Way back in May and June 2005 I published the following posts on my personal blog (ecclestoad.co.uk). Now that I’ve scrapped that blog I’m republishing it here.
May 25, 2005 — Sudoku solver in four lines
Slightly silly perhaps but I thought it would be fun to write a piece of code to solve these sudoku puzzles that keep popping up. As that appeared to be trivial I decided to see if it could be done in four lines or less. Here it is:
It is slightly arcane in its usage but what do you expect from four lines of Perl? The best way to run it is…
Two months ago I stopped doing what I’d been doing for the last three years. I was a coder, but have written almost no code. Daily IRC chats have become none. Twitter stayed unchecked. I’ve sent less than 10 real emails.
By not having external influences affect what I do or think about I’ve been able to reach a new stable state and introspect about it. With some surprising results. The me of two months ago is not the me of today.
Metrics and quantification
I can tell you how many tweets I’ve composed, how many Facebook or LinkedIn contacts I have, commits…
Why sometimes it is better just to fix things after they break
I’m currently sitting in a desert. Mendoza, in Argentina, gets about 230mm of rain a year. In February it should get around 38mm. Without irrigation it would just be dry dusty scrub. With irrigation it is a wonderful place to grow grapes. In satellite photos it appears to be a patchwork of green squares on a dusty yellow background.
This February has been very wet — we’re likely to have 50mm today and the same again tomorrow, and it rained hard last week too. …
