stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » niagara
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/category/niagara
An Irishman’s Fiery. Posted on August 6, 2006, under general. So, earlier this week, we deployed murphy.redbrick.dcu.ie. The T2000 Sun donated as the new main login server for RedBrick. It’s gone very well indeed, and it’s nice to have 16 Gigabytes of RAM to play with! It will be used as a development host for some Apache work, a web host for some high-traffic sites (including this one) and a few other things. We havn’t decided where to colocate it just yet, but have a few options. By far the best thing ...
blog.sciencevsmagic.net
Lets Play: Ancient Greek Geometry | sciencevsmagic.net
http://blog.sciencevsmagic.net/science/lets-play-ancient-greek-geometry
Lets Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. June 26, 2013. Today I’m releasing Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry. It’s a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I’ve always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles, straight lines, and their intersection points. You can read the wikipedia here. 8211; but watch out, some of the gifs are spoilers for the game.
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2009 » December
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/12
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for December, 2009. Posted on December 28, 2009, under general. So, about 2 minutes after taking this photo;. I slipped on the paraffin-laden solid granite pavement, everything went flying, and I ended up getting a very different kind of photo entirely;. Have been very good, and if you ever plan to break anything I can recommend doing it near them. Science is really really cool. Randomised control trials have shown that a simple millennia-old sling (not a cast) is the bes...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2009 » November
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/11
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for November, 2009. Posted on November 26, 2009, under general. Though it’s been a while coming. I wrote that there’d be a followup on scheduling periodic tasks. The most important point to get is that for nearly all real-world use cases the actual time that a “scheduled” task runs at doesn’t matter. Tasks that have to occur at a specific time on Tuesday are vanishingly rare. To produce a gigantic linear algebra equation, with 100s of parameters, that would balance the likeli...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2010 » March
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/03
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for March, 2010. Posted on March 29, 2010, under general. On the contrary, I can think of many many falsehoods, myths and bizarre theories the group has promoted. My favourite being the simple falsehood that the majority of schools in Ireland have satellite broadband connectivity. But the latest effort takes the prize. In an anonymous, unattributed blog-post with no contact details; http:/ irelandoffline.org/2010/03/eircom-and-next-generation-broadband/. In reality, there has...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2011 » May
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2011/05
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for May, 2011. Posted on May 15, 2011, under coding. On its own, that task can produce some fun results, but it’s also a very repurpose-able technique. You can use this kind of statistical generation to simulate realistic network jitter (record some N-tuples of observed RTT with ping), or awesome simulated-user fuzz tests (record some N-tuples of observed user inputs). It’s surprising that it isn’t more common. When coming to the problem, the first thing to decide is whether ...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2010 » September
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/09
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for September, 2010. Posted on September 2, 2010, under general. A common software engineering pattern is the need to test elements for set membership. Practical questions like “is this item in my cache” arise surprisingly often. Bloom Filters. Sets, and thought it was worth sharing. It’s definitely not the first time the technique has been used, Cian. First things first, some huge disclaimers;. The approach only works on. Here’s a summary of operations;. Adding to the set:.
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » Point Break
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/12/28/point-break
An Irishman’s Fiery. Posted on December 28, 2009, under general. So, about 2 minutes after taking this photo;. I slipped on the paraffin-laden solid granite pavement, everything went flying, and I ended up getting a very different kind of photo entirely;. Have been very good, and if you ever plan to break anything I can recommend doing it near them. Science is really really cool. Randomised control trials have shown that a simple millennia-old sling (not a cast) is the best treatment, so that’s...Over th...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » 2009 » September
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/09
An Irishman’s Fiery. Archive for September, 2009. Period Pain part 2. Posted on September 27, 2009, under general. Last week I wrote about problems with periodicity. But it was only half of the problem. But before moving on to the second half, it seems like a good time to post with some clarifications. I wrote that using some locally unique well-distributed value, such as a mac address, was better than choosing a random number once. But crucially, I left out. Mac addresses, and the hash, are both really ...
stdlib.net
/~colmmacc/ » Prime and Proper
http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/09/02/prime-and-proper
An Irishman’s Fiery. Posted on September 2, 2010, under general. A common software engineering pattern is the need to test elements for set membership. Practical questions like “is this item in my cache” arise surprisingly often. Bloom Filters. Are a great mechanism for performing this test, and if you haven’t encountered them before – they’re well worth knowing about. But over the last year, I’ve been experimenting with a different method for these kinds of membership tests on. The approach only works on.
