After a couple of weekends of hard work on free software recently, I was feeling pretty tired, and decided to dedicate the weekend just past to intensive rest and catching up on my sleep.

It turns out that if I really try hard to catch up on sleep, and succeed, then I become noticeably more caffeine-sensitive. I drank the same amount of coffee ( Read more... )

This weekend, after preparation and faff lasting several months, I migrated all of my free software projects out of Subversion into a collection of git repositories.

Good grief, it was a faff! It's surprisingly like moving house - there's no end of just-one-more-things that all have to be sorted out, and every so often you turn a corner and find ( Read more... )

At work the other day a fellow developer and I were discussing incomplete array types in C, and at one point in the conversation he referred to them using a phrase which gave me a perfect opportunity to reply ‘Arrays of Unspecified Size? I don't think they exist.’ Sadly, I got a blank look.

And today at lunchtime there was a silly conversation about ( Read more... )

A random childhood memory of mine is of being about 10, and wondering what my life would look like when I was grown up and didn't live with my parents1 any more.

At that age, a thing I was enjoying doing in my spare time was making cardboard models of polyhedra. And I remember having the thought that once I was a grown-up, perhaps I might still feel ( Read more... )

I was in the kitchen just now, humming to myself as I peeled an avocado.

I don't really know how to peel avocados without getting tasty green goo all over my fingers. So when I'd finished, I licked it off. In the process, in a feat of staggering clumsiness, I managed to (not very painfully) bite my own thumb.

I felt a bit silly about that. But then I ( Read more... )

It occurred to me last week to wonder: in organisations that predominantly do development in Python, do the managers talk endlessly about having to get all their vaguely duck-shaped objects in a row?

Also at Dreamwidth. (
( Read more... )

Since I made my adages post last year, I've had a few afterthoughts, so here's a second instalment of things I seem to find myself saying a lot.
( seven more short pontifications )

Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous entry with proofs, software and other useful comments. I think I've now taken the investigation of this problem as far as I have the energy to, at least for the moment. A collection of all the useful things I know about it, including a big pile of data, is now up on a web page: http://www.chiark. ( Read more... )

Here's a mathematical sort of question that occurred to me last year. I've been pondering it off and on ever since, but not reached any useful conclusions; and I just came across my file of notes on it, and thought perhaps I should post it somewhere for other people to ponder as well.
( cutting up sticks and reassembling them )

A few months ago I was talking to a friend who was intending to learn C, having previously only worked with higher-level languages. We had a conversation about the assorted (and mostly painful) culture shocks that C is liable to deliver to someone whose previous experience of programming is rather less user-hostile, and afterwards I thought, hmm, ( Read more... )