Author Archives: Jacques Chester

Cooking and Coding

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Jacques Chester

Sometimes, when we programmers sit down to explain programmer, we resort to the hoary old cooking metaphor. “Programming is like cooking”, we say. “We write recipes, and the computer carries them out”. And sometimes methodologists apply it to our work … Continue reading →

Posted in Rants, Software Engineering | Leave a comment

It is done.

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Jacques Chester

Just submitted by dissertation. Alchemist:dissertation jacques$ date; texcount -nosub dissertation.tex Wed 26 Oct 2011 20:15:06 WST File: dissertation.tex Encoding: ascii Words in text: 11775 Words in headers: 283 Words in float captions: 632 Number of headers: 75 Number of floats: … Continue reading →

Posted in Studies | Leave a comment

Another milestone

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Jacques Chester

My dissertation draft has been reviewed by a few other pairs of eyes. I’ve also spent a few days going over it myself. Apart from getting BibTeX to display a sensible bibliography, I reckon it’s about ready for submission. Wed … Continue reading →

Posted in Studies | Leave a comment

An important milestone

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Jacques Chester

My absolutely unedited, unreviewed, unchecked, unimproved, uncorrected, un-followed-up-on-TODOs-yet draft of my dissertation is done! FILE: dissertation.tex Words in text: 9634 Words in headers: 252 Words in float captions: 590 Number of headers: 66 Number of floats: 35 Number of math … Continue reading →

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If you rely on refereed material …

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Jacques Chester

Then a lot of stuff that happened just 10-15 years ago didn’t happen at all. Some of my research is done “Just In Time”. I think of something I want to refer to, then I hit up IEEE Xplore and … Continue reading →

Posted in History, IT and Internet, Studies | Leave a comment

Progress

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Jacques Chester

According to SLOCCount: SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted) 500 classifier ruby=500 200 tracker ruby=200 101 sql ruby=101 59 publisher php=59 8 https_experiment ruby=8 Totals grouped by language (dominant language first): ruby: 809 (93.20%) php: 59 (6.80%) Total Physical Source Lines of … Continue reading →

Posted in Startup, Studies | Leave a comment

Hacked!

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Jacques Chester

Those few of you who visit my blog will have noticed Google’s scary warning popping up when navigating to my site. Until now I’ve hosted my personal blog at Dreamhost for several years. Mostly because it’s been easy to set … Continue reading →

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Installing the pg gem on OS X with MacPorts

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Jacques Chester

The pg gem, used to connect ruby programs to the PostgreSQL server, is notoriously difficult to install on OS X. I’m using MacPorts and have PostgreSQL 9 installed. Here’s what I did: jacques$ sudo bash root$ export PATH=/opt/local/lib/postgresql90/bin:${PATH} root$ env … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical Notes | Leave a comment

It’s not every day you get to compete with Damon Kelly and Itte Detenamo

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Jacques Chester

Here in Darwin, we host the biennial sports festival called the Arafura Games. At this year’s games, the weightlifting competition also included the Oceania and South Pacific championships. As a resident of the Northern Territory, I was able to qualify … Continue reading →

Posted in Weightlifting | 4 Comments

Fixing blogger imports into Wordpress

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Jacques Chester

I’ve been expanding my Ozblogistan network and have run into an interesting bug. When importing from Google’s blogspot, all post titles and post content wind up with the ‘>’ symbol prepended. This is annoying. If you have database access, the … Continue reading →

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