OK, OK, it’s just a joke because in reality, I became a full US citizen way back on January 6, 2014, but in these days of COVID-19 and social distancing, I find myself doing weird mental arithmetic as I walk our dog Sirius through the various neighborhoods around us, as we steer ourselves past other walkers, maintaining that 6ft separation. […]
READ MOREA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was in an amateur dramatics group called the Environment Players, so named because the organizers worked for the Department of Environment. Which no longer exists as such, as it’s now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Anyway… […]
READ MOREThe other day I got an email from Embarcadero promoting a blog post that Marco Cantu had written about generics in Delphi, and in particular with regard to generic collections. Now, me, I wrote a book a little while ago (first published 19 years ago!) about algorithms and data structures for Delphi, and I’ve hovering on the fence about redoing it using generics instead of pointers. Problem is, I’ve moved away from Delphi to C# and JavaScript and so would the presence of generics help me to swing back into the fold? […]
READ MORESo I went into Whole Foods earlier on this week to get something for dinner, clutching my reusable bag. Whole Foods have this scheme whereby if you have a bag to put your shopping in, they’ll refund you 10 cents because they’re not going to have to use one of their paper bags. To which you can then ask for them to put that 10 cents to their promoted charity of the week. It’s called a Donation Bag Refund. […]
READ MOREI’m pretty sure that the puzzle game of Sudoku needs no introduction. A 9x9 grid formed as a 3x3 grid of 3x3 boxes, with some digits from 1 to 9 in there, and you have to solve for the empty cells such that there are no duplicate digits in each row, column or box. I enjoy playing it, sometimes I’m pretty good, sometimes … not so much. Of course, these puzzles are not generated by hand, they’re generated by some program, but how? How do you solve a Sudoku puzzle programmatically? And how, using that knowledge, can you generate a new puzzle? […]
READ MOREOr to give it its full title, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 5. Fascicle 6 on Satisfiability was published first, and these two form the first 2/3 (well, perhaps, we’ll see) of Volume 4B of Donald Knuth’s lifelong oeuvre. […]
READ MOREWe woke up this morning to find our youngest cat, Alpheus, covered in something … yellow. What the heck had he got into? After some searching around the house, we came to the conclusion that he’d basically messed around with a flower display we had on the kitchen counter. He was covered in pollen. […]
READ MORELike it or not, I view 2020 as the start of the decade, the decade of the 20s. […]
READ MOREDonald Knuth does one of these lighthearted lectures every year, and this one was perhaps more fun and interesting than before: Pi and the Art of Computer Programming. A reminder: Knuth is like the grand master of algorithms, and I have all of his books on my shelves behind me, and used them when I wrote my own book on algorithms. […]
READ MOREIn February next year – not too far away at the time of writing – my UK passport is due to expire. Although I am now permanently living in the States, and have been for over 25 years now, both the US and the UK allow for dual citizenship so I have two passports. And I kind of like having a UK passport. For a start, it’s easier to enter the UK whenever I (or we) fly into Heathrow for business or a holiday, and it’s still good for entering the EU. Well, OK, true enough, only just, with regard to that last point. […]
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