Last time we discussed that money has a time component to it, that it changes value with time. We derived the basic formula for TVM (Time Value of Money): […]
READ MOREBack in a previous life, I used to write swaps and options software for traders and brokers. Of all my jobs, I’d have to say that writing this kind of software was practically the only one that utilized my mathematics degree to any great extent, which I must admit is kind of depressing in a way. You’d think that programming is all about mathematics but, in reality, not so much. Sure, understanding lambda calculus is all very well, but you tend not to have to use it in your day-to-day work. (My friend and colleague Seth Juarez is perhaps the only other person I know who regularly uses “proper” mathematics in his work: he’s a fan of machine learning, and you can get his open-source library here for C# and .NET.) […]
READ MOREFor some reason I missed this from a month or so back. I’m subscribed to David Langford’s Ansible newsletter on science fiction topics, but for some reason I missed reading March’s issue where he noted the death of John Christopher. […]
READ MOREOn a whim at the end of last week I bought a set of Vivitar macro extension tubes for my Canon XTi. These are pretty neat: they pass through the auto-focus and auto-exposure signals from the camera to the lens, making them easier to use. There are three in the set: a 13mm, 21mm, and 31mm tube. If my mathematics is correct, this makes seven possible tube lengths since you can combine them in any order (call them A, B, and C, then the possible combinations are A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, and ABC). […]
READ MORESo far in this series (one, two, three) we have specialized content, detection of phone orientation, basics of being Web Clip capable, and a back to home page functionality. This post wraps it all up by removing the latter, implementing some simple Back button functionality, a “loading” indicator, and I do a little bit of code housekeeping too. […]
READ MOREThe story so far (one, two) is that I’ve simplified the content of this blog for viewing on the iPhone, I’ve added code that recognizes when the phone’s orientation is changed from portrait to landscape (and vice versa), and I’ve added the necessary elements to the head element to indicate that this site can be viewed as a Web Clip. With the current state of play though, the moment you touch on a link, Safari fires up to display the page. […]
READ MORENow that we have a special web site that displays properly either in portrait or landscape mode, let’s make it a web application that we pin to the Home screen. Boiled down to its essence, this is easy: you bring the web page up in Safari, touch the middle button in the bar at the bottom of the screen, and then select the Add to Home Screen option. […]
READ MOREWith the iPhone you easily view a web site in Safari, but you get the annoying bits of chrome at the top (the address bar) and at the bottom (the buttons). What if you wanted your site to occupy the whole of the screen? Well, you can pin the site to the Home screen and, provided that you make a few changes to the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can make your site behave as if it were pretty much a native app. […]
READ MOREAs I said a while back, I was a member of the Kings College London Mathematics Society (a.k.a., KCL MathSoc) during my undergrad years. Now that I have a new flatbed scanner, I’ve been asked to scan the society photos and post them here, so here goes. […]
READ MOREA bit late in announcing this, but it all took rather longer than I thought. Not the creation of the MOBI file, but the publishing of the Kindle Edition of The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures (hereby abbreviated to ToDADS). Let me count the ways. […]
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