Some time ago I stayed over at my dad's house for a few days while he convalesced from a minor operation. He's a great fan of Robert Goddard. Having said that he's recently mentioned that he needs to broaden his reading beyond Goddard. Dad's quite a slow reader, but my …

Someone requested that Imprimatur support HTTPS requests. It did seem an oversight, so I've remedied that with the newly released Imprimatur 017.

HTTPS requests are supported with the scheme attribute, which has a default of http, but can also be set to https. The scheme attribute can be used in …

I thought I'd read Jane Eyre because my friend has written a book on it. I'll own to not having read a single Bronte.

One observation; there are a lot of long silences. There's a Borat sketch where he says, 'there will now be a 10 minute silence'. Of course …

Shantini suggested that we see Inception, and I agreed enthusiastically.

Early on in the film, a character asked, 'why do you need an architect?', I laughed when they replied, 'they're the closest thing to creators of worlds in people's minds'. So not computer game designers then? Of course, an architect …

As you know, I'm growing ivy on the walls of my house to keep it cool in summer and warm in winter. Last year I posted a series of photos of the ivy I'm growing. Here's how the ivy looks like now:

Pamela Flitton is doing the best. The only …

Lexical scoping can only apply within a single source file. What you do about importing other files is a separate question. I think the Java importing solution is a practical one, but I'm open to suggestions!

If you didn't scope this at a module level (or provide some way of renaming variables on import) then either code reuse becomes very hit and miss, or people will be reduced to mangling variable names (e.g. inserting a java style package as a prefix for all).

Don't deny …

Looking at Python's global keyword led me to think how I'd like scoping to work. Some languages have lexical scoping, some dynamic scoping and some a mixture of two. I think scoping should be entirely lexical. My language (let's call it Klop) is dynamically typed, and variables are declared the …

I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 yesterday.

This was the first time I'd upgraded an existing installation, usually I wipe the disk and install afresh. The only problem I encountered after the upgrade was that the volume control was missing from the Gnome panel, but that was easily solved …

The doorbell sounded yesterday. My housemate answered and shouted up that it was for me. At the door was a man who stated, 'I'm from the local electricity company SSE, and I've come to do a rate check' (or words to that effect).

In the UK the electricity industry is …