Paul Sinnett

Category: programming

  • A can of colours

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    Paul Sinnett
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    Last night was the first Croydon Tech City programming surgery of the new year. On several of these events last year, I forgot to write up the questions and learning. So, this time I decided to keep notes as we went along to remind me what I needed to write up.

  • Upcycling Cardboard

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    Paul Sinnett
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    Last month, the good folk of Lives Not Knives and a few of us local technology specialists got together to host an event for London Technology Week. Our theme was upcycling cardboard. Mick Rideout and I created a workshop where attendees could add their own faces into a virtual reality zombie game running on the…

  • Q & A: Running a programming club in a library

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    Paul Sinnett
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    Kirstin of the Home Educators Coding Club, which runs in Norfolk Library, left a comment on my previous post asking some questions about the details of running our library programming club. I feel these are questions of general interest to those running or planning to run their own club. So I decided to write up…

  • Croydon Central Library Code Club

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    Paul Sinnett
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    As you can see from the large hole in my post history, I’ve been a little busy for past couple of years. Of course, this is no excuse. I’m just as busy now, if not more so. But I’m going to put more effort into regularly updating this blog. Code Club is one of the…

  • Croydon Tech City programming surgery

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    Paul Sinnett
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    On Thursday, I started a new monthly Croydon Tech City event. I’ve scheduled this event for 19:00 to 21:00 on the last Thursday of the month at Matthews Yard. The programming surgery is a chance for local programmers to get help with their programming problems from local professionals.

  • XPath and the default namespace

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    Paul Sinnett
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    I’ve been working on a make script that extracts the files it needs to build from a Microsoft Visual Studio project file. The .vcxproj file format is XML so I imagined it would be easy to use a command line XML processor to do the job. However because the project file declares a default namespace…

  • That’s not what I had in mind

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    Paul Sinnett
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    I’ve recently noticed that I frequently hold nonsensical ideas in my mind. Often these are pure contradictions. Merely attempting to describe these is enough to discover the problems. But there are also times where only the realisation of the ideas can break the illusion.

  • A taste of Haskell

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    Paul Sinnett
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    I found a link to an OSCON 2007 lecture on Haskell by one of its authors. It offers a good introduction to the language and an insight into its creation and development. The lecture also references a paper about the history of the language.

  • Back to School

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    Paul Sinnett
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    I’ve recently been watching the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures. These are a boon to the programming community. I wish my school had just used these videos rather than attempting to teach Lisp themselves.

  • Coding comments

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    Paul Sinnett
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    I’ve long favoured self-documenting code over code comments. But I’ve recently reconsidered the issue. After years of dealing with self-documenting code I’m beginning to see problems. With hindsight I’m less sure that self-documenting code is always the best way to go.