Over the weekend, I finished Exile, a three-part drama series from the BBC. I’d ordered the DVD from Amazon.co.uk never having heard of the production, but since it starred John Simm (I hugely enjoyed his performances in both Life on Mars and State of Play) and Jim Broadbent (think any number of TV productions or movies, he’s one of the top actors of his generation) I felt that I couldn’t go wrong. […]
READ MOREAs I mentioned a week or so ago, I discovered that my book, The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures, was out as an ebook. And that, since the ebook was mostly created from a mechanical process converting my PDF for the physical book, it was pretty grim formatting-wise. So, over the past 10 days (not continuously, I hasten to add), I’ve been recreating it. […]
READ MOREA reader asked me how the Extras tab on my blog was made. It’s a bit of CSS and a bit of JavaScript, so let’s describe it all. […]
READ MOREIt’s about time I introduced the first Hewlett-Packard calculator I ever bought. Unlike the previous calculators I’ve shown (Litton Royal 5T, Casio SL-800, Casio ML-81) which were replacements obtained long after the originals had been lost or thrown away, this is the actual calculator I purchased and used back in 1988. I can’t remember the cost, but it must have been enough that I also splashed out on the deluxe leather case to protect it. These days they go for about $150 on eBay for one in good condition with manual and standard case. […]
READ MOREI learned today that my book Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures is available as an ebook for both the Nook and for iOS devices like the iPad. It is not available on the Kindle. […]
READ MOREYou’ve probably seen those photos which look as if they are images of miniature landscapes. […]
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A quick synopsis of the history of email, plus a discussion of how email actually works (in other words, what POP3 and STMP servers do). I even touch on MX records. I can’t remember how the topic came up at this remove (it doesn’t sound like something I’d think of), but I’ll admit it was a quick write. Probably the most fun I had with it was drawing the figure. Let’s call the article workmanlike without showing any particular craftsmanship. […]
Over the weekend, I spent some time updating the CSS (cascading stylesheet) of this blog. There were two main purposes for this: Less and @media queries. […]
READ MOREOvernight, it wasn’t exactly snow falling so much as fog freezing. There was snow left over from the past couple of days, but the roads were clear and the freezing fog had covered the trees with a sugar dusting of white. It was also very cold overnight: around –12C or 10F. […]
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If you have a presence on the web that’s not just Facebook, you ought to go check out the 444-and-counting free font families available at Google Web Fonts. They’re a great way to spruce up the look of your web site for very little work. For example, on this blog I’m now using Oswald for the headers, Droid Serif for the main text, and Inconsolata for the code blocks. (I’ve been using the former two for a few months now, and Mehul prompted me about trying the latter this evening). The headers are very sharp (I really like the condensed look of Oswald, but it’s a shame there’s no italic form – I dislike slanted roman a’s) and the code displayed by Inconsolata is very legible. The Droid Serif body text (what you are reading now) is readable without being tiring. All in all, I think it’s working out very well. […]