I'm currently in the middle of two weeks off work. During this time I'm trying to get a few long-standing chores done, and a few things mail-ordered while I'm conveniently in to receive the deliveries. And it occurred to me today that more or less everything on that list of chore-type activities has unexpectedly turned out to begin with B.

I've mail ( Read more... )

It's increasingly occurred to me, as I get older and crustier, that I find myself saying things to people that I've said a number of times before.

Some of them are well known adages or observations, of course, but others are things that I wasn't previously aware of, or put together from several other pieces, and they've gradually become a sort of ( Read more... )

Here's a thing I was pondering the other day about lexing.

Suppose you have a language containing two moderately common lexical features: a comment mechanism in which comments are newline-terminated (C++/C99 style //, shell #), and a line-splicing mechanism in which a backslash at the end of a line causes the next line to be glued on to it as if ( Read more... )

Inspired by completely mistaking the meaning of a class name this week ...

View poll: Hey, I ordered a cheeseburger

Also at Dreamwidth. (
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Hmmm. This morning I looked at my watch and discovered that it was reading a completely random time of day. It's also lost its ability to sync with the MSF radio signal from Rugby, and for good measure it's forgotten its settings too (particularly the vital ‘don't go beep all the time’).

Now those could all be consequences of a low battery, possibly ( Read more... )

This morning I noticed a sort of ‘natural pun’ between maths and software. I suspect about three people will get it, but I'll say it anyway because it's too good to lose.

The Schröder-Bernstein theorem states that given injections from a set A to a set B and from B to A, you can find a bijection between A and B. There's a well known construction ( Read more... )

Almost four years ago I had a silly idea, and used Graphviz to generate a Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table, under the partial order with which any sensible ranking of medal counts (irrespective of the country producing them) must agree no matter what relative importance it assigns to gold, silver and bronze.

I had an email from the New ( Read more... )

This morning I tried to return a phone call. I managed to dial the wrong number three times at widely separated intervals, and (I later worked out) on all three occasions I transposed the same pair of adjacent digits. And despite carefully cross-checking between the number shown on the display of my phone, the number on the email (my employer's ( Read more... )

Today I got out needle and thread and made a new strap for my watch.

My diary archives tell me that it was on 4th July 1998 when I last did this. I had been advised by a doctor that wearing a watch constricting my wrist might have been contributing to the wrist pains I had at the time, and after trying various other solutions (e.g. things that weren ( Read more... )