The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance

Author: Jordi

  • Это Сан Франциско, город в стиле диско

    Pretty awesome day in the Bay Area today. The Russians summarised it so a couple of decades ago: We went to the computer history museum, I discovered that I have a bit of talent for Dance Dance Revolution and loved it (how did I manage to let that game intimidate me all this time and…

  • Andrew S. Tanenbaum, where have you been all my life?

    I’m currently reading Modern Operating Systems by Mr Tanenbaum in preparation for an important interview, and I have to stop to interject, what a fantastic book. I wish I had come across it earlier. It has very lucid and detailed explanations of many workings of computers that I have long wondered about but never had…

  • Octave documentation

    Yay, another patch of mine accepted into the Octave repository. Quite a trivial patch, but at least it was applied without hassle or modification. Maybe because it was only a documentation patch? I’ve got one other documentation patch in the works about coding standards for m-scripts distributed with Octave, which isn’t explicitly described anywhere. I…

  • TODO created

    So using Emacs’ org-mode, I’ve written a TODO list. It’s my list of tasks for the various projects I’m involved in. It’s quite fanciful for now, but at least I am certain that all the tasks in it are doable, with a modicum of effort. The advantage of using org-mode is that I can keep…

  • We’re back in the air!

    My laptop Iris is back from the shop, and it’s totally like this: There was a bit of a mixup in that her keyboard is now the wrong layout, but they promised me that they would order the previous layout (US layout, baby, big backslash keys, no L-shaped enter key!). For now, I got a…

  • Iris in the shop

    Iris is my laptop. She’s a Dellbuntu, which may soon become a collector’s item. About two weeks ago, I spilled some tea with sugar on her. She worked for a week after that, but her keyboard died unexpectedly a week later. I know, I know, I should have foreseen it, should have cleaned her, but…

  • Complex gcd in Octave

    So I wrote a couple of patches for Octave’s gcd. Jaroslav Hájek rewrote most of a bare bones implementation by David Bateman, but omitted Gaussian integers from the implementation. Octave has integral real types, but only float types for complex numbers, because for some inscrutable reason, C++ itself specifies that std::complex<T> is UB if T…

  • Linked on Reddit

    Oh, dear me. A few years ago, I wrote a strongly-worded opinion piece on just why I believe so strongly on free software. Today it was linked on Reddit. While I do want free software everywhere, and I would like to completely abolish the notion of proprietary software, I see that as a distant dream.…

  • A Personal Introduction to LiDIA

    LiDIA is a very old C++ library for computational number theory. The copyright statements inside its source say it’s from 1994. I’m not sure if it’s any good anymore, but it probably isn’t the best one out there, although at one time, it did have the best implementation anywhere for doing arithmetic with elliptic curves.…

  • Salve, cronica electronica!

    Hello, blog! Hopefully this post is the first of many. I plan to write about several things, both personal and more public/professional. I must say, WordPress was quite easy to set up, but I’m still not sold on PHP. I had to patch a few things here and there, in particular with this nifty $$\LaTeX$$…