As of this afternoon, I have the keys to my new (temporary) residence in Observatory. It has two spare bedrooms, so if you want to visit me in Cape Town, do it before the end of January. :-)

I have been playing with Project Euler quite a bit recently. It's a fun little project where they give you a bunch of short mathematical programming problems ( Read more... )

I wrote a satisfying amount of Python this weekend. I am currently in the throes of rewriting bits of my website backend, and one of the things I'm replacing is the syntax highlighting code. The present system shells out to vim and munges the HTML it gets back into a useful form. The new plan is to use pygments, a python syntax highlighting library ( Read more... )

I recently had occasion to refactor a bunch of bash scripts, and one of the problems was that certain loop constructs were cropping up a lot. A quick search didn't turn up a way to do higher order functions in bash, so I (re)invented one:

higher_order() {
# some code
eval "$1"
# some more code
}The eval evaluates the code passed as a ( Read more... )

Remember that Erlang tutorial I wrote? Well, I entered it in a blogging competition. And I won!

Today, I needed to get some information out of my Amazon AWS usage report. (Bandwidth usage, in this case.) I wanted pretty output in gigs (usage is measured and reported in bytes) and I didn't want any of the extraneous stuff. Since AWS helpfully provides a CSV, I wrote a cunning little Python one-liner to extract it:

python -c 'print "\n". ( Read more... )

I recently had cause to go delving into the documentation for Ruby's open() method. While I found the information I needed fairly quickly, I was appalled to discover that open() will happily open a pipe to a subprocess (if the path parameter starts with "|") and even fork your app (if the path parameter is ( Read more... )

In the spirit of Karnaugh's recent blog post about RTFM and GIYF, I am posting the solution to a problem I had at work today ( Read more... )

I spent a large part of today sitting in bed with the laptop playing with Erlang. The result can be seen on my websiteIt took a few iterations to get this far, and the experience was incredibly enlightening. When I have time and my brain isn't so tired (tomorrow, perhaps) I'll write up a proper tutorial running through the same steps my vaguely ( Read more... )

This post is some Linux geekery inspired by a problem a coworker solved today ( Read more... )

Taken verbatim from an email I sent to a programmer's mailing list I'm on:

I have decided that the only way for me to finally get around to ( Read more... )