This is the second article about how working with temporal information in computer systems. The first article was about contained some definitions about astronomical time and timezones.

This article describes options for storing temporal values in your programs, and their limitations. In particular, it describes two pitfalls that can happen …

Many cultural and religious traditions place a lot of importance in names, and hold that names have power. There is something magical about them.

In Classical Greek tradition, Hades was feared and his name was not spoken. The Bible supposes that the name of God is to be used for …

One reason why Python is such a popular and powerful language is that it is straightforward to learn and make good progress. Learners can quickly become comfortable with many aspects of the language, such as control flow and functions.

The first obstacle that many learners come across is when they …

I was a volunteer and organiser for codebar for several years and was heavily involved in outreach activities during my time at Cambridge. In the face of cuts to DEI initiatives, I believe that the lack of diversity at all levels of the tech sector seriously harms the sector.

Besides …

I have been reading – at a very shallow level – about category theory (wiki), and thinking about its applicability to software and system design for data engineering. This post is a loose collection of thoughts on the subject, and a manifesto for employing a more rigorous language when building such systems …

Emergency services, GPs, hospitals, transportation systems and the like are funded, at least in part, by public money. When their computer systems go down, the public is badly affected and people can get hurt, and lives can be put at risk. So what regulations and quality controls are there on …

A little investment into building a GUI for live visualizations and control provides huge improvements in iteration speed.

I recently came across the excellent video Coding Adventure: Simulating Fluids wonderfully explained by Sebastian Lague. The video walks through the steps to build a simple smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation from nothing …

Originally written May 2022.

Introduction

In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has unflattering things to say about the development of writing, arguing among other things that it weakens the memory:

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared …

I recently asked the following questions:

Assuming all other requirements are the same:

1. Is a vegan a vegetarian?
2. Is a vegetarian a vegan?

To my (somewhat) surprise, this drew quite a lot of interest from colleagues, friends, and even people on Facebook I hadn't talked to for years, with lots …

This website is now self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi server at home. I had struggled with nginx and HTTPS in the past, so was rather pleasantly surprised to see how straightforward it was.

I couldn't find anything on the web that walked one through the whole process, so here are …