Crippling Your Technology, Part 1

Sometimes it feels like I blog only when I can't sleep. Maybe that's why these posts lack content.

Quotient spaces, visually understood

Quotient spaces until recently gave me a great deal of trouble. I had no intuition for them, and no image to latch on to.

More Diverse Music Thanks To Computers

I was just going through my to-do list about 10 minutes ago and one item on it was "listen to more diverse music". Well, I'm lazy and that's never going to happen on its own. So I wrote a short shell script to make it easier.

Custom infix operators

I started thinking of this after mucking around with Python's os module a lot more recently.

My First Vim Plugin

I wrote a Vim plugin to replace Notational Velocity.

Researchers should buy an iPad Pro

I've got a lot of use out of my iPad Pro. I think it's one of the few purchases that makes you more productive as a researcher, and I've convinced a lot of researchers to buy it. Now I'll try to convince you.

Training Yourself To Build A Better Workflow On A Computer

Some Cringy Self-Promotion

less pager filter command

I'm using the less pager more and more these days.

Simple is Difficult

You want to know a secret? Writing what you call good music is easy, piece of cake. You're writing for intelligent, educated people who are prepared to meet you halfway. It's the army songs and the romantic ballads that made me sweat blood."

Stop using Drop Caps

They look terrible, mess up the formatting of a page, and make it annoying to copy plaintext, like God intended.

One View of Lazy Evaluation

From Simon Peyton Jones's interview in Coders At Work by Peter Siebel.

The Feeling of Being at an Airport

Best described by K. J. Parker.

Y'all Should Eat Mackarel

Most people don't seem all that fired up about mackerel, especially for things other than sushi (grilled or fried). To be fair, it does spoil awfully fast.

What Is It Good For?

If they're really not all that different from us, what are we slaughtering each other for?"

He sighed.

"Honour," he said. "Moral imperatives, to defend our country and our way of life. Money, of course, and eternal glory, and to defend our trading interests. Because we're right and they're wrong. Because evil must be resisted, and sooner or later there comes a time when men of principle have to make a stand. Because war is good for business and it's better to die on our feet than live on our knees. Because the fire god is on our side, and it's our duty to Him. Because they started it.

But at this stage in the proceedings," he added, with a slightly lopsided grin, "mostly from force of habit."

The Lambdas of Notes

Here's a vaguely math-y analogy.

Getting Help in the Terminal

Unix is not beginner friendly. It was designed by some of the best computer scientists in the world when it was hard to tell if ordinary people would ever use a computer. So beginner-friendliness was not a priority.