Recently updated blogs

I've a written a new book. It's a children's book and it's called A Riddle for a King. It's suitable for those aged between about eight and twelve, although it has been rigorously tested on children from six to thirteen (I test all my products on children and animals). The six-year-old had to have it read to him, but he loved it. The story is about a boy called Philo, …

“King County Metro Route 8 | NFI XDE60 | Madison St @ MLK Jr Way” by Han Zheng is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Transit access is frequently depicted with isochrone maps. Given a starting point, time of day, and time budget, determine all the places that can be reached within that budget using transit and walking. These maps are not a new concept, with examples dating to the late …

I’m really thrilled that our research article on government IT procurement was recently published in Canadian Public Administration. It’s a bit over two years since Prof. Amanda Clarke and I began this research project, and this article being published is in some ways the final milestone of that work. The article is open access, and you can read it online (or download the PDF version). Here’s the upshot: We reveal …

Dear readers,It is a rare thing for Art of the Title to publish an editor’s note but the time has come to provide an update. Many of you are likely unaware that, since 2018, Art of the Title has been a one-person operation managed by myself, Editor-in-Chief Lola Landekic. It has been my honour to be a member of the small Art of the Title team since 2011 when I …

This is a piece of advice that I found myself giving to many early career researchers, students, and colleagues supervising and advising those as well. For years, actually. A mathematician, the joke says, is a blind man, in a dark room, searching for a black cat that isn't there. I don't know about that, but I think we can still agree that a researcher, in most fields, is sailing a …

The swallows have departed. The tall, dry meadow grass rustles in the nearly empty air. Now and then a sparrow suddenly flutters up from beside the path, then flies off toward the trees surrounding the field. Ghostly white tufts of thistle seed float past, rising and falling. Swallows FlownWhence comes that small continuous silence Haunting the livelong day?This void, where a sweetness, so seldom heeded, Once ravished my heart away?As …

Ruby on Rails has built-in support for managing uploaded files with ActiveStorage, which both cleans up your application code and acts as an abstraction over different storage backends. Azure Storage is one of the supported backends, but configuring it securely can take a little figuring out. The most sensible way I’ve found to have it configured is with files stored having no public access, but allowing temporary access via signed …

I’m evaluating the usability of GitHub merge queues under a set of conditions that makes merge queues hard: pull requests have a high probability of failing CI when merged together despite passing on their own. (Plus, GitHub’s implementation has like 11 different knobs, and the documentation is somewhat limited.) I could make a bunch of PRs on my own, but that’s boring, and I’m not good at finding edge cases …

WelcomeYesterday we played a show in the Great Hall of the Dominion Museum in Whanganui a Tara. I returned for the second day to Akin for breakfast, the café with a name that I still couldn’t think of a pun for but an establishment that I now trusted to provide me with the nutrition to get me through a day of travelling and performing. Moving into the savoury section of …

Let’s talk about the basic concept of the "making app". I’ve written about this before, and demoed it in some of my public project walk-throughs, but there’s no single straightforward explanation out there, so let’s take a swing. What is a "making app", and why might one want to roll one for a project? In […]

I have adopted uv for a lot of Python development. I'm also a heavy user of direnv, which I like as a tool for setting up project-specific environments. Much like Hynek describes, I've found uv sync to be fast enough to put into the chdir path for new directories. Here's how I'm doing it. Direnv Libraries First, it turns out you can pretty easily define custom direnv functions like the …

Trappistenhuis Den Herberg in Waasmunster is a volkscafé offering Trappist beers, Geuze, and sourdough bread made with Chimay yeast. The post Trappistenhuis Den Herberg appeared first on Belgian Smaak.

Visits counter was a critical feature of every website just 20 years ago. In this tutorial, we will implement it with Rust Cloudflare Workers by adding persistence and dynamic behaviors to an otherwise static page. We will also discuss other practical use cases of CF workers edge proxy. Static blog with CF edge caching Visits: [VISITS_COUNT] This blog is a static JekyllRB website hosted on an EC2 behind an NGINX …

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me. Again. Not in Faifley, but Oslo. To be precise this happened on a walk with fellow archaeologist Ingrid Mainland in Ekebergparken, on the south side of the harbour fjord of the Norwegian capital city. The park is better known for a stunning …

I recently took a trip to the Yukon (and two days in Alaska) with my partner Elaine. The trip was mostly hiking focused and generally enjoying the nature. We took almost two weeks which was a good amount of time for us. Enough to not rush and soak in a lot of nature but not so long that our legs really started hurting and we started missing the comforts of …