Frothy
noun. A quality of a segment of the Venture Capital investment portfolio, where valuations are felt to be so inflated that the only frame of reference available are other, similarly inflated,...
View ArticleClick through rates
When the first banner ad for Hotwire appeared online in 1994 it generated a click through rate (CTR) of 78%. Today, banner ads generate a CTR of 0.2%.
View ArticlePivot
noun. To scrap your business plan and start again while keeping your investors’ money.
View ArticleBash trick ‘o the day
Bash supports the += operator % echo $PATH /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin % PATH+=:$HOME/bin % echo $PATH...
View ArticleOS X has a built in WiFi scanner
Did you know that OS X has a built in WiFi survey tool? Nope, neither did I, but here it is /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport This won’t be in your...
View ArticleSayonara Posterous
I’ve decided to bring my website back in house. Shamefully I haven’t written my own blog engine, instead I have reverted to WordPress. Sadly my limited design skills can only be measured on a nanometer...
View ArticleHow to decode travel agent speak
From the useless-trivia-department My job takes me to strange foreign lands occasionally. As Australia is long way from anywhere, these trips are long and spine breaking. As a consequence, there is a...
View ArticleUsing screen for lazy dot files
I have a lot of shell accounts; on my laptops and workstations, on my ARM build boxes, on remote servers, and so on. I don’t make a lot of customisations to my login shell as the lowest common...
View ArticleStupid Go declaration tricks
This is a brief post highlighting a curious aspect of the declaration syntax in Go. Most Go programmers know that the following of import declarations are equivalent import "fmt" import "math/big" //...
View ArticleEvaluation order oddity
At Canonical we’re increasingly invested in gccgo. While testing various packages built with gccgo we ran across test failures which we traced to an innocent looking piece of code. package main import...
View ArticleThe Mythical Man-Month selection bias
There is an apocryphal story1 during World War Two, of a squadron of bombers leaving on a sortie. Time passes and finally a few bombers struggle back to their base, the crew shaken, but alive, their...
View ArticleOn declaring variables
Go has several ways to declare a variable. Possibly there are more ways than are strictly required but with the Go 1 contract in effect it’s not going to change. This short post gives examples of how I...
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Paranormal trivia
Like all children who grew up in the 80′s, I was, and still am a huge fan of Ghostbusters. While recently re watching Ivan Reitman’s homage to New York, I spotted something which has gone unnoticed on...
View ArticleFriday pop quiz: minimum one liner
This program is incorrect package main import "fmt" func f(a, b int) { var min = 0 fmt.Printf("The min of %d and %d is %d\n", a, b, min) } func main() { f(9000, 314) } By adding only one line can you...
View ArticleMinimum one liner followup
It’s a little unfair to announce winners in some kind of order as I did post the quiz at an unfriendly hour of the day for most of the planet. With that said, Tim and William came up with a great map...
View ArticleFriday pop quiz: the size of things
In this program, the size of variables of type x and y in memory varies by platform. package main func main() { const n = 4 type x [n]uint type y [n]int } By changing only one line can you ensure that...
View ArticleFriday pop quiz: the smallest buffer
bytes.Buffer is a tremendously useful type, but it’s a bit large1. % sizeof -p bytes Buffer Buffer 112 … and that is just the overhead, we haven’t put any data into the buffer yet. This Friday’s2...
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The HERE IS key
The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal is a very important artefact in computing history. ADM-3A keyboard (image credit vintagecomputer.ca) If you want to know why your shell abbreviates $HOME to ~, it’s...
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