I've been doing some work with Wordpress off and on for the last couple of weeks - migrating a site that uses a custom CMS onto a Wordpress installation - and a couple of times I've run into the following vexing problem when setting up a local Wordpress installation for testing. I couldn't find anything about it on the web, and it took me several ( Read more... )

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but what the hell.

1. Start tracking my weight and calorie intake again, and get my weight back down to a level where I'm comfortable. This morning it was 12st 1.9 - not terribly high in the scheme of things, but it's almost as high as it was when I first started dieting (though I think a bit more of ( Read more... )

I've been writing some Perl code recently, and a couple of ideas have occurred to me.

1. Closures are great when you have several behaviours which can all vary independently; objects are great when you have several behaviours that must all vary in sync with one another. Put another way: if your problem is combinatorial explosion of objects, try using ( Read more... )

Man, maintaining our Makefiles by hand really sucks. I think I'm going to write a Makefile generator. Do you think that's a good idea?

Certainly not! Go and wash your computer out with soap.

But then my computer will be ruined, and I won't be able to code!

Yes. That's the idea.

I've been doing Stanford's online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning courses. Both have their good points and bad points: here are my comments so far.

[The Introduction to Databases course looks interesting too, but I only have a finite number of hours in the day ( Read more... )

Previously on posts tagged with 'angst' (mostly friendslocked): our hero became depressed, sought help, and is now (mostly) feeling better. Now read on...

John Walker, in his excellent book The Hacker's Diet, distinguishes two approaches to tackling problems, which he calls the Manager's approach and the Engineer's approach. Management is about ( Read more... )

In the coffee room yesterday with michiexile, who has just started a postdoc in cloud-scale computational algebra:michiexile: ... so we thought "that sounds like a nice simple example, let's see if we can replicate their experimental results computationally". So we tried it, and ran out of memory. So we added more memory -
pozorvlak: - and ran out of some other system resource ( Read more... )

[This is a followup to Teaching our kids to codeWhen I say that I yearn for a mass-algorate society, I don't mean a society in which everyone has the level of knowledge of today's professional programmers. We live in a mass-literate society, but we don't expect everyone to be able to write novels or sonnets or in-depth analyses of the politics of ( Read more... )

There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand signatures at the time of writing. I think this issue is much more important than that ( Read more... )

In a world where Smile, Chinese Democracy, Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6 have all actually been released, what archetype are we meant to use for an over-ambitious, never-to-be-completed project? And what did people use before those projects started? What do people who don't know about computers or rock music use ( Read more... )