Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard - Comments

Lucia: ICANN, you can't

nospam@example.com (Lucia) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:28:19 +0000

I agree,the American Government seems to be trying to control the world, being ‘the world’s policeman’, but if this type of censorship continues we may not be able to use the internet at all. I think Europe is better altogether and that it has a more interesting history, as well as better leadership. It just needs its own language. Thank you for your interesting blogs.

sanbikinoraion: Is that all that's wrong with PHP?

nospam@example.com (sanbikinoraion) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:05:03 +0000

In fact, you yourself showed me how to make the PHP even tidier: foreach (range(0,5) as $i) { $array[$start+86400*$i] = 100 * $i; }

Hagfish: Is that all that's wrong with PHP?

nospam@example.com (Hagfish) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:23:36 +0000

Almost ironically, this PHP blogging software couldn’t handle the “less than” sign in your comment, so it stripped it and all the subsequent characters you wrote from the HTML output.

Fortunately the unabridged comment was still stored in the database, so I took the liberty of converting the “less than” to a “less than or equal to”, which makes the syntax invalid (and untypeable) but still I hope gets across your point.

sanbikinoraion: Is that all that's wrong with PHP?

nospam@example.com (sanbikinoraion) — Fri, 14 May 2010 15:40:37 +0000

All groovy seems to really give you here is the neat (0..5).each syntax. In PHP, what you’ve written looks like this:

$start = 0; $foo = array(); for ($i=0;$i≤5;$i++) {$array[$start+86400*$i] = 100 * $i;}

Which is just as much of a one-liner, if you’ll insist on writing all your braces on the same line. The difference is that PHP isn’t relying on a magic ‘it’ variable, which is only implicitly declared and initialized in groovy.

tool: National Anthem

nospam@example.com (tool) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:43:03 +0000

Jes, versajne tiel estis

adze: Splitting arbitrary length strings

nospam@example.com (adze) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:00:34 +0000

Hey! :/ … Also, just to note:

echo length abc + abc |xargs -n 2 expr

adze: How does cryptography work?

nospam@example.com (adze) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:03:43 +0000

I am impressed. The only possible (pedagogical) improvements coming to mind are:

It might do to mention the fact that a^((p-1)(q-1)) is always 1 mod pq to motivate why on earth do we want such an e and d

And coprimality of a and b can be seen more viscerally with a picture: Arrange a dots in a circle (labeled clockwise 0 through a-1), and, starting at 0, if you repeatedly jump clockwise by b dots each time, then you eventually will hit all the dots. (In particular, you will hit the dot labeled 1, so will find a multiplicative inverse!)

adze: first 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e

nospam@example.com (adze) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:37:31 +0000

Two alternatives come to mind, if you don’t mind doing something bad:

Borrows your boilerplate and replaces the interesting bit with a slight infraction of your rules (but the purity in a functional-programming sense (which is surely why one-liners are good) is still there).

As to the second, I should probably be beaten for suggesting this, but anyways:

seq 11 1000 |sed ’s/.*/scale=\0; e(1);/’|bc -l|tr "\n" "a"|sed ’s/\a//g’|tr "a" "\n"|sed ’s/^.*$[0-9]\{10\}$/\1/’|grep -v "^0" |factor |grep "^[0-9]\{10\}: [0-9]*$"|head -1|sed ’s/:.*//’

It is shorter, and follows all the rules, but runs in no less than 7 minutes…

What I really want to do is something like (modulo boilerplate):

echo $e| { grep "^[0-9]\{10-\}" | sed ’s/^[0-9]$[0-9]\{9\}$$.*$$/\2\3 \1\2/’ | tee /dev/fd/0; }

But I don’t see how to actually make this loop like I want (acrobatics with the `read’ command and even with named pipes have proven fruitless thus far), nor how I’d get out of it if I did manage to get it to work (this is sort of what the initial grep is meant for). But this flavor of thing would generalize nicely.

(Also, the hint below the comment box about using geshi in comments should have closing tag for geshi, rather than for a (fictitious?) `lang’ tag.)

Zachary: Is Europe A Country?

nospam@example.com (Zachary) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:43:48 +0000

By definition (in terms of political science) the European Union is a confederation ( A permanent union of sovereign states for common action in relation to other states. Usually created by treaty but often later adopting a common constitution, confederations tend to be established for dealing with critical issues such as defense, foreign affairs, or a common currency, with the central government being required to provide support for all members.)

Tom: European State Mottos

nospam@example.com (Tom) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:09:23 +0000

Very amusing!

The reason the Dutch motto is in French is of course because it is the motto of the house of Orange-Nassau, historic rulers of the French Principality of Orange and the current Dutch Royal family. Perhaps the English motto has a similar Norman origin.

Pop: European State Mottos

nospam@example.com (Pop) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:39:45 +0000

Slovakia´s motto does mean: Nech hory prinesu ludom pokoj, which means something like calmness, or serenity not peace at all..

Subbu: Serendipity

nospam@example.com (Subbu) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:36:25 +0000

take it easy

BBens: Java Problemettes

nospam@example.com (BBens) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:07:45 +0000

I am also having an issue with ‘Cannot connect to VM’. Now it seems the group is up to 3.

test: Hey Miro, I want my Web TV!

nospam@example.com (test) — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:56:17 +0000

this is a test with the right answer

Oliver Taylor: Another IE bug?

nospam@example.com (Oliver Taylor) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:21:25 +0000

If you think IE7 is bad, try the IE8 Beta. It fails abysmally at rendering even google maps correctly.