Saturday. We got up early again and went down to the ferry wharves. Today was our harbour cruise day! We bought a combo ticket for the harbour cruise and Taronga Zoo, and had breakfast at Rossini right on the wharf. Two jam doughnuts as big as our heads, half a…
Oz Report – Part 4 – Sydney Aquarium
I’m blogging this from Melbourne as we are staying with our friends the Boards (see the Ben-n-Em link on the blogroll). Friday. We got up early and headed over to Henry Deane Plaza to have breakfast at Henry Henry, a nightspot and cafe/bar there. Mini-Elbeno managed to fall over and…
Oz Report – Part 3 – Sydney Day 1
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,…
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…
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…
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”….
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…
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…
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…
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…