All articles, newest first
Priority queues in Python Binary search gets a sort key On Exactitude in Programming Python maths updates Fearless Debugging Complex numbers for planar geometry Cryptic Message Dr G’s Award Winning Puzzles Aligning the first line of a triple-quoted string in Python Python Counters @PyDiff Metaphormers Creating a dict of lists in Python TIMTOWTDI vs TSBO-APOO-OWTDI DDD Wales, 2018 Perec @IgniteSwansea #3 Bugwards Compatible Meetup? Turn Up! Advent of Code 2017 Computer World SwanseaCon 2017 Pay rise please Follow me follow me Unleash the test army Lazy sequences working hard Slicing a list evenly with Python Agile at a distance 👍 From bytes to strings in Python and back again 24 Puzzles Unit Tests Questioned: Reading List Unit Tests Questioned A language people use and bitch about Negative Sequence Indices in Python Python Streams vs Unix Pipes Productivity++ != Better Go! Steady. Ready? 8 Queens Puzzle++ 8 Queens Puzzle Easy as Py Sausages, sausages, sausages - slice, slice, slice Gofmt knows best Sledgehammers vs Nut Crackers Advent of Code Code Reviews - the rules Programming Paired and Shared Jokey Code? Election Manifesto - a timely activity for agile retrospectives Speaking at the ACCU Conference 2015 2147483647 Lessons from the OuLiPo . All about a talk I'll be giving at ACCU 2015Why zip when you can map? Find the average of a collection of tuples or dicts using Python Group When Word Aligned, hosted by Github Go for short variable names You wait all day for a bus… Reverse, Esrever Clown, Flee, Jump Angle brackets hurt my eyes “Solutions” ACCU 2013 An Exploration of the Phenomenology of Software Development Patience Sorted Hosting for Life? TextDrive revived! More adventures in C++ Singly Linked Lists in C++ Folded files and rainbow code C++ Concurrency in Action . A glowing review of Anthony Williams' book on C++11's support for concurrencyPython’s lesser known loop control Two star programming ACCU Bristol and Bath Life goes on Life on Canvas Desktop preferences Knuth visited, Brains Limited Set.insert or set.add? Define pedantic Hiding iterator boilerplate behind a Boost facade Equality and Equivalence Binary search revisited Man or man(1)? Binary search returns … ? Think, quote, escape Beware the March of IDEs! Pi seconds is a nanocentury Bike charts by Google . Using the google chart API for something ... differentWhen you comment on a comment Power programming . What makes a language powerful? The programmer!Python, Surprise me! Next permutation: When C++ gets it right . An investigation into a classic algorithm for generating the distinct permutations of a sequence in lexicographical order.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.Steady on Subversion . Despite the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems, I'm sticking with Subversion. Here's why.Favicon . Why my favicon is a jigsaw piece.Code Rot . What happens when we stop tending to our code? It decays. This article investigates why.A useful octal escape sequence Converting integer literals in C++ and Python Inner, Outer, Shake it all abouter . Encapsulation is about allocating responsibility and easing utility rather than protecting data.Blackmail made easy using Python counters . A programming puzzle and a discussion of Python's evolution.Could OCR conquer the calligraphylion? A note on the challenge which Arabic script sets for optical character recognition engines.Undogfooding Tony Hoare’s vision, car crashes, and Alan Turing . The highs and lows of Europython 2009. A personal review.Partitioning with Python Oulipo and the Eodermdrome challenge . The word EODERMDROME is itself an eodermdrome. Can you find any others?Run-length encoding in Python DEFLATE: run-length encoding, but better . An investigation into the extended run-length encoder at the heart of the Zlib compression library.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.Generic documentation The Rings of Saturn Software development checklist += 3 Review: Expert Python Programming 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.OCR. Wrong characters, right meaning! (chuckles) . When OCR gets the characters wrong but the meaning right.Good maths, bad computers 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.Ordered sublists. A brute force approach . A brute force solution to the longest increasing subsequence problem.A race within a race Maximum of an empty sequence? Emoticrab invasion, CSS breakdown . CSS positioning doesn't always work in a Feed reader.Spolsky podcast causes exercise bike incident comp.lang.name? Python was named after a comedy troupe. This note discusses what makes a good name for a computer language.Could a Python eat an elephant? Seamless sequence output in Python 3.0 Tell me about … Virtualization . An attempt to describe virtualization, why it's useful, and when to consider using it.Perl 6, Python 3 Steganography made simple What’s in the box? A Little Teaser. Keen Eyes? You’ll See! Follow the clues to reveal the hidden message.Books, blogs, comments and code samples 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.Negative, Captain Driving down the road of innovation 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.BIG G little g - What begins with G? Capitalisation: Google or google?Removing duplicates using itertools.groupby . An interpreted Python session showing itertools in action.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.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.Life, user manuals, recursive pictures Looping forever and ever Syntactic Sugar Macros with halos Entertaining Documentation iBlame Exchange Distorted Software . What does software look like? This article suggests that architecture diagrams get the emphasis wrong.tag.wordaligned.org Rewriting String.Left() Me, Myself and OpenID . Setting up a personal OpenID server using phpMyIDNonce Sense . CryptographyFixing header file dependencies . A simple script to check header files are self containedRunning Sums in Python . A Python program to generate the running sum of a series.Eurovision 2008 charts Curling for web sites . A script using curl and bash to detect when a website status changes.Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way . Listen when your compiler grumbles, but sometimes you should ignore its suggestions.Accidental Emacs . A list of Emacs modes and tricks I use all the time but discovered by accident.Scatter pictures with Google Charts Takewhile drops one 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.Hunting down globals with nm Programming Nirvana, Plan B . Simon Peyton Jones discusses functional programming, Haskell, and promotes a radical route to programming Nirvana at ACCU 2008.Fun with Erlang, ACCU 2008 White black knight then black white knight . Yet more on drawing chessboardsDrawing Chess Positions . A follow-up article on scripting graphics.Ima Lumberjack, (s)he’s OK . Gender-neutral technical writing using fictional names.Drawing Chessboards . An article about creating graphics programmatically.Tracing function calls using Python decorators . Developing code to trace function calls using Python decorators.Sugar Pie . Approximating pi by scattering sugar.The Price of Coffee . Offering something for nothing and getting paid nothing for it. Leap day ramblings.Top Ten Percent . The most efficient way to sort the top 10% of a collection.Top Ten Tags . Choosing the right algorithm to select the N largest items from a collection.No www, yes comments, no categories Lexical Dispatch in Python . Dispatching to functions based on their namesEssential 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.Attack of the Alien Asterisks . Unusual font rendering on WindowsFrom Hash Key to Haskell . A note on keys, characters, smileys, digraphs and Haskell.Erlang Erlang . A parallel processing problem.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.ACCU Conference 2008 . A preview of ACCU 2008.File shifting using lftp and rsync . Sometimes it's easier to shift files using the command line, rather than a GUI.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?Maybe we live in a scripting universe . Comments on Larry Wall's 11th State of the Onion address.The Maximum Sum contiguous subsequence problem . A stream-based solution to a classic computer science problem.So many feeds, so little news . So many feeds, so little news. A reflection on internet consumption.Elegance and Efficiency . Must elegant code be efficient? This article investigates.Not my links Ever wish you’d branched first? A short article describing how to branch a Subversion working copy based on the development trunk.Zippy triples served with Python . How do you generate previous, this, next, triples from a collection. A stream-based solution in Python.Paging through the Manual using Access Keys Anti-Social Build Orders . An article advocating zero-tolerance for anti-social build offences.Metablog . Reflections on 14 months of blogging, and why I'm no longer using Typo.RTM vs STW Seeing with a fresh pair of ears Reversing Hofstadter’s Law Lock but don’t but Mistargeted ads svn help patch Big City Skyline Puzzle . Comments on a novel computer science puzzle. When machine resources are scarce, a compiled language offers precise control.Ongoing Peer Review Paralipsis Fixed Wheels and Simple Designs A yen for more symbols PyCon UK: statistics, pictures and perennial problems Pitching Python in three syllables What apple gets right The Granny—Stroustrup Scale 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?Shameful Names 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.Collaborative documentation tools Space sensitive programming How green you are When web search results get read out of context A world without version control In, on and out of boxes Pragmatic fashion Robot wars The Third Rule of Program Optimisation Why Python programmers should learn Python Source open, problem closed . An example of the open source advantage.How many restarts? Evolving Python in and for the real world Turing Tests and Train Trackers Feeding an internet addiction Oberon, Cromarty, Lisa, Waggledance, Ariel Introducing Java Perlish Wisdom Awesome presentations Google Reader PyCon UK The Heroic Programmer An ideal working environment The Trouble with Version Numbers High altitude programming Python keyword workaround Charming Python Why Software Development isn’t Like Construction . What’s the best metaphor for software development? Steve McConnell prefers “construction”. I disagree.Shells, Logs and Pipes Drawing Software Designs Test driven development in Python Mixing Python and C++ Release then Test bin2hex.py Code completion for dynamic languages Casualties in the great computer shootout . An investigation into various dimensions of some speed benchmark programs.A tale of two upgrades One svnserve, multiple repositories Happy Mac Retro-fitting coding standards fold left, right Code Craft Narrow Python Trac — not just a pretty interface 1, 6, 21, 107, … ? Martin Fowler on Soft Documentation Printed C++ Journals Review of Pete Becker’s TR1 Book Synchronising Workspaces Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set Permission and Forgiveness Different Angles on Legacy Code Wiki Markup . Wikis often invent their own markup syntax. A note on why I favour Markdown.Functional Programming “Aha!” Moments Spam, Typo, Subversion Logs Internal Subversion Externals Lenient Browsers and Wobbly Tables My First Typo Sidebar Smart Pointers, Dumb Programmers . A note describing how a smart pointer tripped me up.The Etch-A-Sketch User Interface Joined Output and the Fencepost Problem . Items and the spaces between them: some notes on the fencepost problem and joining up strings.When computer applications reside on the web Computer Language Complexity Complacency in the computer industry 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.Personal overnight builds Soft Documentation . A software developer's investigation into documentation tools.From CVS to Subversion Pcl-cvs and Psvn Incompatibilities Sounds of the Tokyo Metro Subversion 1.4 Look and Say Numbers Polyominoes Browsing Python Documentation using the Python Sidebar From __future__ import braces Python 2.5 Friday Puzzles Version Control for Third Party Software Overload Online Personal version control String literals and regular expressions . An article about string literals, escape sequences, regular expressions, and the problems encountered when mixing these together.There’s no escape??! Parsing C++ Py2exe Ignoring .svn directories Are List Comprehensions the Wrong Way Round? How to Mirror a Subversion Repository Message to Self. What’s this? Octal Literals A Subversion Pre-Commit Hook . How to install and test a simple Subversion pre-commit hook script.Creating a Temporary Subversion Repository Binary Literals Readable Code Keyword Substitution - Just say No! map, filter, accumulate, lambda Saving changes to read-only files Google Mail holiday auto-responder A Python syntax highlighter Generating solutions to the 8 Queens Puzzle My (Test) First Ruby Program Getting started with Typo Posting from the command line using mtsend Built in Type Safety? The case against TODO . A neat label for work in progress or an easy way to disguise the flaws in a codebase?Metaprogramming is Your Friend . An investigation into metaprogramming techniques used by lazy C, C++, Lisp and Python programmers.A Mini-Project to Decode a Mini-Language Code in Comments . Don't comment out dead code, delete it!Brackets Off! Thoughts on operator precedence.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
