Once upon a time (well, OK, in the mid 70s) in a land far, far away (England), I went to King’s College, London as an undergraduate to study for a degree in Mathematics. Easy peasy, I thought, pure mathematics all day, every day. I could immerse myself in the realm of the pure thought, build up logical edifices, and marvel at how far we’ve come as a race. Not so fast, said someone just before I appeared for my first year, those mathematicians will leave here with a degree, but they won’t be able to function in the real world because they won’t know how to express themselves in writing. They ought to write at least two essays, one at the end of the first year and one at the end of the second. To make it easier for them the essay topics can be mathematics-related, so something like an overview of some branch of mathematics that’s not covered in the syllabus, a biography of the personality that produced some major mathematical result, something like that. […]
READ MOREThis particular article was prompted by the (June 2012) news that the BBC was going to not only broadcast the 2012 Summer Olympics as normal through its TV channels, but also multicast it via the Internet. (Of course, that was only to UK residents, us US residents had to make do with NBC’s execrable coverage. Unless you knew about and had UK VPN access, cough, cough.) It prompted me to think about how streaming worked over the Internet and to explain it to the layman. […]
READ MOREImagine a prism. White light goes in on one side, and the different wavelengths comprising the light are split because they travel at slightly different speeds in the glass. Since the other side is at an angle to the first – the prism is a triangle – these different wavelengths come out as a rainbow. That’s what it is like reading a Priest novel: the true story, whatever it may be, goes into the triangular prism, and comes out as variations of the same tale. In The Adjacent, his latest novel, somehow Priest has discovered several new colors. […]
READ MOREAh, steganography, that art of hiding some message in plain sight. These days we’re attuned perhaps to just thinking of hiding a digital message by modifying the bits encoding an image, but it does have a long illustrious history before computers ever came along. There’s Herodotus and his idea of inscribing a message on a wax tablet, underneath the wax; microdots used by spies in WWII and later; using code-words in an otherwise normal-looking letter. But in the age of computers steganography really hits its stride. […]
READ MOREOne of the pleasures I had from the late 80s and early 90s, before I moved to the States, was watching Inspector Morse on the telly. The episodes were longer than the average TV cop show and had a leisurely pace which perfectly suited the Oxford setting. It also helped that the title role was sympathetically played by John Thaw – leaving you with a slight disturbing thought that Morse was perhaps an older gentler Jack Regan – with his sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, by Kevin Whatley. Undoubtedly, one factor in the success of the series was due to the chemistry between these two characters and their evolving relationship as well and the interactions with the other permanent characters in the show (one of which was undeniably Morse’s red Mark 2 Jag). The end-titles music was incredibly memorable and poignant, being derived from the Morse code for ‘Morse’. […]
READ MOREFor the longest time now (I see it’s getting on for five years), I’ve owned IMetJulian.com. It’s a handy website for those times I’m talking to someone I don’t know and I don’t have any business cards on me, yet I want to exchange contact details. I just say, remember “I met Julian” the next time you’re at a PC. Works pretty well. For fun, I even self-host it here at home, using an old Dell XPS something-or-other and Windows Web Server 2008. […]
READ MOREFor June 2012, it was back to some computer science. The problem posed was: given a string of characters, find the longest subsequence in that string that is a palindrome. So, taking the example ‘abbaca’ (hey, computer science is full of nonsense strings), it’s fairly obvious there are two palindromic substrings – ignoring those of length 1, which are just silly – ‘abba’ and ‘aca’. The article delves into some algorithms for solving this problem, from the O(n^2) version to a more intricate O(n) one. […]
READ MOREI had some issues today with the Windows 8 WiFi connection on my Dell XPS 12. Short story (the long one is tedious): I was using the machine at my local Acura dealer while waiting for the service on my wife’s car to be completed. I closed the lid once I could pay and get the car, yet when I opened it again at home, all Windows 8 wanted to do was to reconnect to the Acura dealers WiFi. It wouldn’t show my home WiFi at all. Even funnier (in hindsight), running the Troubleshooter resulted in a request to activate a ‘manual’ WiFi profile for an older wireless network for somewhere else. […]
READ MORESo I had an occasion to peruse someone else’s CSS today, when I came across this peculiar construct: […]
READ MORERecently I was playing around and added drop caps to the blog posts on boyet.com/. I decided to go for a pure CSS3 version (so, you’ll have to view this site in a reasonably fresh browser to see the effect) rather than a hacky <span> version that mixes presentation “hints” in the content. (For a brief discussion on the two possible methods, see Chris Coyier’s blog post here.) I certainly didn’t want to change all my posts to include spans on the first letter of the first paragraph. […]