Computing

The problem is simple. Say you have a set of 12 elements. You want to find and to list every possible unique combination of those elements, irrespective of the ordering within each combination. The number of elements making up each combination can range between 1 and 12. Thanks to the demands of some university work, I've written a script that does just this (written in PHP). Whack it on your web server (or command-line), give it a spin, hack away at it, and use it to your heart's content.

We all know what Unicode is (if you don't, then read all about it and come back later). We all know that it's big. Hey, of course it's big: its aim is to allow for the representation of characters from every major language script in the world. That's gotta be a lot of characters, right? It's reasonably easy to find out how many unicode characters there are in total: e.g. the Wikipedia page (linked above) states that: "As of Unicode 5.1 there are 100,507 graphic [assigned] characters." I got a bit curious today, and — to my disappointment — after some searching, I was unable to find a nice summary of how many characters there are in each script that Unicode supports. And thus it is that I present to you my count of all assigned Unicode characters (as of v5.1), grouped by script and by category.

For a recent programming assignment that I was given at university, I was required to do some random number generation. I decided to write my program in such a way that it needed a set of random numbers (with a fixed set size), each of which had to be within a fixed range, and all of which had to add up to a fixed total. In other words, what I needed was a function that let me say: "give me 50 random numbers, and make sure that each of those numbers is between 1 and 20, and also make sure that the total of all those numbers is 200... and remember, despite all that, they have to be random!" Only problem? Finding a function that returns such data is extremely difficult.

Fortunately, I stumbled across the ingenious randfixedsum, by Roger Stafford. Randfixedsum — as its name suggests — does exactly what I was looking for. The only thing that was stopping me from using it, is that it's written in Matlab. And I needed it in C# (per the requirements of my programming assignment). And that, my friends, is the story of why I decided to port it! This was the first time I've ever used Matlab (actually, I used Octave, a free alternative), and it's pretty different to anything else I've ever programmed with. So I hope I've done a decent job of porting it, but let me know if I've made any major mistakes. I also ported the function over to PHP, as that's my language of choice these days. Download, tinker, and enjoy.

The language of law and the language of computers hardly seem like the most obvious of best buddies. Legislation endeavours to be unambiguous, and yet it's infamous for being plagued with ambiguity problems, largely because it's ultimately interpreted by subjective and unpredictable humang beings. Computer code doesn't try to be unambiguous, it simply is unambiguous — by its very definition. A piece of code, when supplied with any given input, is quite literally incapable of returning inconsistent output. A few weeks ago, I finished an elective subject that I studied at university, called Legal Method and Research. The main topic of the subject was statutory interpretation: that is, the process of interpreting the meaning of a single unit of law, and applying a given set of facts to it. After having completed this subject, one lesson that I couldn't help but take away (being a geek 'n' all) was how strikingly similar the structure of legislation is to the structure of modern programming code. This is because at the end of the day, legislation — just like code — needs to be applied to a real case, and it needs to yield a Boolean outcome.

I bought a new laptop at the start of this year, and since then I've experienced the "privilege" pile of festering camel dung that is being a user of Windows Vista. As with most things in Vista, installing Drupal and Apache is finickier than it used to be, back on XP. When I first went through the process, I encountered a few particularly weird little gotchas, and I scribbled them down for future reference. Here are some things to look out for, when the inevitable day comes in which you too will shine the light of Drupal upon the dark and smelly abyss of Vista:

1. Don't use the stop / start / restart Apache controls in the start menu (start > programs > Apache > control), as they are unreliable; use services.msc insetad (start > run > "services.msc").
2. Don't edit httpd.conf through the filesystem — use the 'edit httpd.conf' icon in the start menu instead (start > programs > Apache > configure), as otherwise your saved changes may not take effect.
3. If you're seeing the error message "http request status - fails" on Drupal admin pages, then try editing your 'c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts' file, and taking out the IPv6 mapping of localhost, as this can confuse the Windows mapping of 127.0.0.1 to localhost (restart for this to take effect).
4. Don't use Vista! If, however, you absolutely have no choice, then refer to steps 1-3.

Internet access is available anywhere these days — even on tropical islands in south-east Asia. Several weeks ago, I was on the island of Ko Tao in southern Thailand. Myself and several of my mates were discussing our views on the price of Internet usage. Most of us were in agreement that the standard Ko Tao rate of 2 baht per minute (about AUD$5 per hour) — which was standard across all of the island's many cafés — was exhorbitant, unacceptable and unjustifiable. One bloke, however, had visited the island ten years previously. He thought that the rate was completely fair — as he remembered that ten years earlier, the entire island had boasted only a single place offering access; and that back then, they were charging 60B/min! Nowadays, the standard rate in most parts of Thailand is about ½B/min, or even ¼B/min if you know where to look. This massive price difference got me thinking about what else regarding the 'Net has changed between 1998 and 2008. And the answer is: heck, what hasn't?

Every time that you perform any action in a desktop application, you can hit the trusty 'undo' button, to un-wreak any havoc that you may have just wreaked. One of the biggest shortcomings of web applications in general, is that they lack this crucial usability (and arguably security) feature. However, implementing an 'undo' (and 'redo') system in Drupal should be a relatively simple task - much simpler, in fact, than you might at first think.

I've been working on a project at University, in which my team had to produce a large number of software design documents, which now have to be translated into working code. Wouldn't it be great if I could write just one design specification, and if from that, numerous diagrams and skeleton code could all be auto-generated? What the world needs is a plain-text program design standard.

Attending the Web Essentials 2005 conference (others' thoughts on WE05) was the best thing I've done this year. I'm not kidding. The Navy SEALs, the heart surgeons, and the rocket scientists (i.e. the best of the best) in web design all spoke there. But guys, why did you have to overuse that confounded, annoying buzzword Web 2.0? And what's with the MacOcracy?

Want to know how the GreenAsh clock always tells you, with perfect accuracy, the time in Sydney Australia? Our secret is a little PHP function that modifies the clock according to the rules of NSW Daylight Savings Time. We are now sharing this code with the public for the first time.