A couple of months ago I purchased The Body Farm on DVD from Amazon.co.uk. In theory it sounded promising enough: a series spinoff of Waking the Dead, with one of the characters from that series moving on from the break-up of Boyd’s cold case crime unit. It stars Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart. […]
READ MORELast time I talked about the simple module pattern. This is where you create a function that returns an object with behavior and state and that behavior and state is implemented (and made private) by using a closure. We showed this by using the module pattern to create a stopwatch object. […]
READ MOREIf you recall, JavaScript closures are an extremely powerful concept in the language. By using JavaScript’s rather peculiar scoping rules, closures are a way of creating private variables and functionality for an object. The module pattern builds upon this feature. […]
READ MOREOn rereading this just now, I just had to laugh. Two reasons I suppose. First of all, the article is really about Markov chains (my original title was just that), and I spend just 3 paragraphs right at the end talking about speech recognition. I think my editor was a smidge too enthusiastic about the speech recognition part. Secondly I note that I talk about random walks in a couple of places – even Gambler’s Ruin – a topic I skirted just recently here. It certainly sounds like I knew back then what I couldn’t work out a few days ago; so maybe there’s something to all this forgetting stuff as you grow older. […]
READ MOREAs it says in my bio for this site, I’m a calculator collector. Mostly Hewlett-Packard LCD calculators it must be said, but every now and then I pick up something from another manufacturer. […]
READ MOREBack in my days at Kings College, there was a movement to try and make sure that we mathematics students could write. There was a general worry that because we expressed ourselves tersely and symbolically in the language of mathematics we would forget how to express ourselves correctly in the language of English. So, while I was there, we had to write two essays, one at the end of our first year and one at the end of the second. The essays should be on a mathematical subject, maybe even with a proof or two, but it had to be preponderantly a narrative. (If you think about it, this is the same worry that developers might not be able to express themselves clearly and concisely to their users, which is why there’s so much emphasis on “written and verbal communication” in job descriptions.) […]
READ MOREI’ve been playing around a bit with Kickstarter recently. One of the projects I offered to fund was originally called Red Pop, a gizmo that attached to your iPhone to (a) give it a better grip like a normal camera, and (b) have a nice physical button on top to take photos. They reached their funding, got asked by Red to rename it to avoid any confusion (which they did, to POPA), and then eventually released it. (The following photo is courtesy Beep Industries.) […]
READ MOREThe call went out: November 2010 was going to be the 300th issue of PC Plus. Our articles had to be better than ever before and preferably some kind of top N list to go along with the issue’s theme (the lead article for example was 300 Advanced PC Tips). […]
READ MOREI came across this mathematical problem the other day: […]
READ MOREI can’t believe that I haven’t posted an article on how to call functions in JavaScript and what this gets set to for each of the various invocation patterns. It’s one of those things that catches people out periodically, so it’s well worth discussing at length. […]