I logged into freenode, which I haven't logged into in a while, to help stop some trolling on #bittorrent. I couldn't identify as my nick any more, so I went to ask for help...

when did you register it?

uh, circa 2000
  the current registration is a little over 6 months old - if you did register it in 2000 it must have expired since

so someone ( Read more... )

Threading in web forums isn't hard to get right, but it continues to be done right approximately nowhere. In the interests of helping to improve the situation, I will now explain the right way to do things ( Read more... )

Here are my preliminary thoughts on the Go programming language ( Read more... )

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This is my 'Dual Rings' puzzle, the result of a bizarre collaboration between myself and Oskar where I came up with a completely abstract puzzle and he came up with an unexpected mechanism for it. It's going on the market produced by Hanayama now, and there are a few copies you can buy immediately (see video info for details).

Thanks to google search suggestions, here's the list of life's most pressing existential questions ( Read more... )

This post unintentionally demonstrates that functional-style Python is ugly and bad.

Let us start at the top. At the beginning, it has some sample code which defines a multiple() function, which could be trivially inlined, resulting in code which looks like this (I'm doing all examples in Python 3):

print(sum(x for x in range(1, 1000+1) if x % 3 ( Read more... )

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions for my problems with print yesterday. It turns out that print isn't even vaguely threadsafe, and that the rather surprising behavior when there's a collision is for there to be duplicate output bytes. So if you ever see duplicate print lines, you know what to guess it is now ( Read more... )

I have a very multithreaded Python3 app I'm running which I have a whole bunch of calls to print() in. I don't generally do multithreading, but this is spinning up a whole bunch of servers to check if they're working right. I have another test which is non-multithreaded and reproducible, and will of course have another test of actually running ( Read more... )

Writing a Sudoku solver is a slightly tricky but reasonably straightforward problem. Here I'll present a non-obvious way of implementing it which is short in terms of lines of code and also much easier to modify and extend than the more direct approaches. The general technique is applicable to a very wide range of problems, so hopefully someone ( Read more... )

Security people tend to think that we live in a secure world, one in which everyone is constantly auditing the behavior of everyone else, and the end result is widespread mutually ensured honesty. We don't even vaguely live in that world. We live in a trusting world, where most people are mostly good, and the need for auditing is much lower than it ( Read more... )