Essays on programming, mathematics, and technical writing.
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing. It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life. In…
This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there i…
Let me share a very silly story from roughly 18 years ago! In 2008, I joined RSA, the network security company named after the initials of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, who were also the founders of RSA, the company. There was…
Commenting Guidelines comments section, carefully maintained and curated by the author of this website. When commenting on this website, please keep the following points in mind: comments section. comments section is a sure way to ruin this carefully maintaine…
It is a commonly held opinion that educational institutions could do more to improve the pedagogy of mathematics. This is especially applicable to primary and secondary schools, where students are first exposed to mathematics as a formal subject, along with ot…
Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's excellent post I've banned query strings. Contents Wisdom on the Web Wander on the Web Misfeature Broken URLs Qualms Conclusion Wisdom on t…
Wander Console 0.6.0 is now available. This is the sixth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website discover interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To…
Yesterday, I switched my website from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. In case you are wondering whether you have somehow landed on an ancient post from 2010, no, you have not. Yes, this is the year 2026, and I have finally switched from RSS feeds to Atom feeds. Yes,…
QuickQWERTY 1.2.3 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the browser. This release includes two small bug fixes. In the previous release, QuickQWERTY source code management moved from GitHub t…
QuickQWERTY 1.2.1 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the web browser. This release contains a minor bug fix in Unit 4.3. Unit 4.3 is a 'Control' unit that lets you practise typing partial…
When web-based social media started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social media. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would recei…
Today, we will meet a spiky-haired nerd named Corey Dumm, who normally lives within Markdown code fences. We will get to know him a bit, smile with him when his fences hold and weep quietly when misfortune strikes. One of the caveats of the Markdown universe i…
This is a note where I capture the various errors we receive when we create GitHub workflows that are smaller than the smallest possible workflow. I do not know why anyone would ever need this information and I doubt it will serve any purpose for me either but…
Introduction Contents Introduction Pitfalls Inverse Laws of Robotics Non-Anthropomorphism Non-Deference Non-Abdication of Responsibility Conclusion Pitfalls Three Laws of Robotics devised by Isaac Asimov, which recur throughout his work. These laws were design…
I am a strong proponent of running independent personal websites on your own domains and publishing your writing there. Doing so keeps the web diverse and decentralised, rather than concentrating most writing and discussion inside a small number of large platf…
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overs…
One of my favourite acronyms from the world of computing and technology is XINU. It stands for 'XINU Is Not Unix'. The delightful thing about this acronym is that XINU is also UNIX spelled backwards. For a given word W, a recursive acronym that both negates W…
Ideas ideas page where I keep a brief record of some ideas I might want to explore in the near future. For ideas I have already begun exploring, please see my now page or my web log instead. As of 03 Jan 2026, I have the following ideas in mind that I might wa…
Now now page where I keep a brief record of what I am up to these days. As of 03 Jan 2026, I am: Algebraic Graph Theory by Godsil and Royle. see here). Read on website | #meta
In this post, I return with a retrospective on my coding adventures, where I summarise my hobby projects and recreational programming activities from the current year. I did the last such retrospective in 2023. So I think this is a good time to do another retr…
Nerd Quiz #3 is the third release of Nerd Quiz, a single-page HTML application that invites you to test your nerd level through a short quiz. Each question is inspired by everyday moments of reading, writing, thinking, learning and exploring. This release intr…
Mark V. Shaney Junior 0.2.0 is the second release of this little Markov gibberish generator. This release brings two small changes. First, it now reads the training data from standard input instead of a hardcoded file. Second, the program filename has been cha…
Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs. It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that…
Mark V. Shaney Junior is a minimal implementation of a Markov gibberish generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user in the 1980s that posted messages to newsgroups using text generated b…
How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting…
A version of my CSS Fizz Buzz that uses ordered list () to reduce code. However, I don't quite like how misaligned the numbers and the words look. Correcting that would call for extra code that would cancel out the bytes saved. Read on website | #web
An implementation of Fizz Buzz in four lines of CSS. Read on website | #web
On #emacs IRC or Matrix channels, we often share references to the built-in Emacs documentation as Elisp expressions that look like this: (info "(emacs) Basic Undo") (info "(emacs) Word Search") GNU Emacs Manual: Word Search. The reason for sharing Elisp expre…
In this note I elaborate the proof of a claim regarding Cayley graphs of symmetric groups with transpositions as generators that I found in the book Algebraic Graph Theory by Chris Godsil and Gordon Royle. This claim appears as commentary in Section 3.10 about…