eRambler

Software Carpentry: SC Config; write once, compile anywhere

Nine years ago, when I first release Python to the world, I distributed it with a Makefile for BSD Unix. The most frequent questions and suggestions I received in response to these early distributions were about building it on different Unix platforms. Someone pointed me to autoconf, which allowed me to create a configure script that figured out platform idiosyncracies Unfortunately, autoconf is painful to use – its grouping, quoting and commenting conventions don’t match those of the target language, which makes scripts hard to write and even harder to debug. I hope that this competition comes up with a better solution — it would make porting Python to new platforms a lot easier!
— Guido van Rossum, Technical Director, Python Consortium (quote taken from SC Config page)

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Friday 26 August 2016 Jez Cope Technology Software Carpentry Web archaeology autoconf

Series: Software Carpentry Archaeology

Semantic linefeeds: one clause per line

I’ve started using “semantic linefeeds”, a concept I discovered on Brandon Rhodes’ blog, when writing content, an idea described in that article far better than I could. I turns out this is a very old idea, promoted way back in the day by Brian W Kernighan, contributor to the original Unix system, co-creator of the AWK and AMPL programming languages and co-author of a lot of seminal programming textbooks including “The C Programming Language”.

Monday 22 August 2016 Jez Cope Writing Stuff

Software Carpentry: SC Build; or making a better make

Software tools often grow incrementally from small beginnings into elaborate artefacts. Each increment makes sense, but the final edifice is a mess. make is an excellent example: a simple tool that has grown into a complex domain-specific programming language. I look forward to seeing the improvements we will get from designing the tool afresh, as a whole…
— Simon Peyton-Jones, Microsoft Research (quote taken from SC Build page)

Most people who have had to compile an existing software tool will have come across the venerable make tool (which usually these days means GNU Make). It allows the developer to write a declarative set of rules specifying how the final software should be built from its component parts, mostly source code, allowing the build itself to be carried out by simply typing make at the command line and hitting Enter.

Series: Software Carpentry Archaeology

What happened to the original Software Carpentry?

“Software Carpentry was originally a competition to design new software tools, not a training course. The fact that you didn’t know that tells you how well it worked.”

When I read this in a recent post on Greg Wilson’s blog, I took it as a challenge. I actually do remember the competition, although looking at the dates it was long over by the time I found it.

I believe it did have impact; in fact, I still occasionally use one of the tools it produced, so Greg’s comment got me thinking: what happened to the other competition entries?

Tuesday 16 August 2016 Jez Cope Technology Software Carpentry Web archaeology

Series: Software Carpentry Archaeology

Changing static site generators: Nanoc → Hugo

I’ve decided to move the site over to a different static site generator, Hugo. I’ve been using Nanoc for a long time and it’s worked very well, but lately it’s been taking longer and longer to compile the site and throwing weird errors that I can’t get to the bottom of.

At the time I started using Nanoc, static site generators were in their infancy. There weren’t the huge number of feature-loaded options that there are now, so I chose one and I built a whole load of blogging-related functionality myself. I did it in ways that made sense at the time but no longer work well with Nanoc’s latest versions.

Friday 12 August 2016 Jez Cope Stuff Meta Web

Fairphone 2: initial thoughts on the original ethical smartphone

I’ve had my eye on the Fairphone 2 for a while now, and when my current phone, an aging Samsung Galaxy S4, started playing up I decided it was time to take the plunge. A few people have asked for my thoughts on the Fairphone so here are a few notes.

Why I bought it

The thing that sparked my interest, and the main reason for buying the phone really, was the ethical stance of the manufacturer. The small Swedish company have gone to great lengths to ensure that both labour and materials are sourced as responsibly as possible. They regularly inspect the factories where the parts are made and assembled to ensure fair treatment of the workers and they source all the raw materials carefully to minimise the environmental impact and the use of conflict minerals.

Saturday 7 May 2016 Jez Cope Technology Gadgets Fairphone Smartphone Ethics

Wiring my web

I’m a nut for automating repetitive tasks, so I was dead pleased a few years ago when I discovered that IFTTT let me plug different bits of the web together. I now use it for tasks such as:

Syndicating blog posts to social media
Creating scheduled/repeating todo items from a Google Calendar
Making a note to revisit an article I’ve starred in Feedly

I’d probably only be half-joking if I said that I spend more time automating things than I save not having to do said things manually. Thankfully it’s also a great opportunity to learn, and recently I’ve been thinking about reimplementing some of my IFTTT workflows myself to get to grips with how it all works.

Friday 1 April 2016 Jez Cope Technology APIs Web Automation IFTTT

Data is like water, and language is like clothing

I admit it: I’m a grammar nerd. I know the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’, and I’m proud.

I used to be pretty militant, but these days I’m more relaxed. I still take joy in the mechanics of the language, but I also believe that English is defined by its usage, not by a set of arbitrary rules. I’m just as happy to abuse it as to use it, although I still think it’s important to know what rules you’re breaking and why.

Thursday 31 March 2016 Jez Cope Stuff Language Grammar Data

#IDCC16 day 2: new ideas

Well, I did a great job of blogging the conference for a couple of days, but then I was hit by the bug that’s been going round and didn’t have a lot of energy for anything other than paying attention and making notes during the day! I’ve now got round to reviewing my notes so here are a few reflections on day 2.

Day 2 was the day of many parallel talks! So many great and inspiring ideas to take in! Here are a few of my take-home points.

#IDCC16 Day 1: Open Data

The main conference opened today with an inspiring keynote by Barend Mons, Professor in Biosemantics, Leiden University Medical Center. The talk had plenty of great stuff, but two points stood out for me.

First, Prof Mons described a newly discovered link between Huntingdon’s Disease and a previously unconsidered gene. No-one had previously recognised this link, but on mining the literature, an indirect link was identified in more than 10% of the roughly 1 million scientific claims analysed. This is knowledge for which we already had more than enough evidence, but which could never have been discovered without such a wide-ranging computational study.