Logs and Pipes
  162. Drawing Software Designs
  163. Test driven development in Python
  164. Mixing Python and C++
  165. Release then Test
  166. bin2hex.py
  167. Code completion for dynamic languages
  168. Casualties in the great computer shootout. An investigation into various dimensions of some speed benchmark programs.
  169. A tale of two upgrades
  170. One svnserve, multiple repositories
  171. Happy Mac
  172. Retro-fitting coding standards
  173. fold left, right
  174. Code Craft
  175. Narrow Python
  176. Trac — not just a pretty interface
  177. 1, 6, 21, 107, … ?
  178. Martin Fowler on Soft Documentation
  179. Printed C++ Journals
  180. Review of Pete Becker’s TR1 Book
  181. Synchronising Workspaces
  182. Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set
  183. Permission and Forgiveness
  184. Different Angles on Legacy Code
  185. Wiki Markup. Wikis often invent their own markup syntax. A note on why I favour Markdown.
  186. Functional Programming “Aha!” Moments
  187. Spam, Typo, Subversion Logs
  188. Internal Subversion Externals
  189. Lenient Browsers and Wobbly Tables
  190. My First Typo Sidebar
  191. Smart Pointers, Dumb Programmers. A note describing how a smart pointer tripped me up.
  192. The Etch-A-Sketch User Interface
  193. Joined Output and the Fencepost Problem. Items and the spaces between them: some notes on the fencepost problem and joining up strings.
  194. When computer applications reside on the web
  195. Computer Language Complexity
  196. Complacency in the computer industry
  197. The Lazy Builder’s Complexity Lesson. A discussion of algorithmic complexity, and a demonstration of how the C++ standard library allows programmers to write code which is both concise and efficient.
  198. Soft Documentation. A software developer's investigation into documentation tools.
  199. Personal overnight builds
  200. From CVS to Subversion
  201. Pcl-cvs and Psvn Incompatibilities
  202. Sounds of the Tokyo Metro
  203. Subversion 1.4
  204. Look and Say Numbers
  205. Polyominoes
  206. Browsing Python Documentation using the Python Sidebar
  207. From __future__ import braces
  208. Python 2.5
  209. Friday Puzzles
  210. Version Control for Third Party Software
  211. Overload Online
  212. Personal version control
  213. String literals and regular expressions. An article about string literals, escape sequences, regular expressions, and the problems encountered when mixing these together.
  214. There’s no escape??!
  215. Parsing C++
  216. Py2exe
  217. Ignoring .svn directories
  218. Are List Comprehensions the Wrong Way Round?
  219. How to Mirror a Subversion Repository
  220. Message to Self. What’s this?
  221. Octal Literals
  222. A Subversion Pre-Commit Hook. How to install and test a simple Subversion pre-commit hook script.
  223. Creating a Temporary Subversion Repository
  224. Binary Literals
  225. Readable Code
  226. Keyword Substitution - Just say No!
  227. map, filter, accumulate, lambda
  228. Saving changes to read-only files
  229. Google Mail holiday auto-responder
  230. A Python syntax highlighter
  231. Generating solutions to the 8 Queens Puzzle
  232. My (Test) First Ruby Program
  233. Getting started with Typo
  234. Posting from the command line using mtsend
  235. Built in Type Safety?
  236. The case against TODO. A neat label for work in progress or an easy way to disguise the flaws in a codebase?
  237. Metaprogramming is Your Friend. An investigation into metaprogramming techniques used by lazy C, C++, Lisp and Python programmers.
  238. A Mini-Project to Decode a Mini-Language
  239. Code in Comments. Don't comment out dead code, delete it!
  240. Brackets Off! Thoughts on operator precedence.