All articles, alphabetical order

  1. “Solutions”
  2. 1, 6, 21, 107, … ?
  3. A Little Teaser. Keen Eyes? You’ll See! Follow the clues to reveal the hidden message.
  4. A Mini-Project to Decode a Mini-Language
  5. A Python syntax highlighter
  6. A race within a race
  7. A Subversion Pre-Commit Hook. How to install and test a simple Subversion pre-commit hook script.
  8. A tale of two upgrades
  9. A useful octal escape sequence
  10. A world without version control
  11. A yen for more symbols
  12. Accidental Emacs. A list of Emacs modes and tricks I use all the time but discovered by accident.
  13. ACCU 2013
  14. ACCU Bristol and Bath
  15. ACCU Conference 2008. A preview of ACCU 2008.
  16. An Exploration of the Phenomenology of Software Development
  17. An ideal working environment
  18. Angle brackets hurt my eyes
  19. 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.
  20. Anti-Social Build Orders. An article advocating zero-tolerance for anti-social build offences.
  21. Are List Comprehensions the Wrong Way Round?
  22. Attack of the Alien Asterisks. Unusual font rendering on Windows
  23. Awesome presentations
  24. Beware the March of IDEs!
  25. Big City Skyline Puzzle. Comments on a novel computer science puzzle. When machine resources are scarce, a compiled language offers precise control.
  26. BIG G little g - What begins with G? Capitalisation: Google or google?
  27. Bike charts by Google. Using the google chart API for something ... different
  28. bin2hex.py
  29. Binary Literals
  30. Binary search returns … ?
  31. Binary search revisited
  32. Blackmail made easy using Python counters. A programming puzzle and a discussion of Python's evolution.
  33. Books, blogs, comments and code samples
  34. Brackets Off! Thoughts on operator precedence.
  35. Browsing Python Documentation using the Python Sidebar
  36. Built in Type Safety?
  37. C++ Concurrency in Action. A glowing review of Anthony Williams' book on C++11's support for concurrency
  38. Casualties in the great computer shootout. An investigation into various dimensions of some speed benchmark programs.
  39. Charming Python
  40. Code completion for dynamic languages
  41. Code Craft
  42. Code in Comments. Don't comment out dead code, delete it!
  43. Code Rot. What happens when we stop tending to our code? It decays. This article investigates why.
  44. Collaborative documentation tools
  45. comp.lang.name? Python was named after a comedy troupe. This note discusses what makes a good name for a computer language.
  46. Complacency in the computer industry
  47. Computer Language Complexity
  48. Converting integer literals in C++ and Python
  49. 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.
  50. Could a Python eat an elephant?
  51. Could OCR conquer the calligraphylion? A note on the challenge which Arabic script sets for optical character recognition engines.
  52. Creating a Temporary Subversion Repository
  53. Curling for web sites. A script using curl and bash to detect when a website status changes.
  54. Define pedantic
  55. DEFLATE: run-length encoding, but better. An investigation into the extended run-length encoder at the heart of the Zlib compression library.
  56. Desktop preferences
  57. Different Angles on Legacy Code
  58. Distorted Software. What does software look like? This article suggests that architecture diagrams get the emphasis wrong.
  59. Drawing Chess Positions. A follow-up article on scripting graphics.
  60. Drawing Chessboards. An article about creating graphics programmatically.
  61. Drawing Software Designs
  62. Driving down the road of innovation
  63. Elegance and Efficiency. Must elegant code be efficient? This article investigates.
  64. Emoticrab invasion, CSS breakdown. CSS positioning doesn't always work in a Feed reader.
  65. Entertaining Documentation
  66. Equality and Equivalence
  67. Erlang Erlang. A parallel processing problem.
  68. 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.
  69. Eurovision 2008 charts
  70. Ever wish you’d branched first? A short article describing how to branch a Subversion working copy based on the development trunk.
  71. Evolving Python in and for the real world
  72. Favicon. Why my favicon is a jigsaw piece.
  73. Feeding an internet addiction
  74. File shifting using lftp and rsync. Sometimes it's easier to shift files using the command line, rather than a GUI.
  75. Fixed Wheels and Simple Designs
  76. Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way. Listen when your compiler grumbles, but sometimes you should ignore its suggestions.
  77. Fixing header file dependencies. A simple script to check header files are self contained
  78. fold left, right
  79. Folded files and rainbow code
  80. Friday Puzzles
  81. From __future__ import braces
  82. From CVS to Subversion
  83. From Hash Key to Haskell. A note on keys, characters, smileys, digraphs and Haskell.
  84. Fun with Erlang, ACCU 2008
  85. Functional Programming “Aha!” Moments
  86. Generating solutions to the 8 Queens Puzzle
  87. Generic documentation
  88. Getting started with Typo
  89. Good maths, bad computers
  90. Google Mail holiday auto-responder
  91. Google Reader
  92. Happy Mac
  93. 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.
  94. Hiding iterator boilerplate behind a Boost facade
  95. High altitude programming
  96. Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set
  97. Hosting for Life? TextDrive revived!
  98. How green you are
  99. How many restarts?
  100. How to Mirror a Subversion Repository
  101. Hunting down globals with nm
  102. iBlame Exchange
  103. Ignoring .svn directories
  104. Ima Lumberjack, (s)he’s OK. Gender-neutral technical writing using fictional names.
  105. In, on and out of boxes
  106. Inner, Outer, Shake it all abouter. Encapsulation is about allocating responsibility and easing utility rather than protecting data.
  107. Internal Subversion Externals
  108. Introducing Java
  109. Joined Output and the Fencepost Problem. Items and the spaces between them: some notes on the fencepost problem and joining up strings.
  110. Keyword Substitution - Just say No!
  111. Knuth visited, Brains Limited
  112. 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?
  113. 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.
  114. Lenient Browsers and Wobbly Tables
  115. Lexical Dispatch in Python. Dispatching to functions based on their names
  116. Life goes on
  117. Life on Canvas
  118. Life, user manuals, recursive pictures
  119. Lock but don’t but
  120. 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.
  121. Look and Say Numbers
  122. Looping forever and ever
  123. Macros with halos
  124. Man or man(1)?
  125. map, filter, accumulate, lambda
  126. Martin Fowler on Soft Documentation
  127. Maximum of an empty sequence?
  128. Maybe we live in a scripting universe. Comments on Larry Wall's 11th State of the Onion address.
  129. Me, Myself and OpenID. Setting up a personal OpenID server using phpMyID
  130. 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.
  131. Message to Self. What’s this?
  132. Metablog. Reflections on 14 months of blogging, and why I'm no longer using Typo.
  133. Metaprogramming is Your Friend. An investigation into metaprogramming techniques used by lazy C, C++, Lisp and Python programmers.
  134. Mistargeted ads
  135. Mixing Python and C++
  136. More adventures in C++
  137. My (Test) First Ruby Program
  138. My First Typo Sidebar
  139. Narrow Python
  140. Negative, Captain
  141. Next permutation: When C++ gets it right. An investigation into a classic algorithm for generating the distinct permutations of a sequence in lexicographical order.
  142. No www, yes comments, no categories
  143. Nonce Sense. Cryptography
  144. Not my links
  145. Oberon, Cromarty, Lisa, Waggledance, Ariel
  146. OCR. Wrong characters, right meaning! (chuckles). When OCR gets the characters wrong but the meaning right.
  147. Octal Literals
  148. One svnserve, multiple repositories
  149. Ongoing Peer Review
  150. Ordered sublists. A brute force approach. A brute force solution to the longest increasing subsequence problem.
  151. Oulipo and the Eodermdrome challenge. The word EODERMDROME is itself an eodermdrome. Can you find any others?
  152. Overload Online
  153. Paging through the Manual using Access Keys
  154. Paralipsis
  155. Parsing C++
  156. Partitioning with Python
  157. 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.
  158. Patience Sorted
  159. Pcl-cvs and Psvn Incompatibilities
  160. Perl 6, Python 3
  161. Perlish Wisdom
  162. Permission and Forgiveness
  163. Personal overnight builds
  164. Personal version control
  165. Pi seconds is a nanocentury
  166. Pitching Python in three syllables
  167. Polyominoes
  168. Posting from the command line using mtsend
  169. Power programming. What makes a language powerful? The programmer!
  170. Pragmatic fashion
  171. Printed C++ Journals
  172. Programming Nirvana, Plan B. Simon Peyton Jones discusses functional programming, Haskell, and promotes a radical route to programming Nirvana at ACCU 2008.
  173. Py2exe
  174. PyCon UK
  175. PyCon UK: statistics, pictures and perennial problems
  176. Python 2.5
  177. Python keyword workaround
  178. 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.
  179. Python’s lesser known loop control
  180. Python, Surprise me!
  181. Readable Code
  182. Release then Test
  183. Removing duplicates using itertools.groupby. An interpreted Python session showing itertools in action.
  184. Retro-fitting coding standards
  185. Reversing Hofstadter’s Law
  186. Review of Pete Becker’s TR1 Book
  187. Review: Expert Python Programming
  188. Rewriting String.Left()
  189. Robot wars
  190. RTM vs STW
  191. Run-length encoding in Python
  192. Running Sums in Python. A Python program to generate the running sum of a series.
  193. Saving changes to read-only files
  194. Scatter pictures with Google Charts
  195. Seamless sequence output in Python 3.0
  196. Seeing with a fresh pair of ears
  197. Set.insert or set.add?
  198. Shameful Names
  199. Shells, Logs and Pipes
  200. Singly Linked Lists in C++
  201. Smart Pointers, Dumb Programmers. A note describing how a smart pointer tripped me up.
  202. So many feeds, so little news. So many feeds, so little news. A reflection on internet consumption.
  203. Soft Documentation. A software developer's investigation into documentation tools.
  204. Software development checklist += 3
  205. Sounds of the Tokyo Metro
  206. Source open, problem closed. An example of the open source advantage.
  207. Space sensitive programming
  208. Spam, Typo, Subversion Logs
  209. Spolsky podcast causes exercise bike incident
  210. Steady on Subversion. Despite the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems, I'm sticking with Subversion. Here's why.
  211. Steganography made simple
  212. 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.
  213. String literals and regular expressions. An article about string literals, escape sequences, regular expressions, and the problems encountered when mixing these together.
  214. Subversion 1.4
  215. Sugar Pie. Approximating pi by scattering sugar.
  216. 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.
  217. svn help patch
  218. Synchronising Workspaces
  219. Syntactic Sugar
  220. tag.wordaligned.org
  221. Takewhile drops one
  222. Tell me about … Virtualization. An attempt to describe virtualization, why it's useful, and when to consider using it.
  223. Test driven development in Python
  224. The case against TODO. A neat label for work in progress or an easy way to disguise the flaws in a codebase?
  225. The Etch-A-Sketch User Interface
  226. The Granny—Stroustrup Scale
  227. The Heroic Programmer
  228. 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.
  229. The Maximum Sum contiguous subsequence problem. A stream-based solution to a classic computer science problem.
  230. The Price of Coffee. Offering something for nothing and getting paid nothing for it. Leap day ramblings.
  231. The Rings of Saturn
  232. The Third Rule of Program Optimisation
  233. The Trouble with Version Numbers
  234. There’s no escape??!
  235. Think, quote, escape
  236. Tony Hoare’s vision, car crashes, and Alan Turing. The highs and lows of Europython 2009. A personal review.
  237. 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?
  238. Top Ten Percent. The most efficient way to sort the top 10% of a collection.
  239. Top Ten Tags. Choosing the right algorithm to select the N largest items from a collection.
  240. Trac — not just a pretty interface
  241. Tracing function calls using Python decorators. Developing code to trace function calls using Python decorators.
  242. Turing Tests and Train Trackers
  243. Two star programming
  244. Undogfooding
  245. Version Control for Third Party Software
  246. What apple gets right
  247. What’s in the box?
  248. When computer applications reside on the web
  249. When web search results get read out of context
  250. When you comment on a comment
  251. White black knight then black white knight. Yet more on drawing chessboards
  252. Why Python programmers should learn Python
  253. Why Software Development isn’t Like Construction. What’s the best metaphor for software development? Steve McConnell prefers “construction”. I disagree.
  254. Wiki Markup. Wikis often invent their own markup syntax. A note on why I favour Markdown.
  255. 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.
  256. Zippy triples served with Python. How do you generate previous, this, next, triples from a collection. A stream-based solution in Python.