The first day: After 14 hours, the sun caught up with us and we landed in Sydney a few minutes before sunrise. A SE wind meant a NW approach for our 747-400, which afforded us a lovely pre-dawn view of the downtown area. Arriving at the hotel at about 7.30am, we went straight in to… Continue reading Oz Report – Part 3 – Sydney Day 1
Month: August 2007
Oz Report – Part 2 – The Flight
The flight: Mini-Elbeno: a gem. Sleeping, smiling, watching Bananas in Pyjamas on the in-flight entertainment system. Food: mediocre, where it was edible at all. As expected. Entertainment: Borat – hilarious. Sunshine – reasonable “hard science” content. Enjoyable. The Chaser’s War on Everything – an Aussie comedy sketch show I got by mistake while trying to… Continue reading Oz Report – Part 2 – The Flight
Oz Report – Part 1 – Pre-Flight
I’m blogging this, rather incongruously, from an Aboriginal Cultural centre a little way south of Narooma in NSW. Here’s what I’ve prepared earlier while staying the hotel in Sydney for a few days: Pre-flight: Taxi 30 minutes late. But we are determined not to get stressed. Check in is a breeze, and security fine. But… Continue reading Oz Report – Part 1 – Pre-Flight
Exploring Pascal’s Triangle
Pascal’s Triangle (henceforth known as PT). You know – that thing you learned in maths. The Wikipedia entry, like most mathematical Wikipedia entries, reads (if your mathematical background is anything like mine) like “here’s a few things you might vaguely remember from school, oh and of course gleep = glorp”. Although I have to say,… Continue reading Exploring Pascal’s Triangle
Project Euler
I’ve just discovered Project Euler (from Osfameron, via Planet Haskell). This seems like great fodder for recreational mathematics and Haskell programming. Some of the simpler questions I might even co-opt for interviews (I have been known to ask the interview question “How many trailing zeroes has 100!” which has a similar flavour). I haven’t programmed… Continue reading Project Euler
Haskell – the videos
If you’re one of the approx 3 people left in the world who: knows about functional programming has not yet seen Simon Peyton Jones‘ “A Taste of Haskell” talks from OSCON 2007 I suggest you get over there. It’s quite long, and it gets a bit difficult to follow without slides around 30 minutes into… Continue reading Haskell – the videos
Elevators in malls
People who aren’t (or who aren’t accompanying others) pushing strollers, in wheelchairs, or riding/propelling some other form of wheeled transport should not use lifts when there are perfectly good (and probably quicker for everyone, if you would just use them) escalators available about 50 yards away. I mean, does anyone actually enjoy what are already… Continue reading Elevators in malls
Concurrency in games
I’ve been programming next-gen consoles for a while now, and I have to say: it’s not getting any easier to write games to take advantage of multi-core systems. The conventional wisdom at my company is: writing multithreaded code is hard, so “ordinary programmers” should not be doing it – let’s leave it to the senior… Continue reading Concurrency in games
Building a MAME cabinet 9
I spent another couple of hours at it yesterday, and finished the cutting of the first side, and most of the second side (which was faster). Once the big cuts were out of the way, I moved from the floor onto sawhorses which made the work a lot easier to wrangle. I did use a… Continue reading Building a MAME cabinet 9
OpenID support
I’ve added support for OpenID. For those of you from LiveJournal, this means you have an easy way to post comments here. You’ll see an OpenID URL box when you comment. You already have an OpenID – LiveJournal invented it – and it’s simply the URL of your LJ: for example, mine is http://elbeno.livejournal.com. Put… Continue reading OpenID support