Latest posts
- Twenty Five Years of ComputingFeb 06, 2026
Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my first taste of computer programming as a child, it was only when I e
- QuickQWERTY 1.2.1Jan 27, 2026
QuickQWERTY 1.2.1 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the web browser. This release contains a minor bug fix in Unit 4.3. Unit 4.3 is a 'Control' unit that lets you practise typing partial words as well as full words. In one place in this unit, the following sequence of partial and full words occurs: l li lime
- Attention Media ≠ Social NetworksJan 20, 2026
When web-based social networks started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social networks. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine. The little icons in the top bar would light up because someone had
- Nested Code Fences in MarkdownJan 19, 2026
Today, we will meet a spiky-haired nerd named Corey Dumm, who normally lives within Markdown code fences. We will get to know him a bit, smile with him when his fences hold and weep quietly when misfortune strikes. One of the caveats of the Markdown universe is the wide variety of Markdown implementations available. In these parallel universes, the rules of Markdown rendering diffe
- Minimal GitHub WorkflowJan 15, 2026
This is a note where I capture the various errors we receive when we create GitHub workflows that are smaller than the smallest possible workflow. I do not know why anyone would ever need this information and I doubt it will serve any purpose for me either but sometimes you just want to know things, no matter how useless they might be. This is one of the useless things I wanted to know
- Three Inverse Laws of RoboticsJan 12, 2026
Introduction Contents Introduction Pitfalls Inverse Laws of Robotics Non-Anthropomorphism Non-Deference Non-Abdication of Responsibility Conclusion Pitfalls Three Laws of Robotics devised by Isaac Asimov, which recur throughout his work. These laws were designed to constrain the behaviour of robots in order to keep humans safe. As far as I know, Asimov never formulated any equivalen
- Writing First, Tooling SecondJan 10, 2026
I am a strong proponent of running independent personal websites on your own domains and publishing your writing there. Doing so keeps the web diverse and decentralised, rather than concentrating most writing and discussion inside a small number of large platforms. It gives authors long term control over their work without being subject to changing policies or incentives. I thin
- A4 Paper StoriesJan 06, 2026
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen cabinets or anything that will stare back at you every day for the next t
- Circular Recursive Negating AcronymsJan 05, 2026
One of my favourite acronyms from the world of computing and technology is XINU. It stands for 'XINU Is Not Unix'. The delightful thing about this acronym is that XINU is also UNIX spelled backwards. For a given word W, a recursive acronym that both negates W and reverses it is possible when W has the form W = '?NI?' where each '?' denotes a letter. Some fictitious examples make
- IdeasJan 03, 2026
Ideas ideas page where I keep a brief record of some ideas I might want to explore in the near future. For ideas I have already begun exploring, please see my now page or my web log instead. As of 03 Jan 2026, I have the following ideas in mind that I might want to explore in future: Read on website | #meta
- NowJan 02, 2026
Now now page where I keep a brief record of what I am up to these days. As of 03 Jan 2026, I am: Algebraic Graph Theory by Godsil and Royle. see here). Read on website | #meta
- My Coding Adventures in 2025Dec 24, 2025
In this post, I return with a retrospective on my coding adventures, where I summarise my hobby projects and recreational programming activities from the current year. I did the last such retrospective in 2023. So I think this is a good time to do another retrospective. At the outset, I should mention that I have done less hobby computing this year than in the past few, largely bec
- Nerd Quiz #3Dec 23, 2025
Nerd Quiz #3 is the third release of Nerd Quiz, a single-page HTML application that invites you to test your nerd level through a short quiz. Each question is inspired by everyday moments of reading, writing, thinking, learning and exploring. This release introduces five new questions drawn from a range of topics, including computing history, graph theory and Unix. Visit Nerd Quiz t
- Mark V. Shaney Junior 0.2.0Dec 14, 2025
Mark V. Shaney Junior 0.2.0 is the second release of this little Markov gibberish generator. This release brings two small changes. First, it now reads the training data from standard input instead of a hardcoded file. Second, the program filename has been changed from mvs.py to mvs to reflect that it is an executable file and can be run as ./mvs on most Unix and Linux systems. T
- Fed 24 Years of My Blog Posts to a Markov ModelDec 13, 2025
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs. It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text generated by a Markov model. See the Wikipedia article Mark V. Shaney
- Mark V. Shaney Junior 0.1.0Dec 12, 2025
Mark V. Shaney Junior is a minimal implementation of a Markov gibberish generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user in the 1980s that posted messages to newsgroups using text generated by a Markov chain program. See the Wikipedia article Mark V. Shaney for more details. This release introduces the program
- Fizz Buzz in CSSDec 06, 2025
How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting, we require that all text that appears in the Fizz Buzz sequence comes directly from the CSS. Placing any part of the output n
- CSS Fizz Buzz with Ordered ListDec 05, 2025
A version of my CSS Fizz Buzz that uses ordered list (<ol>) to reduce code. However, I don't quite like how misaligned the numbers and the words look. Correcting that would call for extra code that would cancel out the bytes saved. Read on website | #web
- CSS Fizz BuzzDec 03, 2025
An implementation of Fizz Buzz in four lines of CSS. Read on website | #web
- Emacs Info ExpressionsDec 03, 2025
On #emacs IRC or Matrix channels, we often share references to the built-in Emacs documentation as Elisp expressions that look like this: (info "(emacs) Basic Undo") (info "(emacs) Word Search") GNU Emacs Manual: Word Search. The reason for sharing Elisp expressions like this is likely partly tradition and partly convenience. Many Emacs users are logged into IRC networks via Emacs i