Tag: Perl
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Perl: I still love it
For the first time in a few years I am mucking about with Perl scripts. I know the language is in decline and Perl 6 has become the ultimate in vapourware, but I have to report I still love it.
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Similarity, difference and compression
I am in York this week, being a student and preparing for the literature review seminar I am due to give on Friday – the first staging post on the PhD route, at which I have to persuade the department I have been serious about reading around my subject. Today I went to a departmental […]
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Betamax versus VHS in your browser
Everyone knows the story, even if, unlike me, they are not old enough to remember it: the video format VHS overcame the superior Betamax format to dominate the home video market in the 80s and 90s. Of course, the claims that Beta was superior are rather tendentious but the fact that video producers stuck with […]
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Making sense of Android’s complex development process
Back in about 1997 I bought a book about this new programming environment – it seemed something bigger than a language but smaller than an operating system – called Java. Back then the idea seemed great – write once, run anywhere – but there was a lot of scepticism and, of course, Microsoft tried to […]
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Writing more code to avoid writing any of the report?
I have managed to churn out 160 lines of working C today – which I think is quite good going, though, according to this, maybe I could have churned out 400 of C++ or even 960 of Perl (I love Perl but the mind boggles). My program will tell you how pages pages are present […]
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“Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ”
My MSc project is ambitious, sometimes it seems too ambitious: to test various ways in which the Linux VMM and scheduler could be modified to improve performance under high levels of stress. Books are an essential guide in computer science, perhaps the essential guide, and having a book that helped me get to grips with […]
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Smaller PNG graphic files from your LaTeX
I use LaTeX (LyX as the front end) to generate the occasional bits of mathematical script that appear here. Is it bad to admit it gives me a small thrill to see how the LaTex is transformed into something mathematical – makes me feel like a proper scientist/mathematician. Well, I’ve done it now… WordPress.com will […]
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530 lines of Javascript
I have just written that amount of code in what I persist in thinking of as a toy language (it was actually somewhat longer until I refactored the code to group some common functions together), I had to do this for a coursework exercise – a lot of effort to be honest for what is […]
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Some advice you should ignore
I have an interest in graphic formats – I wrote the perl package Image::Pngslimmer a while back when I was hacking some perl database code that delivered (via Ajax) graphs and photographs. I built the whole website for fun and learning purposes and so therefore used PNG graphics when JPEGs would have (for the photographs at least) been more […]