Diary 2006

In July 2006 I realized that I could sensibly extend the thoughts of the moment section of my web-site to include a diary-style what have I been working on lately category of entries. I'm perfectly happy if this doesn't qualify the result as a blog, but it might conceivably be useful to this site's visitors as a way to notice what's changing. I shalln't include, in this, bits that belong in the thoughts of the moment section in their own right: just the material changes elsewhere in the site. This page is now a fossil: see its successor for more recent updates.

Fast Fibonacci

A description of a fast way to compute Fibonacci numbers; hopefully illustrative of some of the issues relevant to general performance considerations in computing.

Re-organizing my front door

My front page and primary entry-point didn't provide the way into this site that I want, so I've re-worked them.

Moving home

On 2006 August 18th I agreed to pay 2.05 million Norwegian Kroner (M NOK) for a modest flat in lower Torshov, Oslo. Two months later I took vacant posession and began moving: on hallowe'en Flyttegutta helped me move the bulk of my posessions in; and I had enough book-cases assembled, within a fortnight, to be able to unpack my books, thereby liberating enough space to have the option of asking furniture sellers to deliver, 'though I've yet (Nov 19) to actually order the furniture I've chosen. All this activity has disrupted my normal meddling with this web-site; and shall probably continue to do so until mid-winter disrupts even more. (Post script: the last of my furniture arrived in early January, 2007.)

Validating HTML and CSS

In August, I got it into my head to make at least some of my pages pass the W3C's validation tests. It's been an instructive exercise, but don't expect old pages to catch up ! I'll fix what I'm playing with as I go along, but that's all. By early September, I had about sixteen valid pages (including most of my eight XHTML pages, since these were already almost valid, thanks to the browser directing my attention to most defects long before the validator was involved).

mathematical denotations in plain text

Assorted refinements to my specifications for ways to write mathematics; some needed in support of the parser work (see below), others just struck me while I was doing that.

Einstein's algebra

After several attempts (it's just too easy to make mistakes) at verifying the Kerr-Newman solution to the Einstein-Maxwell free-field equations, I decided it was time to write a program to work out the details for me; it may be a while before this is even remotely useful and even then it'll certainly be a while before it does (even most of) what I really want out of it. I have to start by writing an adequate parser for my own notation for mathematics – that'll teach me to innovate…

colour cube

As part of my on-going program to learn how to use SVG better, I'm trying to construct an animated image of the standard RGB colour cube. This'll be an on-going project.

Written by Eddy.