farblog

by Malcolm Rowe

Archive

May 2020

Noda Time 3.0: Nullability, simplicity; more API, less serialization.

January 2019

Short reviews of all the books I read in 2018.

July 2017

On assumptions; a poem.

October 2015

Fun with multithreaded class initialisation. And by fun, I mean deadlocks.

June 2015

Why pip fails with “option --no-user-cfg not recognized”.

March 2015

Noda Time 1.3.1: a few bugfixes.

February 2015

An analysis of Noda Time’s codebase. With graphs.

January 2015

Using ssh to create a simple privilege separation between two processes.

December 2014

How to make a (simple) website mobile-friendly.

November 2014

Ailing hardware, and moving to Google Cloud DNS.

October 2014

A 36-Letter Pangrammatic Window.

September 2014

Linux I/O performance measurement with iostat, while searching the Gutenberg corpus.

August 2014

This blog, now via HTTPS.

June 2014

Noda Time 1.3: Calendars, fixes, and the road to 2.0.
Searching for pangrammatic windows in practice, source-code edition.
Finding pangrammatic sequences in Gutenberg text.

January 2014

Is Google Compute Engine a viable option for running a simple static web server? Yes. Yes it is.

November 2013

Noda Time 1.2: serialization and more serialization, and text handling.
Profile before optimising, then profile again. And then don’t optimise.
Using the combinatorial number system to map combinations to small integers.

September 2013

Jepson, and some background on distributed database theory.
I have some bad code. What can we learn from it? Also, Java.
Meta: redesigning this blog for readability.

August 2013

Noda Time 1.1.1 is out; far too much detail about two bugs we fixed.
Date parsing in SQL Server is confusing.

July 2013

An explanation of Python scoping rules, by way of ALGOL.
English words with minimum edit distances from parts of the alphabet. No, really.

July 2011

Switching to Google’s Page Speed Service; overview and caveats.

June 2009

How to view the Android source within Eclipse.
Debugging steps for when the Android Debug Bridge won’t recognise your phone.

March 2009

An unhealthy obsession with DSL networking.
Other people do ads too?
Watchmen: awesome.

February 2009

Web design is easy, let’s not go shopping.
Brrrrrrrrr.

January 2009

Adam Cadre has a great, if ever-so-slightly confused, review of LotR.
Switched.
I made a calendar for Christmas. It didn’t suck.
Electronic Arts makes spam; I have no Marmite.
Happy New Year!

December 2008

Moving ISP. Goodbye, Demon!

June 2008

A brief look at Scala.
Wonderings about automatic function argument lambda-isation.

May 2008

A bunch of productivity tricks for the UNIX shell.
If you can’t work out why your administrators aren’t, this is why.
Why I love (working at) Google, and a bit about tonight’s OSJam.

April 2008

MySQL’s documentation confounds me again.
Porting the Open Source Jam signup application to the Google App Engine.
Picasa Web Albums goes offline.

February 2008

I’m living in the future, but it’s all beyond me.

December 2007

Authentication by forgetting your password.
Functional programming with the C++ STL: bad idea.
Google’s chart API is publicly-accessible, and darn cool.
A few little updatelets.

November 2007

How to quickly access your browser on a Symbian Series 60 phone.
I got myself a new phone.

October 2007

A collection of links.
Every browser window you have open is a calculator.
Weirdness in the C preprocessor.
The sixth Google London Open Source Jam: Web web web web web.

August 2007

Ross Anderson’s talk about evil malefactors on the internet.
Baby pictures — ahh, cute!

July 2007

On not Getting Things Done.
Why I use Safari on OS X.
(An) iPhone has escaped from the US, and it’s trapped in London!
Is everything you know already in Wikipedia? No problem! Document the future!

June 2007

or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love MythTV.
Google is people too.
Musings on Shrek 3, catenary curves, and being treated like a thief in the cinema.
A collection of links I’ve enjoyed recently.

May 2007

Offline web applications, now.
lolcats + code = …
That is, the Google London Open Source Jam.
When is a NULL not a NULL? When it’s MySQL!
What’s SVNActivitiesDB, and why would you use it?
Google has fantastic brand penetration. Here’s how I know.
Wiring standards are almost as interesting as computer standards. No, really!

April 2007

More than you ever wanted to know about Subversion 1.5 FSFS filesystems.
A nice, simple Google Maps-based tube journey planner.
Two extension problems, two extension solutions.
This weekend’s browsing, an excerpt.
Or, “Googlebot doesn’t belong here”.

March 2007

Microsoft really don’t want me to test out Office for Mac.
The Google Toolbar knows all.
Web Forms 2. It rocks.
Watch this video.
More later.
Mostly car-related, actually.
We’ve made some improvements to help repository admins back up their FSFS repositories.
An analysis of Subversion’s codebase. With graphs.
Thoughts about airport security and Bruce Schneier’s essay.
The Imperial History of the Middle East, in 90 seconds.

February 2007

Drawing on whiteboards is so passé, don’t you think?
A review of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. I liked it.
ObFirstPost.