OddThinking

Wishing someone a Happy New Year may subject you to a Denial-of-Service Attack

In which Julian uses a modern computer (capable of billions of multiplications a second) as a notebook to record how to make a slide-rule (capable of performing a few per minute).

I just discovered the source of an intermittent boot problem I have noticed with my new computer. It was so bizarre, I wanted to tell someone immediately, and I know at least some of you guys will understand.

There was a rumour out on the web out there that HAL BBS wasn’t to be trusted – it had two backdoors built into the software. It was compiled BASIC, so it wasn’t easy to view the source, but I had a bash at finding those backdoors.

Inspired by a post there, I wrote a simple web-crawler that looked at the age, membership length and reputation of the users of StackOverflow.

I describe the method below, for people who like hearing about software. I graph the results below for people who like looking at colourful graphs. At the bottom, I have a quick conclusion for people who just want the summary.

In which Julian stumbles over the concept of Chemical Word Ladders, and proceeds to generate them.

The blogosphere tilted on its axis slightly last week when Donald Knuth had a birthday, and every Computer Science geek rushed to provide a tribute.

This article focuses on that message-passing system and the variants I have tried in the puzzle-solving architecture that has evolved over a number of pet projects.

In which Jeff Atwood dismisses my experience as “naïve”…