OK, I’ll admit it. This one is dead weird. Even when writing it, I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with it so it turned into this essay on what happens when you boot a PC and why the BIOS is antiquated beyond belief. I then threw in a bit about memory management and file systems. I guess you’ve just got to read it to, er, gain the full perspective. […]
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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. […]
The suggestion came from the top: “how about an article on HD video, HD TVs and all that?” When you get those kinds of suggestions, you don’t raise trivial issues like the fact you don’t even have a TV, let alone an HD TV. You File New in Word and get to work. […]
READ MOREA fun one this article: talking about digital recordings and how they’re saved for later playback. Especially CDs and MP3s. […]
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 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’d just read a book called Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser and found it fascinating enough that I tried to encapsulate what NP-complete means in a 2000-word essay for October 2010’s issue. Was I successful? You’ll have to read it to find out. […]
READ MOREAh, memories, memories. For September 2010’s issue I wrote about how to solve Rubik’s Cube, and it allowed me to revisit my days at Kings’, London, when I first came across the puzzle. Back in those days (and probably even now), the Maths Society at Kings had a fun weekend away in Windsor Great Park where we’d have talks about recreational mathematics. (Yes, I know, many people don’t think “recreational” and “mathematics” can be in the same sentence, but bear with me here.) Of course, it was an occasion for too much drinking and smoking and playing 3-card brag and staying up all night, but in 1979 we discovered a puzzle that pushed all that aside: Rubik’s Cube. […]
READ MOREThis particular article explored how to generate arithmetic expressions using a card game as a basis for discussion. It appeared in August 2010, and came about because of me reading two blog posts on entirely different topics within a week or so of each other. The combination triggered an Ah ha! moment, and I wrote it up. The first was for a card game called Krypto and appeared on The Daily WTF; the second was about generating all binary trees of a particular size and appeared on Eric Lippert’s blog, Fabulous Adventures in Coding. […]
READ MOREFor the July 2010 issue, something rather cool: face detection. How does a program (such as that one in your point-and-click camera) work out from an image whether there is a face in it, and if so where it is? […]
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