All articles, newest first

  1. A language people use and bitch about
  2. Negative Sequence Indices in Python
  3. Python Streams vs Unix Pipes
  4. Productivity++ != Better
  5. Go! Steady. Ready?
  6. 8 Queens Puzzle++
  7. 8 Queens Puzzle
  8. Easy as Py
  9. Sausages, sausages, sausages - slice, slice, slice
  10. Gofmt knows best
  11. Sledgehammers vs Nut Crackers
  12. Advent of Code
  13. Code Reviews - the rules
  14. Programming Paired and Shared
  15. Jokey Code?
  16. Election Manifesto - a timely activity for agile retrospectives
  17. Speaking at the ACCU Conference 2015
  18. 2147483647
  19. Lessons from the OuLiPo. All about a talk I'll be giving at ACCU 2015
  20. Why zip when you can map?
  21. Find the average of a collection of tuples or dicts using Python
  22. Group When
  23. Word Aligned, hosted by Github
  24. Go for short variable names
  25. You wait all day for a bus…
  26. Reverse, Esrever
  27. Clown, Flee, Jump
  28. Angle brackets hurt my eyes
  29. “Solutions”
  30. ACCU 2013
  31. An Exploration of the Phenomenology of Software Development
  32. Patience Sorted
  33. Hosting for Life? TextDrive revived!
  34. More adventures in C++
  35. Singly Linked Lists in C++
  36. Folded files and rainbow code
  37. C++ Concurrency in Action. A glowing review of Anthony Williams' book on C++11's support for concurrency
  38. Python’s lesser known loop control
  39. Two star programming
  40. ACCU Bristol and Bath
  41. Life goes on
  42. Life on Canvas
  43. Desktop preferences
  44. Knuth visited, Brains Limited
  45. Set.insert or set.add?
  46. Define pedantic
  47. Hiding iterator boilerplate behind a Boost facade
  48. Equality and Equivalence
  49. Binary search revisited
  50. Man or man(1)?
  51. Binary search returns … ?
  52. Think, quote, escape
  53. Beware the March of IDEs!
  54. Pi seconds is a nanocentury
  55. Bike charts by Google. Using the google chart API for something ... different
  56. When you comment on a comment
  57. Power programming. What makes a language powerful? The programmer!
  58. Python, Surprise me!
  59. Next permutation: When C++ gets it right. An investigation into a classic algorithm for generating the distinct permutations of a sequence in lexicographical order.
  60. Python on Ice. A review of the Python 2, Python 3 language fork. Python 3 has met with some resistance. A moratorium on further changes to the language is being imposed, to smooth the transition.
  61. Steady on Subversion. Despite the increasing popularity of distributed version control systems, I'm sticking with Subversion. Here's why.
  62. Favicon. Why my favicon is a jigsaw piece.
  63. Code Rot. What happens when we stop tending to our code? It decays. This article investigates why.
  64. A useful octal escape sequence
  65. Converting integer literals in C++ and Python
  66. Inner, Outer, Shake it all abouter. Encapsulation is about allocating responsibility and easing utility rather than protecting data.
  67. Blackmail made easy using Python counters. A programming puzzle and a discussion of Python's evolution.
  68. Could OCR conquer the calligraphylion? A note on the challenge which Arabic script sets for optical character recognition engines.
  69. Undogfooding
  70. Tony Hoare’s vision, car crashes, and Alan Turing. The highs and lows of Europython 2009. A personal review.
  71. Partitioning with Python
  72. Oulipo and the Eodermdrome challenge. The word EODERMDROME is itself an eodermdrome. Can you find any others?
  73. Run-length encoding in Python
  74. DEFLATE: run-length encoding, but better. An investigation into the extended run-length encoder at the heart of the Zlib compression library.
  75. Copy, load, redirect and tee using C++ streambufs. The C++ iostream library separates formatting from lower level read/write operations. This article shows how to use C++ stream buffers to copy, load, redirect and tee streams.
  76. Generic documentation
  77. The Rings of Saturn
  78. Software development checklist += 3
  79. Review: Expert Python Programming
  80. Patience sort and the Longest increasing subsequence. How a simple card game provides an efficient algorithm for finding the longest increasing subsequence of a given sequence.
  81. OCR. Wrong characters, right meaning! (chuckles). When OCR gets the characters wrong but the meaning right.
  82. Good maths, bad computers
  83. Longest common subsequence. An investigation into the classic computer science problem of calculating the longest common subsequence of two sequences, and its relationship to the edit distance and longest increasing subsequence problems.
  84. Ordered sublists. A brute force approach. A brute force solution to the longest increasing subsequence problem.
  85. A race within a race
  86. Maximum of an empty sequence?
  87. Emoticrab invasion, CSS breakdown. CSS positioning doesn't always work in a Feed reader.
  88. Spolsky podcast causes exercise bike incident
  89. comp.lang.name? Python was named after a comedy troupe. This note discusses what makes a good name for a computer language.
  90. Could a Python eat an elephant?
  91. Seamless sequence output in Python 3.0
  92. Tell me about … Virtualization. An attempt to describe virtualization, why it's useful, and when to consider using it.
  93. Perl 6, Python 3
  94. Steganography made simple
  95. What’s in the box?
  96. A Little Teaser. Keen Eyes? You’ll See! Follow the clues to reveal the hidden message.
  97. Books, blogs, comments and code samples
  98. Your computer might be at risk. A hard drive failed this weekend. Guess what, it hadn't been backed up. Here's how I went about recovering the data, and some thoughts on the future of computing in general and operating systems in particular.
  99. Negative, Captain
  100. Driving down the road of innovation
  101. Sums and sums of squares in C++. Reduce is a higher order function which applies a another function repeatedly to a collection of values, accumulating the result. Well known to functional programmers, reduce is also a standard C++ algorithm.
  102. BIG G little g - What begins with G? Capitalisation: Google or google?
  103. Removing duplicates using itertools.groupby. An interpreted Python session showing itertools in action.
  104. Merging sorted streams in Python. Did you know that Python's for loops can have an else clause? Here's how it can be used in a stream-merging function.
  105. Launching missiles and other unhappy accidents. Launching a missile is an example of a dangerous programming side-effect. Bus accidents are used to motivate team-work.
  106. Life, user manuals, recursive pictures
  107. Looping forever and ever
  108. Syntactic Sugar
  109. Macros with halos
  110. Entertaining Documentation
  111. iBlame Exchange
  112. Distorted Software. What does software look like? This article suggests that architecture diagrams get the emphasis wrong.
  113. tag.wordaligned.org
  114. Rewriting String.Left()
  115. Me, Myself and OpenID. Setting up a personal OpenID server using phpMyID
  116. Nonce Sense. Cryptography
  117. Fixing header file dependencies. A simple script to check header files are self contained
  118. Running Sums in Python. A Python program to generate the running sum of a series.
  119. Eurovision 2008 charts
  120. Curling for web sites. A script using curl and bash to detect when a website status changes.
  121. Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way. Listen when your compiler grumbles, but sometimes you should ignore its suggestions.
  122. Accidental Emacs. A list of Emacs modes and tricks I use all the time but discovered by accident.
  123. Scatter pictures with Google Charts
  124. Takewhile drops one
  125. Stop the clock, squash the bug. Which is better, a clock which loses a minute a day or one which is stopped? An investigation into how we find and fix software defects.
  126. Hunting down globals with nm
  127. Programming Nirvana, Plan B. Simon Peyton Jones discusses functional programming, Haskell, and promotes a radical route to programming Nirvana at ACCU 2008.
  128. Fun with Erlang, ACCU 2008
  129. White black knight then black white knight. Yet more on drawing chessboards
  130. Drawing Chess Positions. A follow-up article on scripting graphics.
  131. Ima Lumberjack, (s)he’s OK. Gender-neutral technical writing using fictional names.
  132. Drawing Chessboards. An article about creating graphics programmatically.
  133. Tracing function calls using Python decorators. Developing code to trace function calls using Python decorators.
  134. Sugar Pie. Approximating pi by scattering sugar.
  135. The Price of Coffee. Offering something for nothing and getting paid nothing for it. Leap day ramblings.
  136. Top Ten Percent. The most efficient way to sort the top 10% of a collection.
  137. Top Ten Tags. Choosing the right algorithm to select the N largest items from a collection.
  138. No www, yes comments, no categories
  139. Lexical Dispatch in Python. Dispatching to functions based on their names
  140. Essential Python Reading List. An essential Python reading list. I've ordered the items so you can pause or stop reading at any point: at every stage you'll have learned about as much possible about Python for the effort you've put in.
  141. Attack of the Alien Asterisks. Unusual font rendering on Windows
  142. From Hash Key to Haskell. A note on keys, characters, smileys, digraphs and Haskell.
  143. Erlang Erlang. A parallel processing problem.
  144. Animated pair streams. Another look at the functional programming problem of generating an infinite sequence of pairs. An example of using the Python Imaging Library to generate an animated GIF.
  145. ACCU Conference 2008. A preview of ACCU 2008.
  146. File shifting using lftp and rsync. Sometimes it's easier to shift files using the command line, rather than a GUI.
  147. Too big or too clever? Steve Yegge says that, for large applications, size is an enemy best controlled by dynamic languages. Alex Martelli says a language can be too dynamic for a large application. Who's right?
  148. Maybe we live in a scripting universe. Comments on Larry Wall's 11th State of the Onion address.
  149. The Maximum Sum contiguous subsequence problem. A stream-based solution to a classic computer science problem.
  150. So many feeds, so little news. So many feeds, so little news. A reflection on internet consumption.
  151. Elegance and Efficiency. Must elegant code be efficient? This article investigates.
  152. Not my links
  153. Ever wish you’d branched first? A short article describing how to branch a Subversion working copy based on the development trunk.
  154. Zippy triples served with Python. How do you generate previous, this, next, triples from a collection. A stream-based solution in Python.
  155. Paging through the Manual using Access Keys
  156. Anti-Social Build Orders. An article advocating zero-tolerance for anti-social build offences.
  157. Metablog. Reflections on 14 months of blogging, and why I'm no longer using Typo.
  158. RTM vs STW
  159. Seeing with a fresh pair of ears
  160. Reversing Hofstadter’s Law
  161. Lock but don’t but
  162. Mistargeted ads
  163. svn help patch
  164. Big City Skyline Puzzle. Comments on a novel computer science puzzle. When machine resources are scarce, a compiled language offers precise control.
  165. Ongoing Peer Review
  166. Paralipsis
  167. Fixed Wheels and Simple Designs
  168. A yen for more symbols
  169. PyCon UK: statistics, pictures and perennial problems
  170. Pitching Python in three syllables
  171. What apple gets right
  172. The Granny—Stroustrup Scale
  173. Koenig’s first rule of debugging. The problems caused by the C++ compilation model, dependencies and cryptic compile diagnostics. If an expert like Andrew Koenig can’t get it right, what hope for the rest of us?
  174. Shameful Names
  175. He Sells Shell Scripts to Intersect Sets. The Unix command shell contains a lot of what I like in a programming environment: it’s dynamic, high-level, interpreted, flexible, succinct. This article shows the Unix tools in action.
  176. Collaborative documentation tools
  177. Space sensitive programming
  178. How green you are
  179. When web search results get read out of context
  180. A world without version control
  181. In, on and out of boxes
  182. Pragmatic fashion
  183. Robot wars
  184. The Third Rule of Program Optimisation
  185. Why Python programmers should learn Python
  186. Source open, problem closed. An example of the open source advantage.
  187. How many restarts?
  188. Evolving Python in and for the real world
  189. Turing Tests and Train Trackers
  190. Feeding an internet addiction
  191. Oberon, Cromarty, Lisa, Waggledance, Ariel
  192. Introducing Java
  193. Perlish Wisdom
  194. Awesome presentations
  195. Google Reader
  196. PyCon UK
  197. The Heroic Programmer
  198. An ideal working environment
  199. The Trouble with Version Numbers
  200. High altitude programming
  201. Python keyword workaround
  202. Charming Python
  203. Why Software Development isn’t Like Construction. What’s the best metaphor for software development? Steve McConnell prefers “construction”. I disagree.
  204. Shells, Logs and Pipes
  205. Drawing Software Designs
  206. Test driven development in Python
  207. Mixing Python and C++
  208. Release then Test
  209. bin2hex.py
  210. Code completion for dynamic languages
  211. Casualties in the great computer shootout. An investigation into various dimensions of some speed benchmark programs.
  212. A tale of two upgrades
  213. One svnserve, multiple repositories
  214. Happy Mac
  215. Retro-fitting coding standards
  216. fold left, right
  217. Code Craft
  218. Narrow Python
  219. Trac — not just a pretty interface
  220. 1, 6, 21, 107, … ?
  221. Martin Fowler on Soft Documentation
  222. Printed C++ Journals
  223. Review of Pete Becker’s TR1 Book
  224. Synchronising Workspaces
  225. Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set
  226. Permission and Forgiveness
  227. Different Angles on Legacy Code
  228. Wiki Markup. Wikis often invent their own markup syntax. A note on why I favour Markdown.
  229. Functional Programming “Aha!” Moments
  230. Spam, Typo, Subversion Logs
  231. Internal Subversion Externals
  232. Lenient Browsers and Wobbly Tables
  233. My First Typo Sidebar
  234. Smart Pointers, Dumb Programmers. A note describing how a smart pointer tripped me up.
  235. The Etch-A-Sketch User Interface
  236. Joined Output and the Fencepost Problem. Items and the spaces between them: some notes on the fencepost problem and joining up strings.
  237. When computer applications reside on the web
  238. Computer Language Complexity
  239. Complacency in the computer industry
  240. The Lazy Builder’s Complexity Lesson. A discussion of algorithmic complexity, and a demonstration of how the C++ standard library allows programmers to write code which is both concise and efficient.
  241. Soft Documentation. A software developer's investigation into documentation tools.
  242. Personal overnight builds
  243. From CVS to Subversion
  244. Pcl-cvs and Psvn Incompatibilities
  245. Sounds of the Tokyo Metro
  246. Subversion 1.4
  247. Look and Say Numbers
  248. Polyominoes
  249. Browsing Python Documentation using the Python Sidebar
  250. From __future__ import braces
  251. Python 2.5
  252. Friday Puzzles
  253. Version Control for Third Party Software
  254. Overload Online
  255. Personal version control
  256. String literals and regular expressions. An article about string literals, escape sequences, regular expressions, and the problems encountered when mixing these together.
  257. There’s no escape??!
  258. Parsing C++
  259. Py2exe
  260. Ignoring .svn directories
  261. Are List Comprehensions the Wrong Way Round?
  262. How to Mirror a Subversion Repository
  263. Message to Self. What’s this?
  264. Octal Literals
  265. A Subversion Pre-Commit Hook. How to install and test a simple Subversion pre-commit hook script.
  266. Creating a Temporary Subversion Repository
  267. Binary Literals
  268. Readable Code
  269. Keyword Substitution - Just say No!
  270. map, filter, accumulate, lambda
  271. Saving changes to read-only files
  272. Google Mail holiday auto-responder
  273. A Python syntax highlighter
  274. Generating solutions to the 8 Queens Puzzle
  275. My (Test) First Ruby Program
  276. Getting started with Typo
  277. Posting from the command line using mtsend
  278. Built in Type Safety?
  279. The case against TODO. A neat label for work in progress or an easy way to disguise the flaws in a codebase?
  280. Metaprogramming is Your Friend. An investigation into metaprogramming techniques used by lazy C, C++, Lisp and Python programmers.
  281. A Mini-Project to Decode a Mini-Language
  282. Code in Comments. Don't comment out dead code, delete it!
  283. Brackets Off! Thoughts on operator precedence.