Programming Leftovers
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Dima Kogan ☛ Dima Kogan: When are the days getting longer the fastest?
We're way past the winter solstice, and approaching the equinox. The sun is noticeably staying up later and later every day, which raises an obvious question: when are the days getting longer the fastest? Intuitively I want to say it should happen at the equinox. But does it happen exactly at the equinox? I could read up on all the gory details of this, or I could just make some plots.
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Chris Wellons ☛ Meet the new xxd for w64devkit: rexxd
xxd is a versatile hexdump utility with a “reverse” feature, originally written between 1990–1996. The Vim project soon adopted it, and it’s lived there ever since. If you have Vim, you also have xxd. Its primary use cases are (1) the basis for a hex editor due to its -r reverse option that can unhexdump its previous output, and (2) a data embedding tool for C and C++ (-i). The former provides Vim’s rudimentary hex editor functionality. The second case is of special interest to w64devkit: xxd -i appears in many builds that embed arbitrary data. It’s important that w64devkit has a compatible implementation, and a freshly rewritten, improved xxd, rexxd, now replaces the original xxd (as xxd).
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ Changing every line three times
It means that every line in the product source code tree have by now been edited on average 3.5 times. It might been that we have written bad code and need to fix many bugs or that go back to refactor and improve existing lines frequently. Probably both.
Of course, some lines are edited and changed far more often than others, the 3.5 is just an average. We have some source lines left in the code that was brought before year 2000 and have not been changed since.
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Rlang ☛ blocklength 0.2.0
I’m excited to announce that blocklength 0.2.0 is now available on CRAN! blocklength is designed to be used with block-bootstrap procedures and makes it quick and easy to select a block-length quantitatively. This significant update includes a new block-length selection algorithm by Lahiri, Furukawa, and Lee (2007), the nonparametric plug-in “NPPI” method.
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Rlang ☛ Creating R, Python, Stata, and Julia tutorial worksheets (with and without solutions) using Quarto
I regularly need to produce exercises/tutorials for my students. One fantastic feature of R Markdown is that it allows me to create one R Markdown document which can be rendered to both the question document and the solutions document. This is achieved by toggling knitr chunk options such as eval, echo, and include, and using asis chunks to include the text for the solutions. I wrote a little package, knitexercise to help with this.
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Julia Programming Language ☛ Vendor-Neutral GPU Programming in Julia: Unlocking Portability with KernelAbstractions.jl
The ideal solution is a vendor-agnostic GPU programming model, where the same code can run efficiently across different GPUs without modification. This is exactly what KernelAbstractions.jl provides.
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The New Stack ☛ Static vs. Dynamic Content: Which Should Developers Favor?
Static content delivers lightning-fast speeds and rock-solid reliability, while dynamic content enables personalization, interactivity and real-time updates. But which approach is best for your project?
This article will discuss the differences between static and dynamic content, explore their real-world applications, and examine how they integrate with modern cloud computing. Whether you’re optimizing for speed, flexibility or global reach, understanding these approaches will empower you to make smarter development choices.
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Rachel ☛ Mangled names get me to open my eyes a little
Hanlon's Razor falls down in this kind of environment. It's lazy.
I have definitely made this mistake. You need not go particularly far back in my posts to find that I wrote my "honest troubleshooting code of conduct" which incorporates exactly that. Actual life experience now says that leaning on that is the lazy way out, and that you actually have to do some damn work to figure out exactly what's going on.