How to Build a Quine

A quine is simply a program that prints itself. This is my explanation of how they are built.

Writing a quine seems like a chicken-and-egg problem but if you really enforce the physical separation between data and code — that is defining the string to print and the…

My Jekyll and Git Workflow

A few weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to start blogging again. The reasons for why belong to another post but this is a purely technical explanation of how I setup git and jekyll to do things like drafts, site design tweaks and a write-anywhere environment.

The Fear

I wrestled in high school. Our team was good, even winning a state championship one year, and our team was filled with several highly-ranked wrestlers.

By my second year of high school, I was a good wrestler. I’d go up against these ranked wrestlers every day in practice and at first I…

Nobody puts tarsnap in a corner

I woke up this morning around 7:30 with my laptop (a Lenovo R61i running ArchLinux) not feeling quite as snappy as usual. After viewing top, I saw where my nightly backup to tarsnap was still running, which kicks off via cron. This script usually takes 5 minutes, tops.

Choose Your Medium Carefully

So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

Shutters and Apertures

Through college, I used a little Canon PowerShot that more or less had an on-and-off switch and handled all the messy details of focusing and metering for me. For capturing events, it worked, but there was nothing timeless or intriguing about the images I took.

A Sunday Story: 2011–12–11

This past week left me emotionally drained, with the excitement of signing on for my new job and putting my notice in at Flickr. I’ve started to say a few farewells at the office and each one leaves me in a slightly altered state. On top of that, I’ve been fighting the office flu…