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

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

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.

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

I wrote a Vim plugin to replace Notational Velocity.

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.

Some Cringy Self-Promotion

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

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."

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

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

Best described by K. J. Parker.

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.

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."

Here's a vaguely math-y analogy.

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.