Passing Curiosity


This is the complete archive of posts at Passing Curiosity in reverse chronological order.

Posts before September 2007 were originally posted on other – now defunct – blogs. I’m gradually cleaning them up, but there may be some broken links and the like.

May 2, 2013

Sydney Python User Group, May 2013

The May meeting of the Sydney Python user group had talks about Python on the Raspberry-Pi, the pandas library, R, and gstreamer.

April 24, 2013

FP-Syd, April 2013

The April 2013 meeting of the FP-Syd group had presentations about GPU programming with Accelerate and little languages using the Free data structure.

April 24, 2013

AWS Summit, Sydney

My thoughts on the Amazon Web Services Summit 2013 in Sydney.

March 21, 2013

Sydney Drupal Meetup, March 2013

My first Drupal meetup since moving to Sydney.

September 16, 2012

Injection avoidance in Haskell

A proof of concept technique for writing injection-proof APIs in Haskell.

August 19, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Server performance

Notes from a talk about server performance at Pycon AU 2012.

August 19, 2012

PyconAU 2012: No, Bad Pony!

Notes from a talk about Django feature requests and why they don’t get implemented at Pycon AU 2012.

August 19, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Message queueing

Notes from a talk about message queue solutions at Pycon AU 2012.

August 19, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Django Testing

Notes from a talk about testing Django solutions at Pycon AU 2012.

August 19, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Continuous Deployment

Notes from a talk about continuous deployment at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Unexpected Day

Notes from a talk about using the Python FFI and libpcap at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Testing and being lazy and stuff

Notes from a talk about testing Python web projects at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Natural language processing

Notes from a talk at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Notes on Mike Ramm’s keynote

Notes from a talk at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Python’s dark corners

Notes from a talk at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Writing command-line applications

Notes from a talk about writing command-line applications in Python at Pycon AU 2012.

August 18, 2012

PyconAU 2012: Implementing a cloud service in Python

Notes from a talk at Pycon AU 2012.

September 19, 2011

Tweaking the configuration of cabal-dev

While cabal-dev is great, I need to make a few tweaks to its default configuration before it’s useful.

August 31, 2011

Using git repositories for platform versioning

This is a guide to my current thoughts on using git to maintain and distribute platform releases for Drupal-based projects.

July 11, 2011

“Drupal 7: theming forms with tables”

This is a quick guide to using tables for layout of forms in Drupal 7 without being naughty.

April 1, 2011

Trip to Japan

I’m on holiday in Japan right now.

January 18, 2011

Getting rid of Boot Camp volumes

A short overview of my last few hours fighting to get rid of the Boot Camp, Ubuntu Linux and rEFIt volumes on my Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard. It was a struggle, but I got there.

January 12, 2011

Planning for DrupalDownunder

I’m off to Brisbane later this month for DrupalDownunder (and LCA). This is a quick overview of the things I’m looking forward to.

November 10, 2010

IE performance problem turns out to be images not found

A quick post describing a performance problem I encountered in Internet Explorer and what it turned out to be.

November 10, 2010

Fixing the “Reformat Quoted Text” command in TextMate

How to fix the “Reformat Quoted Text” command in TextMate so that it works on Intel Macs (without installing Rosetta).

October 11, 2010

Using ImageMagick and GD2 together with Drupal ImageCache

A quick (working!) introduction to using ImageMagick in custom ImageCache actions while using GD as your default toolkit.

July 6, 2010

Going Further with Litecal

This article builds on my last by adding additional features to a calendar view based on litecal.

July 5, 2010

Using Litecal

This is a quick introduction to using the litecal module to display month calendars on Drupal powered web-sites.

May 11, 2010

Providing default settings for Django applications

There doesn’t seem to be an official way for a Django application to provide default values for its “custom” settings - you just document them somewhere and hope that the users take note. Here is some proof of concept code to automatically inject an application’s defaults into Django’s settings.

April 14, 2010

Updating an INI file with AWK

A colleague asked if I knew a way to edit a line in a particular section of a .ini file in a shell script. There are plenty of ways to do this, but my answer is in AWK.

April 10, 2010

Barcamp Perth rides again

Barcamp Perth 4.0 (or 2010, there seems to be some confusion) was held today at the Central Institute of Technology. Here are some notes about the day.

January 18, 2010

Attribute Oriented Programming in PHP

The fourth talk at the Open Programming Language Miniconf 2010 was Peter Serwylo’s presentation about Attribute Oriented Programming in PHP.

January 18, 2010

Notes on Preparing for PHP6

My notes on Ben Balbo’s talk at Open Programming Language Miniconf 2010: Preparing for PHP6.

January 18, 2010

Notes on Introducing Gearman

My notes on Giuseppe Maxia’s talk at Open Programming Language Miniconf 2010: Introducing Gearman – Distributed server for all languages.

January 18, 2010

Notes on Haskell, and all the wonderful things it doesn’t let you do

My notes on Stephen Blackheath’s talk at Open Programming Language Miniconf 2010: Haskell, and all the wonderful things it doesn’t let you do.

January 17, 2010

Welcome to LCA2010

So LCA2010 is underway. It’s been busy and it’s only day two (day one really), so I’ll give a brief recap so that I can remember it later.

January 15, 2010
January 13, 2010

Progress with Jekyll

I’ve made a bit of progress hacking on this blog the last few nights…

January 12, 2010

Converting to Jekyll

This blog has been languishing for months now, nearly untouched. I’m changing that now, by throwing WordPress away and replacing it with Jekyll.

November 4, 2009

Nick Cowie’s talk on Progressive Enhancement with CSS3

My notes on Nick Cowie’s talk “Progressive Enhancement with CSS3” at Edge of the Web 2009.

November 4, 2009

Dmitry Baranovskiy’s talk on Your JavaScript Library

My notes on Dmitry Baranovskiy’s talk “Your JavaScript Library” at Edge of the Web, 2009.

November 4, 2009

Lachlan Hardy’s session The Open Web

My notes on Lachlan Hardy’s presentation “The Open Web” at Edge of the Web, 2009.

November 4, 2009

Anil Dash’s keynote on “Next Year’s Web”

My notes on Anil Dash’s keynot speech on “Next Year’s Web” at Edge of the Web, 2009.

November 3, 2009

Logging the locking in SPIP

The rather hackish way I instrumented SPIP to record debugging information about its file locking to a remote syslog server.

November 2, 2009

Edge of the Web 2009

A list of the sessions I plan to attend at the Edge of the Web, 2009.

October 20, 2009

Treatments, Typography, and Markdown for SPIP

A quick and rather hackish way to replace SPIP’s built-in text markup format with Markdown.

October 14, 2009
September 26, 2009
September 20, 2009
September 1, 2009
August 18, 2009
August 16, 2009
August 16, 2009
August 10, 2009
August 5, 2009

Adding a distance function to MySQL

This is a quick and rather hackish way to add a “distance” function to MySQL and call it from the Django ORM framework.

July 27, 2009
July 20, 2009

Writing view decorators for Django

Using decorators to wrap and modify Django views is quick, easy, composable, and just about the most awesome thing I’ve seen in a while. It also takes a little bit of figuring out. Here’s my explanation…

July 18, 2009
July 18, 2009

Notes on “Statecharts and Numbats”

This post consists of my notes on the Statecharts and Numbats presentation by Harry McNally at Perth Barcamp 3.0.

July 18, 2009

Notes on Perth Barcamp 3

Some notes about Barcamp Perth 3.0.

July 18, 2009
July 18, 2009

Notes on “Adruino hacking”

Notes from a session on Arduino hacking are Barcamp Perth.

July 13, 2009
June 25, 2009

Haskell FastCGI with Apache

Getting started writing web applications in Haskell is pretty easy with FastCGI.

June 22, 2009

Django form fields and templates

Determining the type of a form field object from a Django template requires writing a new filter.

April 16, 2009

Specifying a UNIX socket using MySQL with Django

Configuring Django to connect to MySQL with a socket according to the official documentation works fine (for me), but it breaks the dbshell command (for me). This is how I configured it so that Django works and so does the dbshell command.

March 30, 2009
March 30, 2009

Authorising user actions in SPIP

One of the APIs that many SPIP plug-ins will need to use is autoriser() – the function which determines whether a user should be permitted to perform a given operation. As I couldn’t find any document on using this function, here are a few notes.

March 27, 2009

SPIP tags with multiple aliases

This post describes creating SPIP tags with multiple “names” (like #INCLURE and #INCLUDE) and taking the technique further to implement families of related tags.

March 11, 2009

Dynamic tags, fake arguments, and AST mangling in SPIP

Sometimes a dynamic SPIP tag (one evaluated at request time) needs details about the template, but this information is not available. This post describes a technique for passing data from the AST into the tag’s static and dynamic evaluation functions.

March 11, 2009
March 5, 2009

Hierarchical Rights in Drupal

There’s been a bit of noise about alternatives to the rather limited permissions system in Drupal. Here are a few of my thoughts about one proposal.

March 3, 2009
March 3, 2009

Content types and dispositions in PHP

Exporting data as CSV is pretty run of the mill for most web developers (though generating “valid” CSV is not exactly trivial), but every time I do I find myself figuring out how to force the browsers to save it to a file. This quick post is about using a Content-Disposition header to strongly suggest that browsers save the data to a file.

December 10, 2008
December 8, 2008

Literate Haskell with Markdown and Syntax Highlighting

This post describes the scripts I (used to) use to turn a literate Haskell programme (with Markdown formatted literate comments) into HTML and PDFs using Pandoc.

December 7, 2008
December 3, 2008
November 25, 2008

A better way to control attributes in SPIP templates

This post describes a PHP function to replace SPIP’s inserer_attribut and extraire_attribut filters with a single jQuery-inspired attr filter.

November 19, 2008
November 19, 2008
November 3, 2008
August 10, 2008

Matching Brackets in Cocoa

Once you’ve got a piece of code to check that a string uses correctly matched brackets, hooking it up to widgets in Interface Builder is pretty simple.

August 2, 2008
July 24, 2008
July 23, 2008
July 22, 2008
July 21, 2008
July 20, 2008
July 18, 2008
July 15, 2008
July 8, 2008
July 8, 2008
June 28, 2008
May 10, 2008

World Blog Awards

Notes from an announcement at Barcamp Perth 2009 about the “World Blog Awards”.

May 10, 2008

Using Rails and Flex

Notes from a talk on Using Rails and Flex at Barcamp Perth 2009.

May 10, 2008

TiddlyWiki presentation

Notes on a talk about TiddlyWiki at Barcamp Perth 2009.

May 10, 2008

Starting your own web-business

Notes from a Barcamp Perth 3.0 talk on starting your own web business by Paul Faix.

May 10, 2008

Myles-i the web guy

Notes from a question and answer session with Myles Eftos at Barcamp Perth 3.0.

May 10, 2008

Model View Controller

Some notes from a Barcamp talk about Model-View-Controller in ASP.Net.

May 10, 2008
May 10, 2008
May 10, 2008

Angel Funding Q & A session

Some questions and answers about angel funding and venture capital for web projects and about Silicon Valley.

January 10, 2007
January 10, 2007
January 9, 2007
January 4, 2007
January 4, 2007
January 4, 2007
December 22, 2006
December 22, 2006
December 20, 2006
December 20, 2006
December 19, 2006
December 18, 2006
December 18, 2006
December 18, 2006
November 24, 2006
November 24, 2006
November 17, 2006
November 16, 2006
November 16, 2006
November 8, 2006
November 8, 2006
November 8, 2006
November 8, 2006
November 8, 2006
November 7, 2006
November 7, 2006
November 4, 2006
October 30, 2006
October 10, 2006
October 2, 2006
September 29, 2006
September 28, 2006
September 27, 2006
September 26, 2006
September 25, 2006
September 18, 2006
August 20, 2006
August 15, 2006
August 14, 2006
August 13, 2006
August 13, 2006
August 11, 2006
August 11, 2006

Megatokyo volume four

A quick review of Megatokyo book four.

August 11, 2006
August 4, 2006
July 11, 2006
June 30, 2006
June 28, 2006
June 27, 2006
June 27, 2006
June 23, 2006
June 19, 2006
June 14, 2006
June 12, 2006
June 4, 2006
May 28, 2006
May 28, 2006
May 28, 2006
May 27, 2006

Transactional memory with data invariants

A few thoughts about a Transactional memory with data invariants by Tim Harris and SPJ.

May 26, 2006
May 19, 2006
May 11, 2006
May 10, 2006
May 9, 2006
May 9, 2006
May 8, 2006
May 6, 2006
May 5, 2006
May 5, 2006
April 29, 2006
April 28, 2006
April 28, 2006
April 26, 2006
April 24, 2006
April 20, 2006
April 20, 2006
April 14, 2006
April 14, 2006
April 13, 2006
April 12, 2006
April 11, 2006

Transactional memory with data invariants (DRAFT)

A few thoughts about a draft paper Transactional memory with data invariants.

April 11, 2006
April 11, 2006
April 9, 2006
April 9, 2006
April 8, 2006
April 7, 2006
April 5, 2006
April 4, 2006
April 4, 2006
April 2, 2006
March 31, 2006
March 31, 2006
March 22, 2006
March 21, 2006
March 19, 2006
March 19, 2006
March 19, 2006
March 18, 2006
March 18, 2006
March 8, 2006
March 8, 2006
March 7, 2006
March 7, 2006
March 7, 2006
March 7, 2006
March 6, 2006
March 3, 2006
March 3, 2006
March 1, 2006
February 28, 2006
February 28, 2006
February 28, 2006
February 28, 2006
February 26, 2006
February 26, 2006
February 26, 2006
February 26, 2006
February 26, 2006
February 26, 2006
January 24, 2006
December 3, 2005
November 29, 2005
November 4, 2005
November 3, 2005
November 3, 2005
November 2, 2005
October 26, 2005
October 26, 2005
October 26, 2005
September 19, 2005
September 17, 2005
September 16, 2005
September 12, 2005
September 2, 2005
September 2, 2005
August 31, 2005
August 31, 2005
August 30, 2005
August 26, 2005
August 25, 2005
August 25, 2005
August 22, 2005
August 20, 2005
August 16, 2005
August 16, 2005
August 15, 2005
August 14, 2005
August 14, 2005
August 13, 2005
August 12, 2005
August 8, 2005
August 7, 2005
August 7, 2005
August 6, 2005
August 5, 2005
August 5, 2005
August 5, 2005

RSChem is Burning Down, Burning Down, Burning Down…

There was a fire at the Research School of Chemistry.

August 5, 2005
August 5, 2005
August 5, 2005
August 2, 2005
August 1, 2005
July 31, 2005
July 29, 2005
July 28, 2005
July 27, 2005
July 27, 2005
July 26, 2005
July 26, 2005
July 25, 2005
July 25, 2005
July 25, 2005
July 23, 2005
July 21, 2005
July 20, 2005
July 20, 2005
July 19, 2005
July 19, 2005
July 19, 2005
July 18, 2005
July 18, 2005
July 18, 2005
July 18, 2005
July 17, 2005
July 17, 2005
July 17, 2005
July 14, 2005
July 12, 2005
July 10, 2005
July 10, 2005
July 10, 2005
July 9, 2005
July 3, 2005
June 27, 2005
June 27, 2005
June 24, 2005
June 24, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
June 22, 2005
June 22, 2005
June 22, 2005
June 21, 2005
June 20, 2005
June 20, 2005
June 18, 2005
June 17, 2005
June 16, 2005
June 11, 2005
June 11, 2005
June 10, 2005
June 10, 2005
June 10, 2005
June 10, 2005
June 9, 2005
June 8, 2005
June 8, 2005
June 8, 2005
June 7, 2005
June 5, 2005
May 31, 2005
May 28, 2005
May 28, 2005
May 28, 2005
May 26, 2005
May 24, 2005
May 24, 2005
May 22, 2005
May 20, 2005
May 19, 2005
May 14, 2005
May 13, 2005
May 8, 2005
May 7, 2005
May 5, 2005
May 4, 2005
May 3, 2005
May 3, 2005
April 30, 2005
April 25, 2005
April 25, 2005
April 25, 2005
April 14, 2005
April 11, 2005

A Comics Update

Notes on a few new comics including Nightmares & Fairy Tales, Courtney Crumrin, and Gloom Cookie.

April 10, 2005
April 9, 2005
April 8, 2005
April 5, 2005
April 4, 2005
April 4, 2005
March 27, 2005
March 15, 2005
March 11, 2005
March 11, 2005
March 8, 2005
March 6, 2005
March 5, 2005
March 5, 2005
March 5, 2005
March 2, 2005
March 2, 2005
March 2, 2005
March 2, 2005
March 1, 2005
March 1, 2005
March 1, 2005
March 1, 2005
March 1, 2005
February 24, 2005
February 23, 2005
February 23, 2005
February 23, 2005
February 11, 2005
February 4, 2005
February 4, 2005
February 4, 2005

Some More Comics

Notes on a few new comics and manga: Dead@17, Aria, and Remote.

February 2, 2005
February 2, 2005
February 2, 2005
February 2, 2005
February 1, 2005
February 1, 2005
January 28, 2005
January 28, 2005
January 28, 2005
January 24, 2005
January 24, 2005
January 20, 2005
January 20, 2005
January 19, 2005
January 17, 2005
January 13, 2005
January 13, 2005
January 10, 2005
January 10, 2005
January 6, 2005
January 6, 2005
January 6, 2005
December 27, 2004
December 27, 2004
December 22, 2004
December 20, 2004
December 20, 2004
December 18, 2004
December 15, 2004
December 15, 2004

A Radial Layout

My first approach at generating a radial layout of the graph data logged by the theorem prover.

November 26, 2004

“Verbosity: Not always a bad thing!”

It appears that we need to set very_verbose to get the prover to output clauses generated by factorisation, etc. Without this, we get only 5 clauses from LCL403 instead of the nearly 30,000 expected.

November 25, 2004

Data, Data, Everywhere

The amount of data produced by the problems may pose a problem. LCL005 produces more than 600MB of output and generates over 6,000,000 events. Processing this data into a graph description is the next phase of the project.

November 24, 2004

Graphviz, Dot, Large Graphs and Crashing!

Running GraphViz on my generated dot files exhausts memory and dies. I’ll need to either use a smaller problem, or another visualisation tool.

November 23, 2004

Graphviz, Dot and Large Graphs

Notes on my graph visualisation project.