I’ve had the impression lately that everyone is learning Rust and there’s plenty of great material out there to make that easier. {gifski} is perhaps the most well-known example of an R package wrapping a Rust Cargo crate. I don’t really know any system language particularly well, so I figured I’d wade into it and see what it’s like.
[Read More]Australian Signals Directorate 50c Coin Decryption
Updated: 2022-09-04
I took a very long time to post about the last Australian Signals Directorate (then DSD) decryption, so this time I’ll be a lot more punctual. This article was published today announcing that ASD have collaborated to release a new 50c coin containing a decryption challenge.
Lissajous Curve Matrix in Julia
Another ‘small learning project’ for me as I continue to learn Julia. I’ve said many times that small projects with a defined goal are one of the best ways to learn, at least for me. This one was inspired by yet another Reddit post
[Read More]Where for (loop) ARt Thou?
A loop by any other name...
I’ve long been interested in exactly how R works - not quite enough for me to learn all the internals, but I was surprised that I could not find a clear guide towards exactly how vectorization works at the deepest level.
[Read More]Codegolf - Lisp Edition
I occasionally like a round of code-golf (e.g. recently) and I try to solve these with R, but this one gave me some hope that I could make use of a really cool feature I knew about in common lisp.
Codegolfing Minecraft Lighting
I occasionally like to participate in an odd sport known as ‘code golf’ where the aim is to write some code to achieve a given task using the smallest number of characters.
Adventures in x86 ASM with rx86
I just finished ‘Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software’ by Charles Petzold which was a really well-written (in my opinion) guided journey from flashing a light in morse code through to building a whole computer, and everything needed along the way.
The section on encoding instructions for the processor (built up from logic gates) - assembly instructions as a human readable version of the machine code - was particularly interesting to me, and as I was describing this to a colleague I remembered that it’s not the first time I’ve played with assembly…
Improving a Visualization
I saw this post on Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful showing this plot of streaming services market share, comparing 2020 to 2021
and thought it looked like a good candidate for trying out some plot improvement techniques.
[Read More]isEven without modulo
You may have seen the memes going around about fun ways to program the
straightforward function isEven()
which returns TRUE
if the input is even,
and FALSE
otherwise. I had a play with this and it turned into enough for a
blog post, and a nice walk through some features of R.
r-bugs :: object_size
As soon as the R-Foundation posted that they’re inviting cleanup of old bugs, I knew it would be an opportunity to learn more about the way R works on the inside.
[Read More]