My blog about linguistics, computing, politics and whatever else passes through my head
The Mythical Progressive Alliance (2010-05-03)
With the polls showing both that the Liberal Democrats are doing well and that it may be hard for the Conservatives to win a large majority, a lot of people are back to talking about the “progressive alliance”. This has happened most in the Labour camp, where there have been ...
moreEaster In Andalucía (2010-04-02)
Things have been quiet recently because I’ve been enjoying a holiday in the south of Spain. I think Spring is definitely the right time to visit – the sun shines but it is cool to warm rather than hot. I don’t mind the heat too much, and I’ve ...
moreIs Haskell Fast? (2010-04-02)
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the functional programming language Haskell. It seems to be very popular at the moment, and is often recommended to programmers as a language to expose them to new ideas. And I do find some of its features interesting, but that’s a topic for ...
moreSpeed And Parsing (2010-03-16)
Well, the sound change applier is back in a usable state again. All the basic functionality works, and the code is even cleaner than it was. It’s following the general pattern with my personal programming projects: I usually prototype first and gradually refine, rather than trying to get it ...
moreRedundancy In Python (2010-03-16)
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the fact that Python (and a lot of other programming languages) have a lot of redundancy in the basic structures that they offer. In particular, there are a lot of ways of grouping together code with state which are similar in some ways and ...
moreOpen Source Licensing (2010-03-07)
The sound change library I’ve been writing is finally getting close to the stage where I’m thinking about releasing it. There are still a large number of improvements I’d like make, and more tidying up to do, but that’s a matter for another post.
Anyway, I ...
moreRepresenting Phones (2010-03-02)
Now that code formatting works, I’m going to start describing how the sound change applier that I’ve been writing works. I think it’s worth writing about because:
- It’s slowly coming into shape as a fairly self-contained reusable library which can be distributed
- It’s one of ...
Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief (2010-03-01)
Well, this weekend Esther and I went to see “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief”. I have to admit that we weren’t too optimistic about it before going in, but there wasn’t that much else at the cinema which appealed to us. So expectations weren’t high.
Having ...
moreCode Formatting (2010-03-01)
Hopefully, code formatting should now work for this blog. If it does, then I’m going to start a series of posts soon on the design on my sound change python library. Here’s a test:
class Phone(list):
__init__(self):
pass
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The Gloss Plugin Works! (2010-02-26)
Well, after a few evenings of fiddling with PHP, I think I’ve finally got my simple dokuwiki gloss plugin doing what I want it to. It’s probably still not perfect, and might be improved by adding some extra features, but it’s good enough and it has the ...
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