Potpourri for February 2013

Another entry in my series of “fragrant dried leaves in a pot” (English version), or “rotten stuff in a pot” (French literal translation): in other words, stuff I found interesting in the past month and tweeted or Facebooked.

Regex crossword puzzle

A fiendish puzzle that will practice your knowledge of regular expressions and their application: “A Regular Crossword”.

Rules for using the “long s”

Prior to the beginning of the 20th century, printers used to use a long S (ſ), the one that looks like a lower-case F, instead of the short S that we’re so familiar with. Mainly they were used in the middle of words – but not it seems at the end. What exactly were the rules about using it? Andrew West did a whole bunch of research and has published his findings in the post The Rules for Long S. One of the fascinating things to realize for me is that the slash used to demarcate shillings from pence pre-decimalization, such as 2/6 for half-a-crown, is actually a stylized long S.

asm.js

To quote the spec: asm.js [is] a strict subset of JavaScript that can be used as a low-level, efficient target language for compilers. This sublanguage effectively describes a safe virtual machine for memory-unsafe languages like C or C++. A combination of static and dynamic validation allows JavaScript engines to employ an ahead-of-time (AOT) optimizing compilation strategy for valid asm.js code.

One of the interesting things about this JavaScript subset is the way it defines a strict type system (in standard JavaScript) that can then be used for parameter validation. A bit like TypeScript.

Decoding JPEGs

A series on the JPEG format and from that discussion writing a decoder for JPEG files: “Let’s Build a JPEG Decoder”.

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