I have been trying out Django on my mac, working through the Djanjo Book tutorial. One thing that puzzled me is that I was not seeing the promised “pretty error pages”. Django is supposed to show very informative, nicely formatted error messages. Not happening for me. I eventually discovered that the problem has something to [...]
Archives for March 2008
x + x = 2x
This post is the second in a series. The first is here. The plan for this post is to introduce just enough notation to define some functions in the Mathematica language, and then use Mathematica to solve a not-entirely-trivial problem. The central idiom in functional programming is applying a function f to an argument x. [...]
The unknown functional language
Functional languages are experiencing something of a renaissance, or so I gather from reading reddit and the blogs. I have been known to dabble in lisp, erlang, and haskell. Each is beautiful language in its own way. But when I actually want to get something done, not just play, I turn to either python or [...]
OOP in erlang
I read this quote on the blog of Isaiah Perumalla, in the post called My Journey to Smalltalk: “OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this [...]
dynamic virtual terminal manager
The more I work with computers, the more I appreciate working entirely in text. You know, in that old dinosaur, the shell, the terminal, the console, the command line. Every console fan already knows about GNU Screen. I just tried another great tool, dvtm, and am totally impressed. What is dvtm? Here is what the [...]
The Atari ST remembered
A blast from the past: the building of the Atari ST. I had one, and still fondly remember its monochrome bit mapped screen. The ST character set included an Easter egg of sorts, four characters that (properly combined) depicted the smiling face of J. R. Bob Dobbs.
operations as a competitive advantage
Good article on operations as a competitive advantage. Here’s a quote: The example above is the tale of two Web 2.0 startups scaling to 20 systems during their first three months. The first team starts writing software and installing systems as they go, waiting to deal with the “ops stuff” until they have an “ops [...]
Happy Birthday to xmonad
Happy Birthday to xmonad. One year old today.
ReadyNAS power supply
We have an Infrant ReadyNAS NV at work, and it recently died. Rather, its power supply died. It proved to be all but impossible to buy a new power supply for this thing. Hoping to find a clue, I checked the ReadyNAS forums, and found this thread. It turns out a series of these devices, [...]
Euler 100
Euler Project problems can be addictive. This one gave me fits. If a box contains twenty-one coloured discs, composed of fifteen blue discs and six red discs, and two discs were taken at random, it can be seen that the probability of taking two blue discs, P(BB) = (15/21)×(14/20) = 1/2. The next such arrangement, [...]
Posts