Monthly Archives: March 2009

A sed Quirk

Posted on March 31, 2009 by MXH

The sed utility is a useful, if slightly obscure, tool. (Fortunately, there are excellent guides available to its use.) Today, however, I ran across an annoying incompatibility in one of its features, which I want to briefly discuss.

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Single Signs

Posted on March 29, 2009 by MXH

Remember this fascinating article? (It’s about those www.CITYNAMEsingles.com signs that were nearly ubiquitous 6-9 months ago.) If you don’t remember, or haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read. I have only an anecdotal note to add.

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WordPress Backups (con’t)

Posted on March 28, 2009 by MXH

This is a quick addenda to yesterday’s notes on backing up self-hosted WordPress blogs. I noticed that I neglected to make the scripts I described available as downloads, and that I didn’t illustrate the final piece of the puzzle: a … Continue reading →

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WordPress Backups

Posted on March 27, 2009 by MXH

If you run a self-hosted WordPress Blog, it’s probably a good idea to back it up now and again. Here I present some code that I use to back up my blog to Amazon’s S3 service, which might help you … Continue reading →

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Twitter

Posted on March 26, 2009 by MXH

Today, a brief contest between two theories explaining why you’ve been hearing so much about Twitter recently. Our contestants are Mickey Kaus, who has reasonable instincts for when he’s being had, and Seth Godin, who knows a lot about how … Continue reading →

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KenKen Puzzles

Posted on March 25, 2009 by MXH

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the construction of a solver for KenKen puzzles. Most people, of course, prefer to play these puzzles. To that end, I present a collection of roughly 1000 KenKen-style puzzles, available here.

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KenKen Solver – Multiple Solutions

Posted on March 23, 2009 by MXH

A reader asks if the KenKen solver we recently developed can handle puzzles with multiple solutions. It turns out to be pretty simple to modify the search-and-propagation algorithm to return all the solutions to a puzzle, instead of just one.

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Joe Calzaghe

Posted on March 22, 2009 by MXH

Joe Calzaghe retired from boxing last month. Calzaghe was generally regarded as the top fighter active in the 168 and 175 pound divisions. Debate about his career tends to center on whether he was merely a good fighter in a … Continue reading →

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Irony

Posted on March 21, 2009 by MXH

According to this article in Slate, Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a little-studied condition. I bet this news makes those diagnosed with NPD very, very unhappy.

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Overspecialized Constructors

Posted on March 20, 2009 by MXH

I want to discuss a simple mistake which recently caused me a disproportionate amount of trouble. I believe I violated a simple rule which might be formulated as “do not create overly specialized constructors in languages which lack constructor overloading“.

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