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QuickQWERTY 1.2.1 is now available. QuickQWERTY is a web-based touch typing tutor for QWERTY keyboards that runs directly in the web browser. This release contains a minor bug fix in Unit 4.3. Unit 4.3 is a 'Control' unit that lets you practise typing partial words as well as full words. In one place in this unit, the following sequence of partial and full words occurs: l li lime lime The full word lime was incorrectly repeated twice. This has been fixed to: l li lim lime To try out QuickQWERTY,...

When web-based social media started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social media. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine. The little icons in the top bar would light up because someone had sent you a direct message or engaged with something you had posted. There was also, at the beginning of this millennium,...

Today, we will meet a spiky-haired nerd named Corey Dumm, who normally lives within Markdown code fences. We will get to know him a bit, smile with him when his fences hold and weep quietly when misfortune strikes. One of the caveats of the Markdown universe is the wide variety of Markdown implementations available. In these parallel universes, the rules of Markdown rendering differ subtly. In this post, we will focus only on the CommonMark specification. Since GitHub Flavoured Markdown (GFM) is...

This is a note where I capture the various errors we receive when we create GitHub workflows that are smaller than the smallest possible workflow. I do not know why anyone would ever need this information and I doubt it will serve any purpose for me either but sometimes you just want to know things, no matter how useless they might be. This is one of the useless things I wanted to know today. Contents Empty Workflow On On Push Jobs Job ID Steps Runs On Runs On Ubuntu Latest Empty Steps Run Run E...

Introduction Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot services have become increasingly sophisticated and popular. These systems are now embedded in search engines, software development tools as well as office software. For many people, they have quickly become part of everyday computing. I personally find these services incredibly useful, particularly for exploring unfamiliar topics and as a general productivity aid. However, I also think tha...

I am a strong proponent of running independent personal websites on your own domains and publishing your writing there. Doing so keeps the web diverse and decentralised, rather than concentrating most writing and discussion inside a small number of large platforms. It gives authors long term control over their work without being subject to changing policies or incentives . I think that a web made up of many small, individually run websites is more resilient and also more interesting than one dom...

I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen cabinets or anything that will stare back at you every day for the next ten years. It involves one tool: a sheet of A4 paper. Like most sensible people with a reasonable sense of priori...

One of my favourite acronyms from the world of computing and technology is XINU. It stands for 'XINU Is Not Unix'. The delightful thing about this acronym is that XINU is also UNIX spelled backwards. For a given word W , a recursive acronym that both negates W and reverses it is possible when W has the form W = '?NI?' where each '?' denotes a letter. Some fictitious examples make this clearer: LINA Is Not ANIL. TINK Is Not KNIT. OINO Is Not ONIO. Words of the form '?N?' also work if we are happy...

Ideas Hello! This is my ideas page where I keep a brief record of some ideas I might want to explore in the near future. For ideas I have already begun exploring, please see my now page or my web log instead. As of 03 Jan 2026, I have the following ideas in mind that I might want to explore in future: Explore the problem of checking whether two self-complementary graphs are isomorphic. Learn why \( s \)-arc transitive graph must have \( s \le 7. \) Read on website | #meta

Now Hello! This is my now page where I keep a brief record of what I am up to these days. As of 03 Jan 2026, I am: Studying the book Algebraic Graph Theory by Godsil and Royle. Learning about the Coxeter graph and Tutte's 8-cage. Learning about distance-transitive graphs, in general. Maintaining this website. Occasionally posting comments to Hacker News ( see here ). Read on website | #meta

In this post, I return with a retrospective on my coding adventures, where I summarise my hobby projects and recreational programming activities from the current year. I did the last such retrospective in 2023 . So I think this is a good time to do another retrospective. At the outset, I should mention that I have done less hobby computing this year than in the past few, largely because I spent a substantial portion of my leisure time studying Galois theory and algebraic graph theory. In case yo...

Nerd Quiz #3 is the third release of Nerd Quiz, a single-page HTML application that invites you to test your nerd level through a short quiz. Each question is inspired by everyday moments of reading, writing, thinking, learning and exploring. This release introduces five new questions drawn from a range of topics, including computing history, graph theory and Unix. Visit Nerd Quiz to try the quiz. A community discussion page is available at Discuss Nerd Quiz . You are very welcome to share your ...

Mark V. Shaney Junior 0.2.0 is the second release of this little Markov gibberish generator. This release brings two small changes. First, it now reads the training data from standard input instead of a hardcoded file. Second, the program filename has been changed from mvs.py to mvs to reflect that it is an executable file and can be run as ./mvs on most Unix and Linux systems. The source and a detailed documentation for this project are available at github.com/susam/mvs . See also this related ...

Yesterday I shared a little program called Mark V. Shaney Junior at github.com/susam/mvs . It is a minimal implementation of a Markov text generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user that posted messages to various newsgroups using text generated by a Markov model. See the Wikipedia article Mark V. Shaney for more details about it. In this post, I will discuss my implementation of the model, explain how it works and share ...

Mark V. Shaney Junior is a minimal implementation of a Markov gibberish generator inspired by the legendary Mark V. Shaney program from the 1980s. Mark V. Shaney was a synthetic Usenet user in the 1980s that posted messages to newsgroups using text generated by a Markov chain program. See the Wikipedia article Mark V. Shaney for more details. This release introduces the program mvs.py that implements a similar Markov text generator. It reads a text corpus of text from standard input, build an in...

How many CSS selectors and declarations do we need to produce the Fizz Buzz sequence? Of course we could do this with no CSS at all simply by placing the entire sequence as text in the HTML body. So to make the problem precise as well as to keep it interesting, we require that all text that appears in the Fizz Buzz sequence comes directly from the CSS. Placing any part of the output numbers or words outside the stylesheet is not allowed. JavaScript is not allowed either. With these constraints, ...

A version of my CSS Fizz Buzz that uses ordered list ( <ol> ) to reduce code. However, I don't quite like how misaligned the numbers and the words look. Correcting that would call for extra code that would cancel out the bytes saved. Read on website | #web

In this note I elaborate the proof of a claim regarding Cayley graphs of symmetric groups with transpositions as generators that I found in the book Algebraic Graph Theory by Chris Godsil and Gordon Royle. This claim appears as commentary in Section 3.10 about Transpositions . Here I present it in the form of a theorem along with a complete proof. Theorem. If \( \mathcal{T} \) is a set of transpositions, then the Cayley graph \( X(\operatorname{Sym}(n), \mathcal{T}) \) has no triangles. Proof. S...

On #emacs IRC or Matrix channels, we often share references to the built-in Emacs documentation as Elisp expressions that look like this: (info "(emacs) Basic Undo") Here is another example: (info "(emacs) Word Search") This is a common practice in the Emacs community even though all of the Emacs manual is available on the World Wide Web too. For example, the section referred to in the above expression eis available here: GNU Emacs Manual: Word Search . The reason for sharing Elisp expressions l...

An implementation of Fizz Buzz in four lines of CSS. Read on website | #web