Unbackslash · Old software joke: “After the apocalypse, all that’ll be left will be cockroaches, Keith Richards, and markup characters that have been escaped (or unescaped) one too many (or few) times.” I’m working on a programming problem where escaping is a major pain in the ass, specifically “”. So, for reasons that seem good to me, I want to replace it. What with? ...
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[8 comments]
New Amplification · The less interesting part of the story is that my big home stereo has new amplification: Tiny Class-D Monoblocks! (Terminology explained below.) More interesting, another audiophile tenet has been holed below the waterline by Moore’s Law. This is a good thing, both for people who just want good sound to be cheaper, and for deranged audiophiles like me ...
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[6 comments]
Standing on High Ground · That’s the title of a book coming out October 29th that has my name on the cover. The subtitle is “Civil Disobedience on Burnaby Mountain”. It’s an anthology; I’m both an author and co-editor. The other authors are people who, like me, were arrested resisting the awful “TMX” Trans Mountain pipeline project ...
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Long Links · It’s been a while. Between 2020 and mid-2023, I wrote pretty regular “Long Links” posts, curating links to long-form pieces that I thought were good and I had time to read all of because, unlike my readers, I was lightly employed. Well, then along came my Uncle Sam gig, then fun Open Source with Topfew and Quamina, then personal turmoil, and I’ve got really a lot of browser tabs that I thought I’d share one day. That day is today ...
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0 dependencies! · Here’s a tiny little done-in-a-couple-hours project consisting of a single static Web page and a cute little badge you can slap on your GitHub project ...
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[7 comments]
Q Numbers Redux · Back in July I wrote about Q numbers, which make it possible to compare numeric values using a finite automaton. It represented a subset of numbers as 14-hex-digit strings. In a remarkable instance of BDD (Blog-Driven Development, obviously) Arne Hormann and Axel Wagner figured out a way to represent all 64-bit floats in at most ten bytes of UTF-8 and often fewer. This feels nearly miraculous to me; read on for heroic bit-twiddling ...
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Mozart Requiem · Vancouver has many choirs, with differing proficiency levels and repertoire choices. Most gather fall-to-spring and take the summer off. Thus, Summerchor, which aggregates a couple of hundred singers from many choirs to tackle one of the Really Big choral pieces each August. This year it was the Mozart Requiem. Mozart died while writing this work and there are many “completions” by other composers. Consider just the Modern completions; this performance was of Robert Levin’s ...
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[4 comments]
2024 Pollscrolling · The 2024 US election has, in the last few weeks, become the most interesting one I can recall. I’m pretty old, so that’s a strong statement; I can recall a lot of US elections. The Internet makes it way too easy to obsess over a story that’s this big and has this many people sharing opinions. Here is my opinion, not on who’s winning, but on how, with only a very moderate expenditure of time and money, you can be as well-informed as anybody in the world as to how it’s going ...
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Basic Infrastructure · Recently, I was looking at the infrastructure bills for our CoSocial co-op member-owned Mastodon instance, mostly Digital Ocean and a bit of AWS. They seemed too high for what we’re getting. Which makes me think about the kind of infrastructure that a decentralized social network needs, and how to get it ...
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[5 comments]
Countrywomen · In the last couple of weeks I’ve been at shows by Molly Tuttle and Sierra Ferrell (I recommend clicking both those links just for the front-page portraits). Herewith thoughts on the genres, performances, and sound quality ...
Invisible Attackers · In the last few days we’ve had an outburst of painful, intelligent, useful conversation about racism and abuse in the world of Mastodon and the Fediverse. I certainly learned things I hadn’t known, and I’m going to walk you through the recent drama and toss in ideas on how to improve safety ...
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[5 comments]
Union of Finite Automata · In building Quamina, I needed to compute the union of two finite automata (FAs). I remembered from some university course 100 years ago that this was possible in theory, so I went looking for the algorithm, but was left unhappy. The descriptions I found tended to be hyper-academic, loaded with mathematical notation that I found unhelpful, and didn’t describe an approach that I thought a reasonable programmer would reasonably take. The purpose of this ongoing entry is to present a programmer-friendly description of the problem and of the algorithm I adopted, with the hope that some future developer, facing the same problem, will have a more satisfying search experience ...
Terse Directions · This post describes a service I want from my online-map provider. I’d use it all the time. Summary: When I’m navigating an area I already know about, don’t give me turn-by-turn, just give me a short list of the streets to take ...
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2009 Ranger · This week we’re vacationing at the family cabin on an island; the nearest town is Gibsons. Mid-week, we hit town to pick up groceries and hardware. Unfortunately, it’s a really demanding walk from the waterfront to the mall, particularly with a load to carry, and there’s little public transit. Fortunately, there’s Coast Car Co-op, a competent and friendly little five-car outfit. We booked a couple of hours and the closest vehicle was a 2009 Ford Ranger, described as a “compact pickup” or “minitruck”. It made me think ...
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Q Numbers · This ongoing fragment describes how to match and compare numbers using a finite automaton, which involves transforming them into strings with the right lexical properties. My hope is that there are at least twelve people in the world who are interested in the intersection of numeric representation and finite automata.
[Note: This whole piece, except for the description of the problem, has been obsoleted by Q Numbers Redux.] ...
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[Note: This whole piece, except for the description of the problem, has been obsoleted by Q Numbers Redux.] ...
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Lounge Penguin · Lounge, as in a jazz club. Penguin, as in GoGo Pengin, a piano/bass/drums trio. We caught their show at Jazz Alley in Seattle last week. Maybe you should go hit a jazz lounge sometime ...
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Epsilon Love · Quamina was for a time my favorite among all my software contributions. But then it stalled after I shipped 1.0 in January of 2023. First of all, I got busy with the expert witness for Uncle Sam gig and second, there was a horrible problem in there that I couldn’t fix. Except for now I have! And I haven’t done much codeblogging recently. So, here are notes on nondeterministic finite automata, epsilon transitions, Ken Thompson, Golang generics, and prettyprinting. If some subset of those things interests you, you’ll probably like this ...
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Wikipedia Pain · There are voices — some loud and well-respected — who argue that Wikipedia is deeply flawed, a hellscape of psychotic editors and contempt for expertise. I mostly disagree, but those voices deserve, at least, to be heard ...
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