Programming Leftovers
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The Bash Special Characters You Should Know About
Not all characters are equal in Bash. Some of them carry out special functions, tweak commands, and help us manipulate data. That's why we've compiled the following list with the most important Bash special characters. Read on to find out how to use them and how they can make your daily Bash life easier.
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Wouter Verhelst: Planet Debian rendered with PtLink
As I blogged before, I've been working on a Planet Venus replacement. This is necessary, because Planet Venus, unfortunately, has not been maintained for a long time, and is a Python 2 (only) application which has never been updated to Python 3.
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Introducing UTF-21, a toy character encoding
In short: I created UTF-21, an impractical alternative to character encodings like UTF-8.
Quick crash course: character encoding & Unicode
Before you can understand my horrible creation, you need to understand a little about Unicode. You can skip this if you want.
Each character has a number
Character encoding is the process of converting characters to numbers and back, typically for digital storage and transmission.
You’ve probably heard of ASCII, which maps 128 characters to numbers. For example,
Wis number 87 and number 36 is$.As you might expect, there are more than 128 characters in the world. Characters like
ñand🥺can’t be represented as ASCII.Unicode is like ASCII, but instead of 128 characters, there are 1,114,111 characters. Way more! That lets us store characters like
ñ(character #241) and🥺(character #129402). It’s a little more complex than this, but that’s the rough idea.Here are a few examples from the big Unicode table: [...]
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Advancing the future of the internet by making math more inclusive
More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) program fuels this movement by supporting people who are looking to advance a more human-centered internet.
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Born in Adelaide, Australia to a Malaysian Chinese family, Brendan’s experience spans wide: He frequently visited Asia, earning a joint undergraduate degree at the National University of Singapore and the Australian National University. Before going to graduate school in Oxford, where he would get his Ph.D. in computer science, he studied with the mathematical physicist John Baez. Baez became one of his Ph.D. advisers and a close collaborator, and he now sits on the advisory council at the Topos Institute, where Brendan is chief executive.
AlgebraicJulia, Brendan’s project with the MIECO program, aims to create new approaches to scientific computing by bridging the gap between stakeholders in different fields, facilitating structured and formal communication between them.
AlgebraicJulia can produce easy-to-understand visualizations and predictions by creating models that, for example, can predict the spread of diseases and the impact of human behavior. This feature can help build trust between stakeholders and the public, thereby making the technology sphere more reflective of human values.
As Brendan put it, “The goal is to make [these theories] useful for the general public without individuals having to go through all the technical aspects of mastering them. Instead, we hope to use them to create tools for better communication and cooperation.”