Recently updated blogs

Filtered sampling from sorted values with incremental binary search Published 2024-12-03 I had a problem recently that I solved badly. As is traditional, I figured out how to solve it well in the shower this morning. The solution is obvious in retrospect, but I thought I’d share it anyway as it’s an interesting algorithm that I’d not seen before. def filtered_sample(random, values, lower_bound, upper_bound): """Samples a random value `x` from …

Ok I’ll admit it, the title is a bit dramatic. Makefiles and shell scripts are here to stay, and that’s fine. I’m wouldn’t make the argument that any tool is the perfect tool for all tasks all the ...

This evening I made a Timeline of Discovery, listing historical inventions, discoveries, events, etc. that I find personally interesting. I started doing it because I saw a project, Markwhen, on Hacker News, that turns a simple markdown-like format into HTML timelines and I wanted to try it out. It turned out not to be exactly what I wanted, because it makes a page that is "too interactive", and I couldn't …

I had some spare time recently as I waiting for the lacquer I'd sprayed on my current batch of acoustic guitars to cure in readiness for polishing, and as I'm becoming a big fan of headless guitars, I put the guitar pictured together while I had the opportunity to do so.I've had the maple neck blank and the Queensland maple drop-top cap in my tonewood stash for what must be …

I know from personal experience that if you work with an artist or band, you very frequently end up liking, or even loving, their music. This is true even for music that is wildly out of your comfort zone. This is also partly why whenever you see a flotilla of music execs in a industry magazine choosing their favourite music of the last year — or their tips for next …

Glassy headers have become a core part of the “slick startup” UI toolkit, but they’re all missing that final 10% that really makes it shine. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create the most realistic lush frosted glass anywhere on the internet. Keep reading.

Yaowarat (Chinatown)

Matt and Sam talk to Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho about progressive organizing in rural and red America.

Well, after a first cup of tea finished off by Lucie, we set off for our earlymorning walk to be greeted by a beautiful dawn with the sun not even over the horizon, a little chilly but as yet no ground frost to speak of and wildlife still dozing apart from the odd rabbit and alerted pheasant. When we set off for the evening walk the sky was pretty much …

The emergence of a bird flu infection in cattle in the United States (US) in March 2024 was unprecedented. Until the US event, mass infection of herbivorous mammals with avian influenza had never been described, although there have been occasional infections seen in different mammalian species across the world. For example, infection of farmed carnivores (for example foxes and mink) and mass mortality events in some marine mammals has been …

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. […]

I was back in hospital today. I needed an echocardiogram to check my heart was OK and that my lungs were clear of blood clots. It was, and they are, so all good. This is the account – primarily for future me – of how I ended up there. Read more.

Most of my multi-page designs are typically created in Adobe InDesign, but for simpler layouts, I sometimes opt for Illustrator. While InDesign offers more advanced tools for managing text styles, the key advantage lies in its use of Master Pages. However, Illustrator also supports threaded text, allowing you to link text areas and have the content flow from one frame to another, along with several useful options and features. Create …

This is a rough transcript based on my notes for the sharing session I presented at the online Groove meetup in June. I've shared the slides before, but I think it's worth putting the content in writing. The full slide deck is accessible on GitHub. css-doodle is a project I started many years ago. Initially, it was used to draw some simple graphic patterns, but over time, it evolved into …

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution. Part 1: Contiguous Array You are given an array of binary numbers, @binary. Write a script to return the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with an equal number of 0 and 1. Let’s not concern ourselves with any particular efficiencies and just analyze all the subsets of the given numbers! The main loop …