Debugging Turing: An excursion with Scheme

code 10 August 2009 | 0 Comments

So, I thought it would be a fun idea for my first ever Lisp/Scheme program to implement Alan Turing’s original a-machines from his paper, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (paper available to public). Fun? Oh, I hadn’t any idea… Preamble; choice of implementation I decided to go with the latest and [...]

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What can we fit in 140 characters?

code 27 May 2009 | 0 Comments

This is in reference to the current ‘Twitter image encoding challenge’ running on StackOverflow. If we want to restrict ourselves to assigned, non-control, non-private Unicode characters, then by my reckoning that gives us 129,775 available characters. wget http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt awk -F ‘;’ UnicodeData.txt -f countUnichars.awk | bc countUnichars.awk source: BEGIN { print "ibase=16" } # set [...]

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Making Maya’s Python palatable

code 3 March 2009 | 2 Comments

Maya’s python interface leaves something to be desired, as it seems like a straight port of their existing MEL interface with no additional thought put into designing a nice OO interface. For example, here is how to set or get the ‘radius’ attribute of a sphere: s = cmds.sphere() r = cmds.sphere(s, query=True, radius=True) cmds.sphere(s, [...]

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Cleaning up a set of tags with Awk

code,commentary,replies,utility 28 January 2009 | 3 Comments

Introduction David R. MacIver has recently written this blog post about cleaning up a set of tags. This blog post, on the other hand, is about a nice old Unix tool called ‘awk’. Awk is one of those programs that is often overlooked. It is really a small domain-specific language for processing text. In some [...]

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