My son bought me these polished hematite balls. We're both hematite fans. They're quite magnetic. If you get the rotations right they're happy enough to sit in this arrangement. At the beginning of this year I began a Diploma in Science, at the University of Queensland. For several years I've been thinking about how...

Some time last year, during one of the many bouts of minor illness which strike children who attend daycare or kindergarten, ours was laid up on the couch watching episode after episode of Go Jetters. We must've watched everything then hosted on ABC iView at least three or four times. I wasn't feeling too well...

I stumbled into what might be some combinatorial esoterica and I can't stop thinking about it. Books Up until April 2023 we had a pretty special second hand book shop up the road, next to the local café1. While it was there my mid morning coffee runs usually involved having a browse and I often picked something up....

I stumbled into what might be some combinatorial esoterica and I can't stop thinking about it. Books Up until April 2023 we had a pretty special second hand book shop up the road, next to the local café1. While it was there my mid morning coffee runs usually involved having a browse and I often picked something up....

Lately I've been thinking about really fun solutions. You know, those solutions which use some insight you were completely unaware of and make it all look like magic. It's been more than once that I've found myself stumbling into something called combinatorics when trying to learn more about them. On the way to...

Lately I've been thinking about really fun solutions. You know, those solutions which use some insight you were completely unaware of and make it all look like magic. It's been more than once that I've found myself stumbling into something called combinatorics when trying to learn more about them. On the way to...

I read Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the commons on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a discussion about open source software communities. I believe this isn't an uncommon way for software folk to become aware of this book. Of the many fascinating insights Ostrom presents there are a few that have really stuck...

I read Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the commons on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a discussion about open source software communities. I believe this isn't an uncommon way for software folk to become aware of this book. Of the many fascinating insights Ostrom presents there are a few that have really stuck...

Let's say we've written a web app in Haskell. $ curl http://localhost:8000/hello/World Hello, World! $ curl http://localhost:8000/hello/Haskell Hello, Haskell! It sure would be nice if we could share it with other people. Let's deploy this wonderful thing to the internet using Heroku. Haskell and Nix Thanks to the...

The operations practice of defining infrastructure as code has been popular for a while, and it’s for good reason. Lot's of strange and unexpected things can happen to our very important web-servers, so being able to quickly build another one in a (close to) identical state can be very handy. Sadly, strange and...

A few years ago I watched the Structure and interpretation of computer programs video lectures, kindly posted publicly by MIT OpenCourseWare. There's so much interesting material in them but one part really struck me, in 5B: Computational Objects Gerald Jay Sussman defines a pair "in terms of nothing but air, hot...

My website has changed a bit over time. It was initially a WordPress blog, contorted to do double-duty as a folio for my design work. More recently it's been a static site, first generated by Metalsmith and later Hakyll. About a month ago I started to feel that hosting my site on Github pages was a little...