I’ve been following the drama of the RustConf Keynote Fiasco (RKNF, per @fasterthanlime) from a great distance - I’m not involved in that community beyond starting to learn the language. But the controversial topic itself Compile-Time Reflection seemed like something interesting I could learn something about.
[Read More]Which Plot Was That?
Plotly subplots and customdata
Plotly has a nice way of making click-events available to the calling language, but
it doesn’t quite work simply when using subplot()
. This isn’t a post about a new
feature, but I didn’t quickly find a resource for it so I’ll add my findings to
make it easier for the next person.
Polyglot Exploration of Function Overloading
I’ve been working my way through Exercism exercises in a variety of languages because I strongly believe every language you learn something about teaches you about all the others you know, and makes for useful comparisons between what features they offer. I was Learning Me a Haskell for Great Good (there’s a guide/book by that name) and something about Pattern Matching just seemed extremely familiar.
[Read More]The Most Complex Puzzle I've Ever Solved
Don’t show me puzzles, unless you want to be responsible for me staying up too late solving them. I’m far too easily nerd-sniped. This one was certainly the most complex I’ve ever solved. Quite complicated too, but definitely the most complex (you’ll see).
[Read More]Polyglot Sorting
I’ve had the impression lately that everyone is learning Rust and there’s plenty of great material out there to make that easier. {gifski} is perhaps the most well-known example of an R package wrapping a Rust Cargo crate. I don’t really know any system language particularly well, so I figured I’d wade into it and see what it’s like.
[Read More]Australian Signals Directorate 50c Coin Decryption
Updated: 2022-09-04
I took a very long time to post about the last Australian Signals Directorate (then DSD) decryption, so this time I’ll be a lot more punctual. This article was published today announcing that ASD have collaborated to release a new 50c coin containing a decryption challenge.

The new ASD 50c coin
Where for (loop) ARt Thou?
A loop by any other name...
I’ve long been interested in exactly how R works - not quite enough for me to learn all the internals, but I was surprised that I could not find a clear guide towards exactly how vectorization works at the deepest level.
[Read More]Codegolfing Minecraft Lighting
I occasionally like to participate in an odd sport known as ‘code golf’ where the aim is to write some code to achieve a given task using the smallest number of characters.

The tradtional way to cheat at golf is to lower your score
Adventures in x86 ASM with rx86
I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way.
The section on encoding instructions for the processor (built up from logic gates) - assembly instructions as a human readable version of the machine code - was particularly interesting to me, and as I was describing this to a colleague I remembered that it’s not the first time I’ve played with assembly…

x86 assembly instructions
Improving a Visualization
I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021

US Streaming Services Market Share, 2020 vs 2021
and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvement techniques.
[Read More]