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Simon Tatham's quasi-blog

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Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Nitpicking the shell history scene in ‘Tron: Legacy’

A detailed look at a still from a 16-year-old film, which I recently found to make a good educational exercise, with the bonus of being fun.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Aperiodic Tilings V: the Refinable Frontier

A sequel to my previous posts on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings: if you have a tiling you can’t build a transducer for, here’s an algorithm to turn it into one you can.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Brute-forcing Langley’s geometry problem with field extensions

An application of algebraic extensions of the rationals: cheating (arguably) at elementary geometry puzzles.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

In which I have Opinions about parsing and grammars

A collection of semi-connected rants about context-free grammars, parser generators, and the ways in which they aren’t quite as useful as I’d like them to be.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Policy of transience

A description of some of my personal computing habits, focusing on avoiding things ‘just turning out’ to last for ever in a disorganised manner.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Iconography of the PuTTY tools

A PuTTY user asked about the history of its logo and icon collection. I discuss the design intentions and technical aspects.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Git without a forge

My personal projects are in Git, but not on a ‘forge’ style website. I talk about why, and how to interact with them.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

XOR

An introduction to the boolean and bitwise XOR operators, their uses, and some advanced topics they lead in to.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Post-quantum public-key encryption: what’s it all about?

An explanation of some post-quantum public-key cryptosystems, simplified to the level of pop-science.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Separation of concerns in a bug tracker

A design thought about how bug trackers could use a more accurate data representation to make queries easier.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Possibly all the ways to get loop-finding in graphs wrong

The history of all the mistakes I've made trying to detect loops in graphs while writing my puzzle collection.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Code review antipatterns

A taxonomy of frustrating code review behaviours, and some thoughts about them.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Symbiosisware

A definition and discussion of my term “symbiosisware”, describing software consciously designed for only yourself to use.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Beyond “Beyond the wall”

A sequel to last month's post on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Beyond the wall: working with aperiodic tilings using finite-state transducers

A sequel to last year's two posts on combinatorial coordinates, this time applying regular-language theory to them.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Writing commit messages

(Yet another) guide to writing commit messages in version control, with a focus on what facts and rationale are good things to include.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

I hate bubblesort

A short opinion: bubblesort is an awful sorting algorithm and I wish people would stop teaching it.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Stop helping!

A short opinion: command-line tools shouldn’t print long help text as well as an error message.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Philosophy of coroutines

Some thoughts about coroutines in general, why I like them so much, and ways of using them and thinking about them.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Writing custom C++20 coroutine systems

A detailed introduction to the C++20 coroutine system, written in the course of teaching myself about it.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Workarounds for C11 _Generic

A description of the big design limitation of C11's _Generic feature, and various workarounds, mostly involving using more instances of _Generic to patch up the original one.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

How to read error messages

An article about getting the most out of error messages, particularly OS and network errors. Adapted from a talk I gave to colleagues last year.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Combinatorial coordinates for the aperiodic Spectre tiling

A description of the algorithms for generating the Spectre tiling in my puzzle game Loopy.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Two algorithms for randomly generating aperiodic tilings

A description of the algorithms for generating Penrose and Hat tilings in my puzzle game Loopy.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Implementing OpenSSH certificate support in PuTTY

A retrospective of the development of the headline new feature in PuTTY 0.78: OpenSSH-style certificates on host and user keys.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

History of PuTTY's development

An overview of PuTTY's development from its genesis in 1996 to the state of affairs in 2020. Written in response to an email query.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Writing a soluble-grid generator for Mines

A description of the technique for generating guaranteed-soluble Minesweeper grids in my puzzle game Mines. Written in response to an email query.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Writing a solver for Net

A description of the automated solver in my puzzle game Net. Written in response to an email query.

Simon Tatham's quasi-blog
• Simon Tatham

Porting PuTTY to Windows on Arm

What I had to do to make PuTTY compile for Windows on Arm as well as on x86, plus a deep dive into the NEON-accelerated cryptography.