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Posts Tagged ‘memory’

London ramble

Posted in out and about, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 25/01/2014| 2 Comments »

One Saturday last November, Mr H. and I went to London to go for a walk. G. came down too, to visit Kew Gardens with a friend, so it was convenient for our walk to start off in Kew.

Kew Station

Before I really get started, I possibly ought to mention that, whilst I’m generally interested in the concept of genre, I’m still rather finding my feet when it comes to the genre conventions of blogging. This is my attempt at a touristy “trip report” style of post, with lots of photos. G. thinks that about ten photos would be a sensible limit, but it was quite a long walk, so I’m going to exceed that. I’ll try to have a fair bit of prose mixed in there too.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Kew.
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Brevity

Posted in arts and crafts, tagged , , , , , on 07/07/2013| 2 Comments »

I’ve been wanting to write something about brevity for a while now. You know: the soul of wit, brevitas vs. copia, maxims and arrows, and all that sort of thing. I fear I may write too much whilst saying too little. Ho hum.
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Scrappy and derivative or ahead of its time

Posted in juvenilia, tagged , , , , , , on 16/11/2012| Leave a Comment »

Kevin Simler’s recent posting on ethics and programming features one of my favourite Brian Kernighan quotes. (I won’t repeat it here, as you can read it there.) This reminded me of another favourite thing: the cover illustration to The Practice of Programming, which features a little dog pointing out the book’s trio of key concepts.
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SDBM

Posted in programming, tagged , , , on 02/01/2010| 2 Comments »

I’ve been a bit slow in my learning of Ruby. This time around I’ve re-written Ozan Yigit’s ndbm clone: sdbm.

I’ve cheated a bit. My general plan has been to pick things up through re-writing bits of existing code in Ruby: but to do them from memory (swotting up if necessary) rather than translate them directly. In this particular case it was convenient (for testing) to ensure that my implementation produced files that were bit-for-bit identical to those produced by the original (as incorporated into Perl). So, to avoid incompatibilities, I wrote down the string hash algorithm and the block sizes used for reading and writing the files. It was only a tiny cheat.

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