ChatGPT

Two stories about ChatGPT Two days ago I tweeted : I confess. I’ve succumbed and subscribed to ChatGPT Plus. Eufrasio asked me why, so I replied It’s great for translating code from one programming language to another. For example, I had a version of Gbloink! running in the browser, I wrote in CoffeeScript 10 yrs …

Command line HTTP apps.

I just rediscovered a question I wrote on Stack Exchange. I can’t remember much about the context, but the idea is to have an ordinary “web server” application accessed through http, but simply sending plain-text backwards and forwards to a command-line based client. command line – Is there a “terminal” style program that talks to …

Travel Report

So as noted previously, I went travelling without a notebook, but with a Xaomi tablet, a portable keyboard, and a copy of UserLand Linux. How did that go? Surprisingly well. Actually I ended up using another keyboard, a cheap “cover” with keyboard built in, no Bluetooth but micro-USB. And I had to get an adaptor …

Holiday Reading

I’m about to go on holiday in January. And it’s time for a new adventure in travelling without my laptop. I can’t go anywhere without the safety blanket of a Unix computer. And since my PocketCHIP got stolen, I’ve been without something portable. Anyway, what you see in the photo is my new Xaomi 8″ …

What's up? August 2019 Edition

Gosh … we’re half way through the year already. So what am I up to in programming? Clojure I still think it’s a wonderful language. Not doing as much as I’d like. But it’s still great. One thing I did a few months ago was port the terminal version of Mind Traffic Control to it. …

Microsoft adds Python to Excel

Several years late, it seems M$ is considering making Python native to Excel. I wrote a … you guessed it … Quora answer as to why this makes sense for Microsoft. Python has become massively popular with the data and machine learning communities in the last few years. Tools like JuPyter are increasingly popular and …

Working with the file system is too verbose. Let's make it more like JQuery!

Working with the file system in Python is too verbose. Seriously. Every time I want to do something with files I need to remember whether it’s the os or sys library that I need to import. I need to remember or look up half a dozen other functions to grab particular bits of metadata from …

Languages for 2018

Bit early. But I answered a question on Quora about languages to learn for 2018. Here’s what’s interesting me for 2018 : I want to continue getting more experienced and better with Clojure. No language is perfect, but for me Clojure is the best language I’ve ever used. And I want to use it for …

Travelling without a laptop

Why, yes. This is, indeed, OWL running on the PocketCHIP. Here’s the story. I spent 12 days recently, travelling in the south of Brazil and Uruguay border. And I decided, as an experiment, to see if I could live without my laptop. I wasn’t meant to be working, but I always like to keep some …

Project ThoughtStorms Update

Been working quite a lot on Project ThoughtStorms, the new Python / Bottle based wiki engine behind ThoughtStorms in the last few days. I can’t believe that I’ve spent 15 years building a wiki without creating my own software. That error is going to be rectified from now on. Sure, most of what I’m doing …