Ask Later
July 26, 2006
Steve Coast and Tom Carden arranged an evening of talks using the Pecha Kucha format (unfortunately they ran into trademark issues so the night was renamed to Ask Later on short notice). Nevertheless, good fun was had by all.
Matt’s talk about building an automated Sudoku solver to win $PAPER’s Sudoku challenge seemed to draw the biggest cheer. It came complete with its own homebrewed OCR component, to deal with the dodgy scanned JPG format the challenge was presented in. Unfortunately, just as he finished his fully automatic Soduko solver the $PAPER stopped presenting today’s challenge on the web…
Printing on water
July 25, 2006
Pink Tentacle reports a couple of interesting stories, including this fabulous research into printing on water. If nothing else, the machine itself looks uber-cool.
Beastly Tax
July 24, 2006
Appropriately, my income tax this month came to £666.
Perl hacks
July 19, 2006
Yesterday a friend mentioned that the word “bookkeeping” was (apparently) the only English word that had three consecutive groups of double letters in it. I decided to test this statement, so I wrote a little Perl oneliner. Here’s the program, and the results of running it:
narya:~% perl -n -e ‘print $_ if /(.)(?:\1)(.)(?:\2)(.)(?:\3)/’ /usr/share/dict/words
bookkeep
bookkeeper
bookkeeper’s
bookkeepers
bookkeeping
bookkeeping’s
So, it turned out he was (mostly) right. Then I got curious; what if the groups don’t have to be consecutive? That’s easy enough to check, so let’s do that:
narya:~% perl -n -e ‘print $_ if /(.)(?:\1).(.)(?:\2).(.)(?:\3)/’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
118
Wow. I wonder if any of those have four groups of double letters in them?
narya:~% perl -n -e ‘print $_ if /(.)(?:\1).(.)(?:\2).(.)(?:\3).*(.)(?:\4)/’ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
0
Sadly, that’s a no.
Evaluating Trac
July 10, 2006
I’m evaluating the use of trac for some of my projects. I banged my head against one show-stopping bug but it turned out it had already been solved in the upcoming 0.10 release. Luckily Debian experimental has that version, so installing it was smooth sailing. Now to see if I can get authentication to work…
