During the writing (and rewriting) of my last two posts I had this idea: what if we could leverage LLMs for a closed-loop rewriting cycle?<\/p>\n
I got some questions about how<\/em> exactly did I use Gemini when creating a project, after posting my previous post. This is the answer.\n A year ago I didn’t think much of LLMs for coding. Just glorified autocomplete at best, useful but just that. I have partially<\/em> changed my mind, although I didn’t realise what was the difference until recently.\n A lot of my projects involve a great deal of I wonder what the result might look like<\/em>. This one was not unexpected<\/p>\n I am a big fan of Concept maps<\/a>, but writing them in Graphviz is annoying. So I wrote a helper.<\/p>\n I know, I have been silent for quite a while<\/em>.\n There’s as a scarcity of themes for this edition: just (not counting miscellaneous stuff, sure) SRE and how to learn things<\/em><\/p>\n Had some stuff going on that ate all my available time.\n Trying a cross between the old format and the new format (since there are people who like both)<\/p>\n If you are reading this as a subscriber, you’ll see some difference.\n Feeling less tired this weekend.\n Playing with stable diffusion on your own machine is great.\n The stuff I have pending to read keeps increasing lately. Too much interesting material being written.\n This post is about how I manage my tasks and projects using Obsidian with the Dataview<\/a> plugin.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#19 Readings \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3b","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/08\/202219-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 14 Aug 2022 09:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/08\/202219-readings.html\/","description":" Slowly, very slowly, cleaning up my reading list.\n I have been busy<\/em>. Hence the radio silence.\n Slightly shorter because I’ll be on holidays.\n This is the next installment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers<\/a> in the data space.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#16 Readings \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3b","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/06\/202216-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 11 Jun 2022 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/06\/202216-readings.html\/","description":" Spent a week in Switzerland\u2026 and on the flight back caught COVID.\n A new entry on the data papers<\/a> series. Ray is a distributed framework for next generation AI applications<\/em>. What does this mean? A scam? Blockchain on AI? Nah, it’s actually pretty cool, it has actors<\/em>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#15 Readings \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3b","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/05\/202215-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 22 May 2022 11:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/05\/202215-readings.html\/","description":" Shit ain’t gettin' better.\n This has been a really tough week.\n I was on J on the Beach<\/a>, so skipped last weekend.<\/p>\n I took some days off for Easter, and I definitely needed them.\n A middle-of-the-week one because it’s Easter and I may not write this during days off.\n It has been a while since my previous data paper. This time I tackle a less known one.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#10 Readings \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3b","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/04\/202210-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 03 Apr 2022 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/04\/202210-readings.html\/","description":" Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet<\/p>\n This turned out a long one\n Trust between business stakeholders and engineering (and data, analytics, operations\u2026) teams is a tricky matter.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#08 Readings \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3b","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/03\/202208-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 06 Mar 2022 12:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/03\/202208-readings.html\/","description":" Meetings galore.\n \u0421\u043b\u0430\u0432\u0430 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0457\u043d\u0456! \u0413\u0435\u0440\u043e\u044f\u043c \u0441\u043b\u0430\u0432\u0430!\n I have been using templates to add recurrent tasks to my daily journal in Obsidian.<\/p>"},{"title":"2022#06 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/02\/202206-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 19 Feb 2022 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2022\/02\/202206-readings.html\/","description":" The dbt issue\n Next week I’m on holidays!\n RIP Michael (originally Marvin) Lee Aday, Meat Loaf \ud83e\udd18\n Haven’t read much these days, but luckily I have not added much to the list either.<\/p>\n Another week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.\n Happy new year!<\/p>\n A bit of Sunday-inspired yak shaving\n Christmas edition!\n End of year cleanup, so a lot of goodies this time\n In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model, with change over time.<\/p>\n Back on track.<\/p>\n An unusual collection of links.<\/p>\n This is a light edition.\n As usual, skipping an edition means a longer collection later on.<\/p>\n No, they are not mind maps<\/em>.<\/p>\n A 2-week’s worth of readings means a longer than usual list, as usual.<\/p>\n This past week we were on holidays \ud83c\udf89.<\/p>\n Days of This Apache Spark feature has made us scratch our heads way too much.<\/p>"},{"title":"2021#20 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/202120-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 21 Aug 2021 16:15:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/202120-readings.html\/","description":" I had a very entertaining week.<\/p>\n So, you want to debug some Go in VS Code. And maybe setup some Docker containers with services before? How the hell do you configure that?<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#19 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/202119-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 08 Aug 2021 17:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/202119-readings.html\/","description":" A week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.<\/p>\n Next week I start a new job \ud83d\ude2e<\/p>\n This edition has an unusually low amount of big data.<\/p>\n This past week I’ve been on holidays in Cordoba. I put on 2.5kg in 4 days. Recommended.<\/p>\n Not sure if bug or feature, but this is hard to pull off.<\/p>\n This past week has been Data+AI Summit, so there are several new product announcements from Databricks.<\/p>\n This week is Data+AI summit<\/a> week.<\/p>\n In which I write some easy Alloy code for a data model.<\/p>\n Not much to report. I’m still in kind of an article reading slump (my backlog is larger than 50 right now).<\/p>\n Having to tweak a presentation for the Data+AI Summit<\/a> time constraints has eaten all my disposable free time, hence the posting hiatus and this being relatively short.<\/p>\n I have spent a big deal of these weeks moving my notes from Bear to Obsidian<\/a>. I may write the reasons at some point, stay \ud83d\udc1f.\n Timezones and UTF are rocks you repeatedly hit in your data journey.<\/p>"},{"title":"2021#09 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/03\/202109-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 14 Mar 2021 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/03\/202109-readings.html\/","description":" Looks like my mojo is coming back.<\/p>\n This edition is kind of strange: there’s more management than “code”.\n My days are consolidating into piano<\/em>, work<\/em>, VR<\/em>, piano<\/em>, sleep<\/em>, This is not an overly long list, but covers a surprisingly large amount of topics.<\/p>\n Sweet, sweet holidays.\n Sometimes I get an idea and I need to implement it. Guillotine<\/a> (and GuillotineJS<\/a>) are one example of this.<\/p>\n Not sure what I did this past week aside from finishing a post<\/a>: I read very little.<\/p>\n Lakehouse is the brand name for the underlying architecture of Databricks' Delta Lake: A data lake that is as performant as a data warehouse.<\/p>"},{"title":"2021#03 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/01\/202103-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 17 Jan 2021 18:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/01\/202103-readings.html\/","description":" This is also a video-heavy edition, I keep chugging along my watch list with Glancer<\/a><\/p>\n Hive<\/a> is arguably old. It is also undoubtedly useful, even now: 10 years after it was introduced.<\/p>"},{"title":"2021#02 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/01\/202102-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 09 Jan 2021 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/01\/202102-readings.html\/","description":" The video edition\n As promised, the numbering of these posts is now year-indexed.<\/p>\n Managing logging in Spark ain’t easy, and is even harder in managed clouds like Databricks or EMR.<\/p>\n Finishing and posting this got lost in a task manager reorganisation, it was due in June-July.<\/p>\n The last of 2020.<\/p>\n My reading list is at less than 10 items, so now my readings<\/em> posts will hopefully look closer to watchings<\/em>. My watch-later list is at more than 90.<\/p>\n I have been on holidays this week, playing VR and preparing videos for an online Python event I co-organise.<\/p>\n This looks like a less hard technical edition than usual.<\/p>\n A relatively common type of query for time-based SQL tables is a find the gap<\/em> query. How can you do this in AWS Redshift, which does not have the SQL function This is a short edition.<\/p>\n Adventures with Applescript, AWK and Things<\/p>\n Finished that post, now started the next. And having all Fridays off is awesome.<\/p>\n This is the next instalment on my quest to read and help understand interesting papers<\/a> in the data space.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#60 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/202060-readings.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 31 Oct 2020 17:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/202060-readings.html\/","description":" I am having a very hard time finishing my summary of the RDD paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.<\/p>\n I have read quite a bit this week, I’m also preparing a summary of the RDD paper<\/a>.<\/p>\n After reading the Snowflake paper<\/a>, I got curious about how similar engines work. Also, as I mentioned in that article, I like knowing how the data sausage is made<\/em>. So, here I will summarise the Delta Lake paper by Databricks<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#57 Readings","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/202057-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 11 Oct 2020 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/202057-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" I have dropped the Weekly<\/em> from the title. It was about time.<\/p>\n In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sun Tzu<\/span><\/p>"},{"title":"Running SparkSQL on Databricks via Airflow's JDBC operator","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/databricks-jdbc.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 05 Oct 2020 20:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/databricks-jdbc.html\/","description":" The one where Airflow messes with you.<\/p>"},{"title":"Does Snowflake have a technical moat worth 60 billion?","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/snowflake.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 02 Oct 2020 23:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/10\/snowflake.html\/","description":" I didn’t know much about Snowflake, so I decided to have a look at its SIGMOD (ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data<\/em>) paper<\/a> and investigate a bit more what special capabilities they offer, and how they compare to others.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#56 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/09\/202056-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 28 Sep 2020 17:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/09\/202056-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" This is a bit late because I have automated something.<\/p>\n I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.<\/p>\n After my happy experience with Haskell rewriting the ticketiser<\/a><\/em> from Python to Haskell, I moved next on my list of rewrites.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#54 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/09\/202054-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 05 Sep 2020 20:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/09\/202054-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" I am on holidays (starting yesterday)! Two weeks of probably more programming than usual \ud83e\udd23<\/p>\n We have alternated Friday’s off, so I have extra time to write this post today.<\/p>\n This one is actually making it on time. Don’t get used to it.<\/p>\n This is a project recap on writing some non-super-trivial Haskell for the first time.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#51 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/08\/202051-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 14 Aug 2020 15:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/08\/202051-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" I should remove the Weekly<\/em> moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!<\/p>"},{"title":"Review of Finding Success (and Failure) in Haskell","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/08\/review-success-haskell.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 12 Aug 2020 09:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/08\/review-success-haskell.html\/","description":" Ever tried. I was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#49 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202049-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 26 Jun 2020 12:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202049-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" An early one: For the first time in\u2026 not sure how, I’m going to be a whole week off. Which implies no computer<\/em>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#48 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202048-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202048-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Spark 3 is here! Rejoice!<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#47 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202047-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202047-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Another hard push at reducing my reading list. At the current pace I may not write many more of these posts.<\/p>"},{"title":"Generative iris","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/iris-sketch.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/iris-sketch.html\/","description":" Here are the details about how my procedural sketch Iris<\/a> works. This has been one of the fastest and most enjoyable sketches I have created lately<\/p>"},{"title":"D3 sitemap using a force layout and web workers","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/d3-sitemap.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 08 Jun 2020 19:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/d3-sitemap.html\/","description":" A D3 sitemap using force layout and a web worker. This will come to bear-note-graph at some point (and other projects)<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#46 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202046-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 07 Jun 2020 10:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202046-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" I made a hard push to clean up my reading list, deleting a lot<\/em> and reading another lot<\/em>. It went from 369 items to 99 \ud83c\udf89<\/p>"},{"title":"Writing generative art on an iPad: Why and how","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/generative-art-on-an-ipad.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 05 Jun 2020 21:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/generative-art-on-an-ipad.html\/","description":" If you have been paying attention, you may have seen me talk about p5js and generative art lately. Here is a break-down of the why and how.<\/p>"},{"title":"Multiline shebang with zsh and running pyenv under cron","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/multiline-shebang-and-pyenv-in-cron.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 03 Jun 2020 22:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/multiline-shebang-and-pyenv-in-cron.html\/","description":" These probably qualify as the most one weird trick<\/em> I have figured out this year.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#45 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202045-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 01 Jun 2020 19:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/06\/202045-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Writing generative stuff is eating away at my free time, reducing reading significantly.<\/p>"},{"title":"Blot\/Painting p5js sketch","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/blot-painting-p5js-sketch.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 26 May 2020 19:00:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/blot-painting-p5js-sketch.html\/","description":" Some details of my The lack of commute is very<\/em> hard on my reading, and I have also been working on several projects that have eaten into my reading\/writing time.<\/p>"},{"title":"Sorting myself out","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/sorting-myself-out.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 06 May 2020 18:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/sorting-myself-out.html\/","description":" Generative art using I have been working on several personal projects lately. Basically scratching\nprojects itching on my to do lists for several months. This is the first write\nup from them: templating without base repositories.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#43 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202043-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 28 Mar 2020 13:20:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202043-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering The stay at home edition. Stay safe these days, and remember to wash your hands and keep your distance.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#41 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202041-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 07 Mar 2020 15:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202041-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" No specific theme this week, but feels more data engineering heavy than lately. As it should. Oh, and beware door knobs, they can bring evil.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#40 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/02\/202040-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 29 Feb 2020 20:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/02\/202040-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Update on read books this year, I had forgotten on my previous posts.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#39 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/02\/202039-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 23 Feb 2020 20:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/02\/202039-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Skipped ehem a few weeks (I can blame one on my birthday).<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#38 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/202038-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 28 Jan 2020 03:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/202038-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Skipped last week Around a year ago (give or take a few months), I was talking with a coworker about context managers, and a question arose: could you use a context manager to measure elapsed time? I stashed the question away, and created a project Timing Context Manager<\/em>, which I actively ignored for many months. New year, new me, and a conversation with Marc Ram\u00edrez<\/a> moved me to unblock some of my old projects. This was the easiest project I had in Python, so I moved it to active.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#37 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/202037-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 11 Jan 2020 18:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/202037-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" First edition of the New Year. As eclectic as usual, I hope. The audio-based monitoring of servers and the weird uses of the GPT-2 neural network could be two highlights.<\/p>"},{"title":"New Keyboard: Gergo","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/new-keyboard-gergo.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 06 Jan 2020 18:15:52 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/new-keyboard-gergo.html\/","description":" My girlfriend likes to joke\/complain that I have more keyboards than hands. And indeed, I have probably a dozen or so different keyboards, most of them bluetooth. But, I have found the best one for the day-to-day work (sadly it is not bluetooth). It is a Gergo<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#36 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201936-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 22 Dec 2019 19:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201936-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" On time this week. Nothing remarkable: I’m winding down a bit my reading (both articles and books) in preparation for the yearly review and having some cooldown period.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#35 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201935-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 15 Dec 2019 12:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201935-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" A flight last Sunday meant I was so sleepy I skipped sending last week’s newsletter\u2026 so this week is super-sized. A lot of content about distributed teams I think.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#34 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201934-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 01 Dec 2019 23:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/12\/201934-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" This week is somewhat more eclectic than usual. There is nothing about any\nparticular programming language. There is a bit on Kubernetes, functional\nprogramming and containers, project management, aviation history,\ninterviews\/bios\u2026 I have started reading a few more papers, and I\u2019ll share the\ninteresting ones as well. This week they are centered in data engineering.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#32-33 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/20193233-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 24 Nov 2019 14:00:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/20193233-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Yeah, I skipped last week. On Saturday Python Barcelona<\/a>\norganised PyDay 2019<\/a>, and I was one of the\norganisers aside from giving a workshop on\nPySpark<\/a>, so I felt pretty tired\non Sunday. Of course this means this is a double issue.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#31 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/201931-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 10 Nov 2019 11:00:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/201931-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" This week there is a lot of functional programming (mostly Scala, a bit of\nHaskell) and data engineering topics. Of course, there is also the usual random\nstuff I find interesting as well (and other engineering topics).<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#30 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/201930-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 03 Nov 2019 15:06:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/11\/201930-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" A mixed bag of interesting history tidbits sprinkled with Haskell code, Scala\nstuff, data engineering systems and practices, and how to code with your voice.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#29 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201929-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 27 Oct 2019 13:06:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201929-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" This feels like a heavy engineering edition. A lot of Haskell, Rust, Python and\nScala. There\u2019s still a bit of everything, but this will appeal hardcore\ndevelopers more than usual.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#28 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201928-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 19 Oct 2019 13:06:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201928-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" This is a slightly longer edition because my reading list was overflowing with\n400+ articles. I \u201ctrimmed\u201d it down to \u201conly\u201d 380 during this week, I had a lot\nof airport time due to going to Spark Summit\nEurope<\/a> to give a talk.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#27 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201927-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 12 Oct 2019 13:06:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/10\/201927-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Some data engineering, a bit of Haskell, programming music, Python and random\nbits and bobs. I recommend you play with the third. Several good books this\nweek, as I have ramped up my reading: current goal would be 52 this year.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#26 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201926-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:06:45 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201926-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" A bit of Python, some more Rust and the usual randomness. The first one looks\ntasty.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#25 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201925-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 22 Sep 2019 21:06:45 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201925-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" Heavy focus on Python’s Although this week I have been reading mostly Apache Cassandra documentation, I\nhave tried to avoid an onslaught of tips, tricks and readings on it. Just one\narticle.<\/p>"},{"title":"Blog Moved","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/blog-moved-to-hugo.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 10 Sep 2019 19:42:11 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/blog-moved-to-hugo.html\/","description":" If you’ve been in this blog before, you may wonder if it looks different or is\njust your imagination. Fear not! You are not going crazy, this blag has<\/em>\nchanged.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#23 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201923-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 01 Sep 2019 13:03:45 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201923-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":" I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month<\/em>\nedition. Sorry!<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#20,21,22 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/2019202122-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 28 Jul 2019 18:39:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/2019202122-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn\u2019t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.<\/p>\n Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#19 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/201919-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 08 Jul 2019 21:52:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/201919-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" History, haskell, Wardley mapping, functional programming. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a>. You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"A (section) of a map of the data engineering space","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/a-section-of-map-of-data-engineering.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 07 Jul 2019 13:34:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/07\/a-section-of-map-of-data-engineering.html\/","description":" The map and problem described here were part of my presentation Mapping as a tool for thought<\/a>, and mentioned in my interview with John Grant<\/a> and Ben Mosior<\/a> (to appear sometime soon in the Wardley Maps community youtube channel<\/a>). I\u2019m looking for ideas on how to make this map easier to understand and useful, so I posted it to the Wardley Maps Community forums requesting comments<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#18 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201918-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 25 Jun 2019 20:01:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201918-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Software engineering, history, planning, data engineering. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#17 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201917-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 17 Jun 2019 17:24:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201917-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" _This week is a bit light on technical content because I was attending Scala Days 2019<\/a> in Lausanne and I had enough with the talks.\u00a0_<\/p>\n Software engineering, psychology, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#16 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201916-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 10 Jun 2019 21:18:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201916-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Wardley mapping, data engineering and big data, maths. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#15 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201915-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 04 Jun 2019 20:34:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/06\/201915-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Data engineering, adtech, ZIO, Rust, writing, some miscellaneous stuff. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#14 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/201914-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 26 May 2019 11:48:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/201914-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Data engineering, adtech, functional programing, formal specification. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"LSP for Python and Scala","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/lsp-for-python-and-scala.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 21 May 2019 23:41:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/lsp-for-python-and-scala.html\/","description":"If you have have known me for any length of time you’ll know I write mostly Python and Scala lately (Rust is getting into the mix slowly). And you should know, I am a heavy emacs user. I have been using emacs for close to 15 years, for the past 3 my emacs of choice has been spacemacs. I used to have a very long, customised and complex .emacs and with spacemacs I get a mostly-batteries-included package."},{"title":"2019#13 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/201913-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 19 May 2019 19:21:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/201913-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Functional programming, adtech, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#12 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/2019-12-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 13 May 2019 00:31:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/2019-12-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Big data and data engineering, metallurgy, Rust (not the metallurgy-related rust). Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"gtags (GNU global) in emacs for Scala","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/gtags-gnu-global-in-emacs-for-scala.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 09 May 2019 17:27:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/05\/gtags-gnu-global-in-emacs-for-scala.html\/","description":" As you may know, I\u2019m a heavy emacs<\/a> user, and a frequent Scala developer. Scala tooling for emacs was restricted to mostly ensime until recently. Although ensime is an excellent piece of software, it made my old Macbook suffer a lot (it only had 8gb of RAM). So, most of the time I just went hardcore mode developer, and worked with no autocompletion, no jump to definition, no-nothing. A pervasive use of ripgrep and good memory were sometimes enough, but I was envious of many things I could see in my colleagues using IntelliJ. Of course, switching editors was not an option.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#11 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-11-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 28 Apr 2019 17:39:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-11-readings-of-week.html\/","description":"Software engineering, Spark, history, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.\nTesting and debugging Apache Airflow We’ve been using Airflow for almost a year (on my suggestion). I’m not super-happy with it, and testing it is one of the pain points."},{"title":"2019#10 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-10-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 18 Apr 2019 11:39:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-10-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Software engineering, psychology, generative art. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#9 Readings of the week (x4)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-9-readings-of-week-x4.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 07 Apr 2019 19:37:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/04\/2019-9-readings-of-week-x4.html\/","description":" You know how you slip once on a habit and everything goes crazy? Well, I\u2019ve been 4 weeks without writing these, so here\u2019s the accumulated reading from 4 weeks. Because, even if I don\u2019t write it, I read a lot anyway. Also, there\u2019s lot of interesting content this \u201cweek\u201d.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#8 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/03\/2019-8-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 04 Mar 2019 21:11:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/03\/2019-8-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" This edition has Software engineering, formal methods, fraud, Scala. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#7 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-7-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 26 Feb 2019 22:54:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-7-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Formal methods, Scala, productivity. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"Apache Hive and java.lang.ClassCastException on start","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/apache-hive-and-javalangclasscastexcept.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 19 Feb 2019 23:47:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/apache-hive-and-javalangclasscastexcept.html\/","description":" A couple of days ago I installed Hive<\/a> from Homebrew<\/a> on my Mac. Sadly, when I tried to run the Software engineering, adtech, psychology, python. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#5 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-5-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 10 Feb 2019 22:38:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-5-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Software\/data engineering, psychology, formal systems. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#4 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-4-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 05 Feb 2019 22:56:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-4-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Sorry for the delay, Sunday was my birthday (also, Elmo\u2019s<\/a>, and The Day The Music Died<\/a> as well) and I spent the day without access to a computer.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#3 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-3-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 27 Jan 2019 20:01:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-3-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Software\/data engineering, history, formal systems. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a> . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#2 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-2-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 20 Jan 2019 16:32:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-2-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" Software\/data engineering, languages, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all weekly readings by checking the tag here<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#1 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-1-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:50:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2019-1-readings-of-week.html\/","description":" If you know me, you’ll know I have a quite extensive reading list. I keep it in Pocket<\/a>, and is part of my to do stored in Things3<\/a>. It used to be large<\/em> (hovering around 230 items since August) but during Christmas it got out of control, reaching almost 300 items.<\/p>"},{"title":"2018: Year in Review","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2018-year-in-review.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 01 Jan 2019 15:00:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/01\/2018-year-in-review.html\/","description":" The year has ended, what has been going on?<\/p>"},{"title":"Things3 Weekly Review mode shortcut(s)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/12\/things3-weekly-review-mode-shortcuts.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 31 Dec 2018 16:07:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/12\/things3-weekly-review-mode-shortcuts.html\/","description":" This is how I handle the dreaded GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review when using Things 3.<\/p>"},{"title":"Notifications from Spark on an Apple Watch (via IFTTT)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/05\/notifications-from-spark-on-apple-watch.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 05 May 2018 02:40:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/05\/notifications-from-spark-on-apple-watch.html\/","description":" This week I have been working a lot with a relatively large dataset on a Spark shell. It was a graph with 1 billion nodes and 2 billion edges that I wanted to analyse with GraphFrames<\/a> (the successor of GraphX<\/a> on Spark).<\/p>"},{"title":"Modifying the agnoster theme for zsh","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/04\/modifying-agnoster-theme-for-zsh.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 29 Apr 2018 15:38:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/04\/modifying-agnoster-theme-for-zsh.html\/","description":" Even though I have been a long time user of oh-my-zsh<\/a> on zsh (moved from plain bash to zsh<\/a> like 10 years ago), I have been minimal on my use of its theme capabilities. I have used the default theme forever: A few days go I played a bit with a naive implementation of Bloom\nfilters<\/a> in Python. I wanted to time\nthem against just checking whether a field is in a set\/collection. I found\nsomething slightly puzzling: it looked like the I ran into this problem with Down into some net rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a review of Work Clean<\/a>. I chuckled: a productivity book, philosophizing about how cook\u2019s approach to preparation (mise en place<\/em>) would fix all our problems? Bring it on, I have a long commute.<\/p>"},{"title":"Using Processing from Scala","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/processing-and-scala.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 02 Mar 2018 17:40:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/processing-and-scala.html\/","description":" I had always wanted to play with Processing (after leafing through The\nProcessing\nHandbook<\/a>\u00a0and\nVisualizing\nData<\/a>\nsome years ago). My general dislike for Java or the JVM made me just play a\nshort amount of time with A few months ago I stumbled into the problem of Akka logging, specifically\nClassNotFoundException when using Almost two months ago (time sure flies) I attended for the second time the conference Scala eXchange<\/a>, one of the largest Scala conferences in the world, and which happens to be 1 tube stop from the office you can find me from time to time in London.<\/p>"},{"title":"2017: Year in Review","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/01\/2017-year-in-review.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 06 Jan 2018 15:31:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/01\/2017-year-in-review.html\/","description":" I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we<\/em>, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.<\/p>"},{"title":"Want to play? Get a MFi controller for Christmas","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/11\/nimbus-steelseries-mfi-controller-for-christmas.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 19 Nov 2017 17:42:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/11\/nimbus-steelseries-mfi-controller-for-christmas.html\/","description":" It would probably be an understatement to say I’m not a gamer. Last console I\ngot was a Game Boy, 22 years ago (IIRC). Never got a gaming PC.<\/p>"},{"title":"Change the parameters of a docker container without knowing the docker run command used","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/08\/change-parameters-of-docker-container-docker-run.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 20 Aug 2017 19:30:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/08\/change-parameters-of-docker-container-docker-run.html\/","description":"I’m not sure how useful this Docker “trick” is, since it happens in a very niche situation.\nAt work, we have several instances running a suite of Docker containers, with some non-trivial amount of environment variables, port configurations, volumes and links among them. This is set up really easily using ansible: writing link\/port\/volume mappings in ansible (using the docker, container or docker-container modules, depending how long ago we set it up)."},{"title":"Shading dependencies with sbt-assembly (in particular, shapeless in Spark 2.1.0)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/05\/shading-dependencies-with-sbt-assembly.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 07 May 2017 10:40:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2017\/05\/shading-dependencies-with-sbt-assembly.html\/","description":"A few weeks ago I needed to parse configuration files in Scala for a Spark project and decided to use PureConfig. It is incredibly lean to use, needing minimal boilerplate. I recommend you check it out (give also a look at CaseClassy, which I haven’t had time to test yet).\nEverything seemed straightforward enough, and I got it working pretty quickly (as in, it compiled properly). The surprise? spark-submit failed with a conflict with Shapeless (lacking a witness)."},{"title":"2016 in Review","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/12\/2016-in-review.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 31 Dec 2016 14:34:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/12\/2016-in-review.html\/","description":"Some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon. I only recommend what I use.\nAt last February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I\u2019ve seen in the year\nWork February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation."},{"title":"My portable Bluetooth keyboard","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/11\/my-portable-bluetooth-keyboard.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 22 Nov 2016 17:12:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/11\/my-portable-bluetooth-keyboard.html\/","description":"I have been looking for the perfect, really portable Bluetooth keyboard for several years. Typing on the go, or having a truly mobile office in your pockets is a really interesting concept for a consultant like me. You never know when opportunity or need may arise.\nA year and a half ago I ordered what it looked like the perfect keyboard for that setup, but (even though it was supposed to arrive 3-4 months later) I’m still waiting."},{"title":"October Kafka London Meetup - Jay Kreps: Distributed stream processing with Apache Kafka","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/10\/apache-kafka-london-meetup-distributed.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 31 Oct 2016 21:37:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/10\/apache-kafka-london-meetup-distributed.html\/","description":"This has been the first time I could attend\u00a0the Apache Kafka meetup in London.\u00a0Previous meetings had me in Barcelona or flying. First realisation: it is a\u00a0surprisingly crowded meetup! Clearly, everyone is using Kafka, even if it is not\u00a0clear from the outside. Oh, and the food was pretty good, too. Thanks to the\u00a0sponsor (which I have sadly forgotten).\nI really enjoyed this one. The speaker was Jay Kreps, CEO and co-founder\u00a0of Confluent (and author\u00a0of I Heart Logs), so, basically, a Kafka top committer\u00a0himself."},{"title":"More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/09\/more-emacs-configuration-tweaks.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 11 Sep 2016 17:34:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/09\/more-emacs-configuration-tweaks.html\/","description":"At Affectv we use a wide range of editors: Sublime, Atom, Emacs, Pycharm, IntelliJ… Actually only two people use the same editor! As such, from time to time I see things in other people’s editors that I would like to have as well. So, yesterday I decided to improve on some configuration settings on Spacemacs.\nClick for multiple-cursors I saw this on Jordi’s Sublime, and it is much more comfortable than using more-like-this or similar helper functions, even if I need to use the trackpad to do so."},{"title":"Moving from Emacs to Spacemacs","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/08\/moving-from-emacs-to-spacemacs.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 07 Aug 2016 22:42:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/08\/moving-from-emacs-to-spacemacs.html\/","description":"A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.\nIn case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs."},{"title":"Ruben Berenguel, PhD","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/04\/ruben-berenguel-phd-in-mathematics.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 30 Apr 2016 20:24:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2016\/04\/ruben-berenguel-phd-in-mathematics.html\/","description":"Started a long time ago. It was supposed to be about a phenomenon leading to chaos: separatrix splitting. I got a research grant. I worked on holomorphic dynamics. Travelled. Presented. Too many roadblocks with the separatrix problem. Switched topics. Welcome to a different new world, infinite dimensional dynamical systems. I read the literature. Researched, proved some things. My grant ran out. I worked. A lot. Too many times I considered giving up."},{"title":"SyncTeX and pdf-view-mode for emacs","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/11\/synctex-and-pdf-view-mode-for-emacs.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 02 Nov 2015 23:33:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/11\/synctex-and-pdf-view-mode-for-emacs.html\/","description":"Back in the days of yore, when I was switching between my Windows machine and a Linux machine, I remember having SyncTeX active in my Windows machine. It was a wonderful experience: SyncTeX lets you click anywhere on a generated file from LaTeX and gets back to your editor, to the place generating where you clicked. This was extremely useful, specially later on when you need to adjust many formulas to fit and you need a bit of back-and-forth-ing."},{"title":"Cold Brew Yerba Mate","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/06\/cold-brew-yerba-mate.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 19 Jun 2015 17:00:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/06\/cold-brew-yerba-mate.html\/","description":"Thermometers are already hitting 29\u00b0C with temperature feelings around 32 or 33. It\u2019s this time of the year when I need cold drinks to keep me alive. I\u2019m not a big soda fan (except when I\u2019m on Finland in the Nordic Go Academy\u00a0camp, they are so stocked on soda that I\u2019m dragged in,) so my go-to drink is usually freshly squeezed lemonade with some ice cubes and sometimes a pinch of soda to make it fizz (and make it less acid."},{"title":"Using QGIS to create a custom map","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/06\/using-qgis-to-create-custom-map.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 14 Jun 2015 20:12:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/06\/using-qgis-to-create-custom-map.html\/","description":"I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there\u2019s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn\u2019t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps."},{"title":"Handling of exponent overflow in GNU APL and Dyalog APL (on Mac)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/04\/handling-of-exponent-overflow-in-gnu.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 13 Apr 2015 11:29:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/04\/handling-of-exponent-overflow-in-gnu.html\/","description":"A few weeks ago I started trying a pre-beta release of Dyalog APL (now available as “full beta”) for Mac. Fellow Mac users, looks like we are in for a treat after so much time of only having GNU APL and the pretty expensive APLX. Now Mac APL lovers, users and aficionados will have a competitive, commercial option. At last!\nI started with the usual 1+1, \u2373 10 , \u2374 \u2373 10 to check it worked as expected."},{"title":"Picking up Backgammon","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/03\/picking-up-backgammon.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 08 Mar 2015 12:30:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2015\/03\/picking-up-backgammon.html\/","description":"The links to Amazon and The Book Depository are affiliate links. If you purchase like 50 copies I may afford a coffee :D\n\nFrom Flickr\nIt all started after reading If you can\u2019t choose, pick at random at Aeon.co. It delves into how choosing at random can be best in some cases. Give it a read, it is interesting. Among the HackerNews comments about this submission there were some mentions about choosing at random in real life, and to the novel The Dice Man (Amazon | Book Depository)."},{"title":"The Mandelbrot set in one line of APL","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2014\/01\/the-mandelbrot-set-in-one-line-of-apl.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 02 Jan 2014 20:37:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2014\/01\/the-mandelbrot-set-in-one-line-of-apl.html\/","description":"Is this line noise?\n \u2349' *'[\u234e'1+0<|z',(\u220a150\u2374\u2282'\u2190c+m\u00d7m'),'\u2190c\u2190(\u00af2.1J\u00af1.3+(((2.6\u00f7b-1)\u00d7(\u00af1+\u2373b))\u2218.+(0J1\u00d7(2.6\u00f7b-1)\u00d7(\u00af1+\u2373b\u219051))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?"},{"title":"My Russian KL-1 Circular Slide Rule (and a small intro to slide rules)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/11\/my-russian-kl-1-circular-slide-rule-and.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 02 Nov 2013 18:29:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/11\/my-russian-kl-1-circular-slide-rule-and.html\/","description":"A few months ago (woah, so long already) I had an impulse buy: I purchased a circular slide rule from Etsy. It was cheap, and I had always wanted one, so\u2026 I just bought it (a neat addition to my Addiator.)\nI guess if you are geeky enough to read mostlymaths.net, you know how a slide rule works. Although I knew how to use it, getting to grips with it took a little while."},{"title":"A Slightly Better reddit Upvote\/Downvote Widget (button)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/09\/a-slightly-better-reddit-upvotedownvote.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:43:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/09\/a-slightly-better-reddit-upvotedownvote.html\/","description":"A few days ago I found myself with a problem. I wanted a reddit button in one of our websites, and our technical guy wanted it to be asynchronous. After a little poking around and deciding that reddit doesn’t offer asynchronous buttons, I rolled my poor man’s version: wrap it in a $(document).ready() It’s not asynchronous, but at least it won’t block page loading.\nBoth happy, we deployed and I tested."},{"title":"Find Search Engine Rankings... via the Command Line","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/05\/find-search-engine-rankings-via-command.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 22 May 2013 18:33:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/05\/find-search-engine-rankings-via-command.html\/","description":"Via pixelfrenzy@flickr\nBeware! The software described here is just for personal and very light use. Its use beyond purely recreational value is against Google Search terms of service, and I don’t want you or anyone to step that line. Any use of this code is at your own risk.\nWell, after this scary paragraph, lets get to the real meat. Which boils down to just a few lines of bash."},{"title":"Just as Mario: Using the Plan9 plumber utility","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/04\/just-as-mario-using-plan9-plumber.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:30:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/04\/just-as-mario-using-plan9-plumber.html\/","description":"Note: It’s best to open the videos in full screen. Also I have added a few line breaks\u00a0or readability\u00a0in the code snippets that will make them not work correctly. It’s not hard to find where they are, if you run into any problems let me know.\nIf you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know I’ve been using Acme and related Plan 9 from User Space utilities lately. One of its pieces is the plumber."},{"title":"Extensibility in the Acme text editor","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/03\/extensibility-programming-acme-text-editor.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:31:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/03\/extensibility-programming-acme-text-editor.html\/","description":"Text editors. You hate them or love them. Praise them with religious zeal, and attack them with the same power. I’ve been an emacs user for the last 8 years, getting as deep as I could without checking the source. And the past few months I have started using evil-mode in emacs, to get some taste of vim in my daily editing (mostly text objects.)\nThere’s still a third contestant in editor-land, for me."},{"title":"Creating New Text Objects in Evil-Mode (Vim emulation layer in emacs)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/02\/creating-new-text-objects-in-evil-mode.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 22 Feb 2013 18:28:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2013\/02\/creating-new-text-objects-in-evil-mode.html\/","description":"The links to Practical Vim are affiliate links to Amazon. Beware!\nSo… last January I was in a flight to London, preparing for an intense, 12 days course on traditional shoemaking (English hand-welted shoes, improving our knowledge at The Fancy Puffin.) And my flight read was Practical Vim. Most of my readers are already aware I’m an emacs guy, so the main question is why?\nI love knowing many tools."},{"title":"An introduction to the magic of Google Tag Manager","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/10\/an-introduction-to-magic-of-google-tag.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:41:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/10\/an-introduction-to-magic-of-google-tag.html\/","description":"If you want to read a quick overview of this in Spanish, check my post about GTM at DoctorMetrics.\nGoogle has just unveiled a new tool: Google Tag Manager. I have spent a few hours playing with it (both before and after official release.) And it’s awesome! Or at least, it has quite a lot of awesomeness, hidden behind a seemingly simple interface.\nIts main feature is the fact that you can get away with just a piece of included code."},{"title":"Version Control: Started using git and github (and how to set-up a remote git server)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/using-git-and-setting-remote-git-server.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:28:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/using-git-and-setting-remote-git-server.html\/","description":" It’s been almost 6 years since I used some kind of version control system. Back\nthen I wasn’t sure about which I wanted to use\u2026 I settled with RCS, the father\nof them all. RCS was structurally simple, with text-based (human-readable) delta\nfiles. I liked that. I had all my code and TeX files under revision control, but\nthen I started using more than one computer and it got out of hand quickly\n(using RCS or CVS in Windows was quite tricky and had user and encoding\nproblems.)<\/p>"},{"title":"Editor Magic: emacs, vim, acme and the return key","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/editor-magic-emacs-vim-acme-and-return.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:02:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/editor-magic-emacs-vim-acme-and-return.html\/","description":"Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Image copyrighted\u00a0by Lucent Technologies, hosted by Wikimedia\u00a0Commons and posted here for information purposes\nA few months ago I wrote about how I’m using vim in my ipad. You know, I’m an emacs guy, just started writing my own (useful) stuff to improve it. Recently I finished gnusnotes.el, a package which allows you to easily add notes to emails. Of course, before this I had already written emacs code, just that it was only for me."},{"title":"Polishing a Shoe","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/polishing-a-shoe-to-get-a-good-shine.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 09 Sep 2012 21:26:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/09\/polishing-a-shoe-to-get-a-good-shine.html\/","description":"_‘Of course I don’t have to do this,’ one middle-aged man said,\u00a0carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a\u00a0little pouch, sat down beside him. ‘But look; this table’s clean.’\u00a0_\u00a0 _‘Usually,’ the man said. ‘I work on alien - no offence - alien\u00a0religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my\u00a0speciality… like when temples or graves or\u00a0__prayers always have to\u00a0face in a certain direction; that sort of thing?"},{"title":"Adding Notes to Emails in Gnus (in Summary View)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/08\/adding-notes-to-emails-in-gnus-in.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:21:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/08\/adding-notes-to-emails-in-gnus-in.html\/","description":"Sensitive information blanked\nThe gnusnotes.el package, with delete and edit capabilities is now available in the marmalade package repository. This post just explains why, how and what (code at the end, too)\nLast month I switched email clients (for the 4th time in the past year.) I’ve passed through gnus, Thunderbird, mail.app and settled with Sparrow. Just 2 days before Sparrow was bought by Google I left for gnus (lucky moment!"},{"title":"(Why) Juggling for Programmers (and other computer people)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/07\/juggling-for-programmers-and-other.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 23 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/07\/juggling-for-programmers-and-other.html\/","description":"From Flickr\nNo, this is not a tutorial (but I do have written the standard steps to learn below). I began learning to juggle very recently. I just want to answer a possible “why”?\nI’ve always been fascinated by juggling, and every time I wanted to eat more than 2 small oranges I’d try my hand at juggling them. Always followed by bowing and picking them from the ground, of course."},{"title":"Back to gnus (emacs mail reader)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/07\/back-to-gnus-emacs-mail-reader.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 07 Jul 2012 20:50:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/07\/back-to-gnus-emacs-mail-reader.html\/","description":"From\nThe Design of the Emacs Logo\nI’ve been thinking about getting a new Macbook lately (my heart and wallet were divided among a 11" Air or a 15" Retina Pro). My 4-year old Macbook (Early 2008 I think, 2 GB Ram, Intel Core Duo 2.4 GHz) was showing its age. Mainly when I had the RAM and cache hungry inhabitants of my dock active: Yorufukurou (the best twitter client for managing multiple accounts in a Mac I’ve seen) and Sparrow (mail client)."},{"title":"Timeline of whatlanguageis.com: first Django project","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/timeline-of-whatlanguageiscom-first.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 12 Jun 2012 15:10:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/timeline-of-whatlanguageiscom-first.html\/","description":"Note from 2020: The domain mentioned in the post is no longer active (or mine at least), I cancelled this project some time ago\nLast week I wrote about ~whatlanguageis.com~, my first simple try at creating a Django powered site. How did it came to be?\nIn the last few months have been writing and thinking about several ideas to process social data with Python, undoubtedly motivated by the great book Mining the Social Web."},{"title":"Language Detection in Python with NLTK Stopwords","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/language-detection-in-python-with-nltk.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:55:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/language-detection-in-python-with-nltk.html\/","description":"Lately I’ve been coding a little more Python than usual, some twitter API stuff, some data crunching code. The other day I was thinking how I could detect the language a twitter user was writing in. Of course, I’m sure there is a library out there that does it\u2026 But the NLTK library (the Natural Language Toolkit for Python) does not have any function for this, or at least I was not able to find it after 5 minutes of Google search."},{"title":"It's Not Only the Politicians: This country is completely fucked up","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/its-not-only-politicians-this-country.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:15:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/06\/its-not-only-politicians-this-country.html\/","description":"Beware, in what follows I rant. All figures come from Wikipedia or similar and are expressed with many zeroes and also in written form to make clear what a billion may be.\nIf you are a regular reader of mostlymaths.net, you’ll be aware that I don’t write a lot about current subjects. In fact, I actively try not to write about what’s going on at the moment, one notable exception may be a post I wrote about Mesut \u00d6zil’s stellar debut in the 2010 World Cup."},{"title":"Aprende a recordarlo todo: el m\u00e9todo del palacio de la memoria","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/03\/aprende-recordarlo-todo-el-metodo-del.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:47:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/03\/aprende-recordarlo-todo-el-metodo-del.html\/","description":"Cortes\u00eda de\u00a0Shanidar\nPuedes leer la versi\u00f3n inglesa de este post aqu\u00ed: Learn to remember everything: the memory palace method\nEn este post os voy a ense\u00f1ar c\u00f3mo recordar a la perfecci\u00f3n una lista. No importa la longitud de la lista: puede ser tu lista de la compra de 10 art\u00edculos, o una lista con 50, 100 o incluso 1000 cosas. Y en un pr\u00f3ximo post, c\u00f3mo aplicar este m\u00e9todo para aprender idiomas."},{"title":"The Mind Palace Memory Technique (or: what I''m watching on TV lately)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/03\/mind-palace-memory-technique-or-what-im.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:01:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/03\/mind-palace-memory-technique-or-what-im.html\/","description":"Caveat: some of the links appearing in this post are affiliate links to Amazon.com If you buy anything from them, I get a small commission. As always, I only link to stuff I like. If you want to support (ever so slightly) this blog, buy something. If you don’t want, don’t do it ;)\nLately I’ve been watching an interesting TV series. Sherlock, the modern version of Conan Doyle’s stories and novels."},{"title":"Learning to use vim in my iPad","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/01\/learning-to-use-vim-in-my-ipad-even-if.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:11:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2012\/01\/learning-to-use-vim-in-my-ipad-even-if.html\/","description":"Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs' Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side."},{"title":"Good Books I have Read in 2011: Perfect Gifts for Geeks!","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/12\/good-books-ive-read-in-2011-perfect.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:29:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/12\/good-books-ive-read-in-2011-perfect.html\/","description":"Taken from Flickr\n In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.\nThis year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap."},{"title":"Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/12\/working-on-go-with-ipad-bluetooth.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:31:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/12\/working-on-go-with-ipad-bluetooth.html\/","description":"All hail Steve Jobs\n Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode. My setup is similar, but I use an iPad 1 and 6sync for the VPS."},{"title":"Again and Again: Playing Go","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/11\/again-and-again-playing-go.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:28:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/11\/again-and-again-playing-go.html\/","description":"I\u2019ve been playing the game of Go (also known as weiqi or baduk) on and off for almost 10 years. In case you don\u2019t know, Go is a board game with very old roots, that can be traced back to at least 2500 years ago, probably a lot more. Very popular in Japan (known as Go or Igo), Korea (baduk) and China (weiqi), it has been slowly spreading among the west during the last century."},{"title":"Time Tracking Like There Is No Tomorrow (with Javascript and HTML5)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/11\/time-tracking-like-there-is-no-tomorrow.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:08:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/11\/time-tracking-like-there-is-no-tomorrow.html\/","description":"A few weeks ago I found out the awesome time tracking setup that Sacha Chua has in her homepage. Although I’m a regular at her blog and I follow her RSS feed, I had not seen it “live” yet. My inner geek yelled “gimme gimme” and I asked her what mobile software is she using for time tracking. Sadly (well, sadly), it is Android only app. Oh well. I don’t want another device."},{"title":"The Mental Drawer: Never miss an idea again","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/09\/mental-drawer-never-miss-idea-again.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:45:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/09\/mental-drawer-never-miss-idea-again.html\/","description":"This was posted to my mail newsletter a few months ago. Subscribe now if you want to receive this kind of content to your inbox. I won’t spam you, promise.\nWhen do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can’t act upon them. While I’m falling asleep or while I’m taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I’ll remember it next morning, something that never happens."},{"title":"Using Gephi with Google Analytics to visualize keywords and landing pages","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/08\/using-gephi-to-visualize-keywords-and.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:50:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/08\/using-gephi-to-visualize-keywords-and.html\/","description":"As of late, I’ve been playing a lot with data analysis and visualization tools. Recently I’ve read two interesting books (Statistical Analysis with R and Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics and I’m on my way to another two to refresh my statistics knowledge.\nBut this post is only mildly related to these books, since it started way before: the day I read about Gephi. Gephi is an open source graph visualization tool, to work with huge (or at least big) datasets and graphs."},{"title":"RTTI: 11 \u2013 A fjord day and visit to \u00cdsafj\u00f6r\u00f0ur","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-10-fjord.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:45:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-10-fjord.html\/","description":"In Back to the Future, Doc sets the clock in the DeLorean to a day 25 years in the future. Today (2010, 6th July) is that day.\n Today was a really amazing day. It was very sunny, and we visited \u00cdsafj\u00f6r\u00f0ur, a city that stole our hearts.\nHolmav\u00edk’s Witchcraft Museum, Reykjanes We started our day with breakfast and taking a quick picture of Drangsnes' Rock troll. It does not look like a troll for us, but anyway."},{"title":"A Quadratic Julia Set for Iceland National Day","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/quadratic-julia-set-for-icelands.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:05:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/quadratic-julia-set-for-icelands.html\/","description":"This was computed using PVM and the full PDF generated is 16k pixels wide\n Today is Iceland’s National Day (commemorating their independence day and the date of birth of J\u00f3n Sigur\u00f0sson), and to commemorate it I share this image with everyone.\nI computed this image a long, long time ago (using the Distance Estimator Method, paralellised with PVM using 16 computers, it took just 2 minutes). The full file is a 30MB pdf, which I printed large-size (2 meters wide), and sits in my office."},{"title":"Ego Depletion: Go Eat That Chocolate Cookie to Be More Productive","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/ego-depletion-go-eat-that-chocolate.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:00:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/ego-depletion-go-eat-that-chocolate.html\/","description":"Snickerdoodles!\nDo you have problems to keep motivated? Is your usual to-do list filled with great hopes of accomplishing 20 things? Do you dump it when you are wasted at 11 AM after finishing just the first 5 things? Of course, you are not alone. This is a very common thing, from freelancers to researchers, or to almost anyone managing their own time. But this can be due to eating radishes instead of chocolate chip cookies."},{"title":"RTTI: 10 \u2013 Hv\u00edtserkur","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-10.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:00:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-10.html\/","description":"As you may remember, yesterday we were not happy with our guest house. And in addition to what we saw yesterday, today our breakfast was d\u2013\u2013n late. When you are driving around a country trying to be on time everywhere, you wake up early and drive a lot. If your breakfast is late, you are bound to either go faster (not a good idea in Iceland) or get to places later."},{"title":"Using an Apple Remote with Mac OS Preview","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/using-apple-remote-with-mac-os-preview.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:00:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/using-apple-remote-with-mac-os-preview.html\/","description":"Last Tuesday I presented a talk in a congress, here in Barcelona. This post is not about this talk, but about the Mac remote and Apple’s “problems”. If you are interested, you can download the talk here, anyway.\nAs the congress was local, instead of using my netbook for the talk I brought my MacBook. Instead of using arrow keys, I could use these fancy Apple remotes. Good plan… at the moment."},{"title":"RTTI: 9 - Go\u00f0afoss and H\u00f3lar","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-9-goafoss.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:00:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/06\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-9-goafoss.html\/","description":"H\u00f3lar’s church, if I’m not wrong\nI’ve been procrastinating a lot with this post. Although it may not look like this from the pictures (or even the text), this was one of the worse days in our trip. Uneventful, visiting not-so-interesting places and with a lousy guest house at the end of the day. Let’s see if you find if interesting! If not, the next post will be, don’t worry."},{"title":"Anki and Language Learning: The Spaced Repetition System","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/anki-and-language-learning-spaced.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 28 May 2011 18:50:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/anki-and-language-learning-spaced.html\/","description":"From my cheap dictionary\nI first heard of spaced repetition software around 5 or 6 years ago, while browsing around the net. Read about it, found it unappealing and moved on. You know, there are times when you learn about something and dismiss it as not necessary… and after a while you are lead into it again to find it is wonderful. This is one of such instances.\nI have only written two highly visited posts about languages: The Language Switch and How to Train Your Brain to Flip to a New Language (in Bitesize Irish Gaelic, it also appeared in Hacker Monthly, April 2011) and a lot of the commenters suggested me using Anki, Mnemosyne or Supermemo."},{"title":"Building Your Memory Palace Collection","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/building-your-memory-palace-collection.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 08 May 2011 13:30:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/building-your-memory-palace-collection.html\/","description":"Picture courtesy of Shanidar\nDo you want to have very good memory? I do, in fact I’ve been interested in it since my school days. There are some techniques that exploit your brain’s natural power, and the one I’m covering here is the memory palace technique.\nI have already written about the memory palace memorisation technique (go and read the previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but I did not cover a very important point there: Where can you find memory palaces to use in your memorisation?"},{"title":"Focus in Language Learning: Doing Two Languages at Once Is a Bad Idea","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/focus-in-language-learning-doing-two.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 01 May 2011 17:30:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/05\/focus-in-language-learning-doing-two.html\/","description":"From my cheap dictionary\nLast February I set myself a goal for these next three months (February, March and April): to learn Gaelic. The time is up and I must confess I have not made a lot of advances. The reasons are plenty, and most are shared with whoever wants to learn a new language. They are even harder for people learning a few languages at once, the kind of language nerds that have way too many Teach Yourself books on languages."},{"title":"RTTI: 8 - From M\u00fdvatn to Husavik visiting \u00c1sbyrgi and Dettifoss","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-8-from.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 24 Apr 2011 20:15:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-8-from.html\/","description":"No more gas ahead\nLeaving M\u00fdvatn was a little dull. We saw a pair of handcraft stores that looked really interesting… And they were closed until 11! No way we could spend so much time waiting. We fueled, bought vanillated skyr for the route and took the road to Dettifoss. This is one of those places where you definitely have to fuel, there is no other gas station in 130km."},{"title":"RTTI: 7 - From Egilssta\u00f0ir to M\u00fdvatn passing through Hverir","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-7-from.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 13 Apr 2011 22:55:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-7-from.html\/","description":"The Myvatn area\nThis weeks post in the Iceland road trip series comes a little late: Saturday was a relaxation day, and Sunday I posted about how relaxing Saturday felt. As such, I didn’t put the time to typeset this post until Friday was looming! I think I got a little out of hand adding pictures to this post… But the M\u00fdvatn area is impressive and I wanted to show it here."},{"title":"Doing (Really) Nothing","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/doing-really-nothing.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 11 Apr 2011 09:45:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/doing-really-nothing.html\/","description":"Yesterday I did nothing. Absolutely, really nothing.\n And it felt great. Before yesterday, my usual weekend was filled of what I thought was doing nothing, but far from it. I wrote posts, programmed, read a lot online and caught up with what was going in the A-List Blogger Club forum. Did some laundry, folded the clothes. All this (well, except for the laundry part) under the assumption that doing what you love does not tire you."},{"title":"Remembering Facts: Using Mental Associative Chains","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/remembering-facts-using-mental.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:55:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/remembering-facts-using-mental.html\/","description":"An image can help your memory…\nFor how long?\nThis is a method I use to complement the memory palace technique to remember facts, either historical, about people or any other subject. It is pretty simple and follows the same principles as the memory palace: you need to make up bizarre images. To memorise facts we just need to attach keys to each fact, and link them to the subject or person we are considering."},{"title":"RTTI: 6 - East Fjords, Egilssta\u00f0ir and Borgarfj\u00f6r\u00f0ur","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-6-east.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 02 Apr 2011 17:55:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/04\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-6-east.html\/","description":"Geese in the East Fjords, Iceland\nIn the last 2 weeks I’ve had a big surge of visits and new subscribers, following the rise in HackerNews of my old post Timeboxing: You Will Work Like Never Before and of my newer post Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique. To put in situation, last July my girlfriend and me made a road trip around Iceland, and I wrote everything we did each day."},{"title":"Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/learn-to-remember-everything-memory.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:02:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/learn-to-remember-everything-memory.html\/","description":"Picture courtesy of Shanidar\n You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and related areas here.\nIn this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Length is not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be a list with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how you how to apply this technique to learning new languages."},{"title":"RTTI: 5 - Ingolfsh\u00f6f\u00f0i and J\u00f6kuls\u00e1rl\u00f3n (again)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-5.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:30:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-5.html\/","description":"Happy World Water Day! Luckily the post due for today was a lot of water in it, iced water sparkling of thousand years old blue ice. This was supposed to be our puffin visit day… But schedules played badly on us and we could not make it. We just made another round of J\u00f6kuls\u00e1rl\u00f3n icebergs while collecting shoreside rocks.\nExpat tales While we were having breakfast we saw another guest in the lovely guesthouse at Hofell… and he surprised us by asking if we were Catalans, in Catalan!"},{"title":"RTTI: 4 - Two magic places, Svartifoss and J\u00f6kuls\u00e1rl\u00f3n","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-4-two.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-4-two.html\/","description":"Svartifoss, Iceland\nToday (i.e. this day in our trip) was Laia’s birthday, and one of our personal landmarks in this trip, as we visited our favourite places: Svartifoss, my special place and J\u00f6kuls\u00e1rl\u00f3n, a place Laia loves. We spent almost all day in these two places and driving around, but they are probably two of the most remarkable experiences of our road trip in Iceland.\nKirkjugolf and Skaftafell Today we managed to visit the church’s floor, the Kirkjugolf."},{"title":"Using Taskwarrior Instead Of Emacs+Org Mode For To-Do And Appointment Tracking","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/using-taskwarrior-instead-of-emacsorg.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:50:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/using-taskwarrior-instead-of-emacsorg.html\/","description":"One of my fractal images\n\nI have a confession to make: I’m not using emacs+org mode to keep my to-do list and appointments. What? The same emacs junkie that used emacs for (almost) everything last December gave up emacs? Yes, the same, but only gave up for this use case. I have some good reasons about why I am using TaskWarrior. Which does not mean that I could not be using emacs for the same, I just wanted to try something new."},{"title":"Road Trip Around Iceland: The Index","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-around-iceland-index.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:45:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-around-iceland-index.html\/","description":"Dynjandi waterfall, Iceland\nThis is the journal of our road trip around Iceland, what we did each day as we circled the island through the Ring Road. This series of posts started on February 2011, and is so far ongoing, posting once a week from our annotations and pictures. Bookmark this page if you want to come back to see what’s new.\nRoad Trip Around Iceland, Day 1: Reykjavik - the city I’d like to live"},{"title":"Irish Gaelic Language Learning: Month 1 Overview","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/irish-gaelic-language-learning-month-1.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:50:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/irish-gaelic-language-learning-month-1.html\/","description":"Have you thought about playing\ndice letter gamesin a\nforeign language?\nIt’s been more than a month since I started my goal of learning Gaelic. I’m not happy with how it is going, and I’m the only one to blame for it. Why?\nFirst, I have too many commitments. A few are with myself, others are with my girlfriend and then I have my thesis and research work. All together are way too much to handle in an usual work day, even in an ‘extended work day’, i."},{"title":"RTTI: 3 - Waterfalls and Glaciers","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-3.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-3.html\/","description":"After visiting the wonders of the Golden Circle, we kept driving eastward getting into the region of waterfalls and glaciers. The day began with 2000 Icelandic kr\u00f3nur of fuel, that for 1\/4 of the tank. Expensive, but not as expensive as one may guess, from prices in Spain. It continued with the first sighting of lambs in the middle of the road… Get used to that, it is very common!"},{"title":"Hoarding Projects: Minimise the Trouble","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/hoarding-projects-minimise-trouble.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:40:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/03\/hoarding-projects-minimise-trouble.html\/","description":"Since I can remember, I’ve always tried to bite more than I could chew. Every time I’m stressed, or overworked I end up adding one or two new projects. I don’t know how. I try to pick up a new language, or start to play go again, or decide it is a good moment to learn stenography. These days, for example, added to my usual schedule are a new blog about meditation, I finally started the series on our road trip to Iceland and I am fighting my schedule to learn Gaelic."},{"title":"RTTI: 2 - The Golden Circle (Thingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-2-golden.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:40:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-2-golden.html\/","description":"The Kerid crater. Don’t miss it!\nThis was the official first day. We did a quick packing and preparing in our room and headed downstairs. Breakfast time, and we were amused to find a bunch of Spanish hiking tourists, with a Spanish guide. Had a wonderful breakfast with some tips from the guide: Beware of falling over the side of the road. Why? Because you can be easily distracted by the landscape!"},{"title":"RTTI: 1. Reykjavik - the city I'd like to live","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-1.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:40:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/road-trip-through-iceland-day-1.html\/","description":"\ufeff \/ 64.133; -21.933\n\nAfter a huge delay, this is the first of a few posts about our road trip to Iceland last June and July. While we were there, I wrote a journal about what we did and saw each day, and this is the extended version (with pictures!)\nWe arrived to Keflav\u00edk International Airport (its terminal is named Leifur Eir\u00edksson after the European discoverer of North America), really late: our plane needed refueling before departure and it ate quite a lot of time."},{"title":"Focused Interview with Steven Pressfield","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/focused-interview-with-steven.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:15:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/focused-interview-with-steven.html\/","description":"This is Steven!\nI guess there is not much need of an introduction for Steven. Just in case, Steven Pressfield is a best-selling author who started its career with The Legend of Bagger Vance and then started to write historical fiction, usually military themed. Some of his books (like Gates of Fire and Tides of War) have achieved cult status among military people, and they are even used as teaching material in some military schools."},{"title":"February, March and April Challenge: Language Learning Applied to Gaelic","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/february-march-and-april-challenge.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:15:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/02\/february-march-and-april-challenge.html\/","description":"From my cheap dictionary\nAs a byproduct of The Language Switch, I was invited to send a guest post to Bitesize Irish Gaelic, a wonderful site where you can learn Irish gaelic online.\nLast year I decided to learn Icelandic because we were going to Iceland, this year I was learning Gaelic… Thus we decided that Ireland might be a good place to visit this summer on holidays, encouraging me to learn better this new language."},{"title":"Installing Debian on my Ben Nanonote","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/installing-debian-on-my-ben-nanonote.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:45:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/installing-debian-on-my-ben-nanonote.html\/","description":"Yes, that’s me with a polariser.\nWait, playing Dungeon Crawl\nin your Nanonote?\nInstalling Debian on the Ben is pretty easy after the work of the people at pyneo.org. I follow mostly their instructions which can befound here.\nThe first step is installing the package xburst-tools, following the instructions from the Qi Hardware Wiki about reflashing your Ben Nanonote.\nThe package can be downloaded in .deb format for Debian-like distributions."},{"title":"The Language Switch (or how my brain seems to work when learning languages)","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/language-switch-or-how-my-brain-seems.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:10:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/language-switch-or-how-my-brain-seems.html\/","description":"From my cheap dictionary\nI love learning languages. Since I picked my first Teach yourself English (in Spanish) from my grandparents place when I was 10 years old, I have been fascinated by languages and language learning, first human languages and then also by computer languages. Aside from English, Spanish and Catalan I can defend myself in German and French (enough to get directions and keep simple conversations up, although the last time I was in Germany all Germans I talked to said I could keep up pretty well… Sure they are polite!"},{"title":"Counter-examples, Converging Sequences and Giving Immediate Answers","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/counter-examples-converging-sequences.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:50:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/counter-examples-converging-sequences.html\/","description":"Next week is the final exam of the course I’m giving, Numerical Analysis. Classes finished before Christmas, and this week is for students questions. I had one of these sessions this morning, when a pair of students came with a few questions related to the problems I solved on the blackboard.\nAll were quick to solve, until one simple question arose, concerning a trivial problem in Calculus 1 (or Analysis 1, as we name it here)."},{"title":"A DIY Kirigami Notebook to Keep in Your Jeans' Small Pocket","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/diy-origami-notebook-to-keep-in-your.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 08 Jan 2011 22:30:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2011\/01\/diy-origami-notebook-to-keep-in-your.html\/","description":"This is the notebook where I keep my to-do list, like the one you can see in the picture in Book Review: Do It Tomorrow. A quick and cheap way to have a small multipage notebook you can always keep with you. Of course, calling this origami is a small lie, as you have to use scissors.\nI read a very good post about going the analog way (How analog rituals can amp your productivity) and this was my tool."},{"title":"E30DC: Get the latest gnus to improve speed","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-get-latest-gnus.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:00:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-get-latest-gnus.html\/","description":"The gnus logo,\nfrom gnus homepage\nEver since my first post of the emacs 30 Day Challenge, I was warned about gnus slowness. A lot of comments in reddit pointed to this, and suggested using wanderlust or installing a local IMAP server (like dovecot or notmuch) to speed up the IMAP back-end (search, retrieval and processing), while also allowing for offline reading.\nThe main drawback was keeping it nicely cross-platform."},{"title":"Don't Wait for New Year to Act on Your Resolutions","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/dont-wait-for-new-year-to-act-on-your.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/dont-wait-for-new-year-to-act-on-your.html\/","description":"During this week you will hear and read a lot about New Year’s resolutions. Questions like what do you want to change in your life for the next year and what good habits do you want to build next year are assumed to be always in your mind now. And they should, but not just now.\nNew Year is only a psychological landmark, and a very bad one. Something like 70% of those good intentions you had while the previous year was ending fade into oblivion before February 1st."},{"title":"Do you Feel the Smell of Burning Wood? Pyrography Box Beta","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/do-you-fell-smell-of-burning-wood.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:45:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/do-you-fell-smell-of-burning-wood.html\/","description":"Santa brought me the gift I wanted for Christmas: a pyrograph. In case you don’t know, a pyrograph is a tool to draw over wood, by burning it.\nAs you may already know, I love drawing (in particular, ink drawing). This is similar: you don’t have a lot of control over tone and a mistake can ruin the drawing.\nThis was the first time I used one, and to test how it worked I decided to draw a Celtic knot over a wooden box."},{"title":"Get into the Flow: Music Meditation","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/give-yourself-to-music.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:15:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/give-yourself-to-music.html\/","description":"From morguefile\nIt’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.\nBut you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place."},{"title":"E30DC: A glimpse of BBDB, The Insidious Big Brother Database and gnus","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-glimpse-of-bbdb.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:20:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-glimpse-of-bbdb.html\/","description":"Keep your contacts\nunder control\nBbdb stands for The Insidious Big Brother Database, and is a very powerful contact book for emacs. It holds names, emails, aliases and other information and has good integration with gnus, wanderlust and vm (view mail). In my case, I have only checked gnus integration which is indeed pretty good.\nThis is the third installment in the set of posts for the emacs 30 Day Challenge: doing everything (as far as possible) from within emacs."},{"title":"E30DC: Using 'gnus' to read mail","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-using-gnus-to.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:10:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-using-gnus-to.html\/","description":"The gnus logo,\nfrom gnus homepage\nWhen the time to choose a mail reader for emacs came, as part of my emacs 30 Day Challenge, there were not really a lot of options. A long, long time ago I had tried vm (view mail) with no luck. I don’t remember the details (it was something like 3 years ago), but the results where unappealing. The only contenders where gnus and wanderlust."},{"title":"Commented Version of the LaTeX File to Create PDF ebooks and A6 Booklets","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/commented-version-of-latex-file-to.html\/","pubDate":"Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:20:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/commented-version-of-latex-file-to.html\/","description":"Below you can find a commented version of the LaTeX template I used to create two free ebooks and A6 booklets. Now you can tweak it as much as you like it!\nThe syntax highlighted TeX code comes from the htmlize package in emacs, to keep with my emacs 30 Day Challenge.\n\\\\documentclass\\[9pt,openany,final\\]{memoir} % Set the font size with 9pt. Openany states that a chapter may start % in either page (recto or verso in publishing language)."},{"title":"E30DC: Writing this in Conkeror","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-update-1-writing.html\/","pubDate":"Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:00:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge-update-1-writing.html\/","description":"It’s been already a week since I started my emacs 30 day challenge, and it is time for an update on how it is going and what packages I am using. I’ll start giving configuration updates along the way, I’m still fiddling with them. You can check also my post about using gnus to read mail with Gmail.\nBrowsing with Conkeror The same day I started my 30 day challenge, the emacs focused blog emacs-fu posted a wonderful article highlighting the conkeror web browser (not to be confused with Konqueror, the standard browser in KDE based desktops)."},{"title":"The Emacs 30 Day Challenge","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:05:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/12\/emacs-30-day-challenge.html\/","description":"From\nThe Design of the Emacs Logo\nAs you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.\nYou can check the challenge updates below:"},{"title":"Focused Interview with Leo Babauta","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/focused-interview-with-leo-babauta.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 27 Nov 2010 19:40:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/focused-interview-with-leo-babauta.html\/","description":"This is Leo!\nFor those of you who don’t know, Leo Babauta is the creator of Zen Habits, a blog on simplicity, productivity and enjoying life named one of the top 25 blogs by Time magazine. He is also the writer of the Amazon best-seller book on productivity The Power of Less (affiliate link) and the un-copyrighted book Zen to Done (meaning you can find it for free somewhere else, this is an affiliate link for purchasing it)."},{"title":"Creating pdf ebooks with LaTeX","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/creating-pdf-ebooks-with-latex-with-two.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 21 Nov 2010 21:45:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/creating-pdf-ebooks-with-latex-with-two.html\/","description":"fire<\/del> Kafka and thunder<\/del> SSL.<\/p>"},{"title":"JSON woes in Apache Spark","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/spark-json-woes.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 25 Aug 2021 21:02:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2021\/08\/spark-json-woes.html\/","description":"loop<\/code>\ngenerate_series<\/code>?<\/p>\n\n
\n
\nEver failed.
\nNo matter.
\nTry again.
\nFail again.
\nFail better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>"},{"title":"2020#50 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/07\/202050-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 12 Jul 2020 19:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/07\/202050-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":"p5js<\/code> sketch Blot\/Painting<\/code><\/a><\/p>"},{"title":"2020#44 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/202044-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 10 May 2020 13:20:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/202044-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":"p5.js<\/code><\/p>"},{"title":"Scratching my own itches: templating with motllo","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/scratching-my-own-itch-templating-motllo.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 03 May 2020 21:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/05\/scratching-my-own-itch-templating-motllo.html\/","description":"\u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af<\/code>. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.<\/p>"},{"title":"2020#42 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202042-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 14 Mar 2020 22:30:33 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/03\/202042-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":"\u00af\\_(\u30c4)_\/\u00af<\/code> This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.<\/p>"},{"title":"A context manager to measure elapsed time?","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/context-managing-time.html\/","pubDate":"Mon, 13 Jan 2020 18:15:52 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2020\/01\/context-managing-time.html\/","description":"asyncio<\/code> this week. Also, one of the best books of the\nyear.<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#24 Readings of the Week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201924-readings-of-the-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sat, 14 Sep 2019 17:54:45 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/09\/201924-readings-of-the-week.html\/","description":"hive<\/code> command, I got the weird-looking error<\/p>"},{"title":"2019#6 Readings of the week","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-6-readings-of-week.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 17 Feb 2019 18:54:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2019\/02\/2019-6-readings-of-week.html\/","description":"robbyrussell<\/code>. But recently I was showing my friend @craftycoder<\/a> the tweaks I have on my system (fzf<\/a>, autojump<\/a>, etc) and he showed me this theme, agnoster<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"How does the 'in' keyword work in Python?","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/04\/how-does-in-keyword-work-in-python.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 15 Apr 2018 22:11:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/04\/how-does-in-keyword-work-in-python.html\/","description":"in<\/code> worked too fast<\/em> for\nsmaller lists. And I wondered: maybe small lists are special internally, and\nallow for really fast lookups? Maybe they have some internal index? This raised\nthe question: how does in<\/code> find stuff in<\/em> sequences?<\/p>"},{"title":"Coursier resolution failing with HTTP method 416 in sbt","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/coursier-resolution-failing-with-http.html\/","pubDate":"Sun, 25 Mar 2018 12:21:00 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/coursier-resolution-failing-with-http.html\/","description":"sbt<\/code> dependency resolution around 7 weeks ago. I\nwas in a hurry, so I commented out the offending import (since it was not in the\nsubproject I was working on, so was not needed for the run I was in) sent my\ncommit to the heavens and CircleCI<\/a> was happy.<\/p>"},{"title":"Book Review: Work Clean","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/book-review-work-clean.html\/","pubDate":"Fri, 09 Mar 2018 23:47:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/03\/book-review-work-clean.html\/","description":"processing.js<\/code> something around 2011 (there was a\nnative<\/em> processing.js application for iOS, I used it for a while on my iPad and\niPod Touch).<\/p>"},{"title":"ClassNotFoundException for Akka logging","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/02\/classnotfoundexception-for-akka-logging.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 14 Feb 2018 15:28:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/02\/classnotfoundexception-for-akka-logging.html\/","description":"akka.event.slf4j.Slf4jLoggingFilter<\/code>, just by\nfollowing the details of the Logging - SL4J section of Akka\ndocumentation<\/a>.<\/p>"},{"title":"Scala eXchange 2017","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/02\/scala-exchange-2017.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 07 Feb 2018 23:27:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2018\/02\/scala-exchange-2017.html\/","description":"
![](\"Dragon.jpg\"\/)
\n<\/figure>"},{"title":"Creating A6 Booklets in 7 Easy Steps","link":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/creating-a6-booklets-in-7-easy-steps.html\/","pubDate":"Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:13:00 +0100","guid":"https:\/\/mostlymaths.net\/2010\/11\/creating-a6-booklets-in-7-easy-steps.html\/","description":"