http://blog.cons.org.nz (cons web log) Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:15:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Keyboard layout that includes a backtick! http://blog.cons.org.nz/2009/02/22/backtick-on-iphone/ Some photos on Flickr have nothing but "awards" in the comments. These "awards" are little more than thinly veiled spam and there are few things more irritating than spam. Here's an example. While the best solution would be for these comments to be deleted, I suspect other people do not sympathize ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2007/09/30/flickrtidy/ I'm currently required to use Python for COMP312. Having come from doing nothing but Haskell and Prolog in COMP304 you can imagine my mind isn't exactly bent around Python's way of doing things. Here are a couple of traps I ran into First off is expressions and lambda >>> def p(x): print(x) ... ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2006/09/04/python-gotchas/ One of the complaints I've heard about Haskell is that it makes your code shorter. I'm not quite sure how that's a bad thing, but it occurred to me while looking at a algorithm I wrote in Ruby. puts $_.chomp.gsub(/../) { |b| b.hex.to_s + "."}.chop The algorithm takes an IP address compactly ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2006/06/21/short-code/ This is not some silly new product title, it is the announcement of an RSS feed. http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/12/12/pros-and-cons-rss/ After stealing a camera to take photos of tictacs for use with tic.t.ac.nz I decided to get myself a camera. Now armed with a Fuji FinePix E500 and a free Flickr account I'm ready for anything. The camera has joined the rest of the equipment that lives in my bag ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/11/23/flickr/ Flock is a recently released "social" web browser derived from Firefox. For the social part, it offers posting to various blogs (including WordPress) with a built-in editor and del.icio.us for bookmarks. As everything these days has an RSS reader builtin, it's not surprising this does also. The feature I like ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/10/22/flock/ The issue of Salient containing the article, temporarily prevented from distribution, has been released. I got my hands on a copy tonight and scanned it, just page one, page two and page one in colour if you so desire. http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/10/05/salient/ The design of pros.and.cons makes it difficult to easily track new changes. I've whipped up something to notify you when there are changes. I used the phrase "notify you" as this is what took the most time to do. There is a notification management daemon running which broadcasts the messages generated ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/09/15/http-in-reverse/ Eleanor Toland has been creating "dolls" with likeness to people she knows and including them in her blog posts. There was one I quite liked so I stole the pictures from it and put them up as splash pages. Then came more and I couldn't resist, so far I've got ... http://blog.cons.org.nz/2005/08/30/dolls/