My favourite feature of Markdown is... not using markdown at all! Since markdown is a superset of HTML, it is possible to simply include plain HTML code in markdown documents like so
<a href="/">Go to home</a>
Which will render as this:
I use this feature …
read moreI'm essentially retired now from taekwondo. It was a hobby that I practiced from 2007 until Arjen was born in 2020, with a rough 1-year break while I was living on a temporary assignment where I couldn't find a school at which I enjoyed training. I was hoping that this …
read moreHere are some more photos of Arjen from when he was 9 months old. As you can see, by the point he became a pro at sitting up by himself, and started to stand up with support as well. He also loves playing with balls and his parents' phones.
Here are some more photos of Arjen from when he was 7-8 months old. This was a big period for him. He learned how to sit up by himself, and it wasn't long before he figured out how to crawl and start pulling himself up too! Probably the cutest part …
read moreMy original intent was to post photos of Arjen every month or so, but definitely fell behind. Part of this is just due to not being able to find the time, and part of it is also because we have so many photos that it's difficult to choose. At one …
read moreAny useful programming language provides a means to implement composite data types, ie. data types built as a composition of primitive and other composite data types. Python provides many ways to implement these structures, but I want to write about how to do this using named tuples and dataclasses.
The …
read moreI just read a fantastic article about the "Make Invalid States Unrepresentable" principle. I have never heard of this principle by name, but I have seen code several times which violates this principle and it makes reading and understanding it incredibly more difficult.
To quickly summarise this article, the core …
read moreA bit late, but Arjen Banerjee is now over 4 months old! Here are some more photos.
Here's a photo of him wearing his daddy's original sandals:
And here are a lot more cute ones:
Time has been flying. He loves playing with his parents' faces with his hands, and …
read moreI recently came across an excellent blog post which has some suggestions on interesting short-term coding projects. I think these projects are a fun way to learn a new language (lately, I've been interested in learning Nim and Ocaml, for reasons that I'll try to explain some other time).
For …
read moreSending files around a network always seems to be difficult for some reason. But Python has a built-in utility that makes this much easier. Simply run this at the command line:
python3 -m http.server 8080
Python will start an HTTP server on port 8080 and it will serve all …
read moreFloating elements are a new annoyance that web developers have decided to adopt. For example, a web developer can write some CSS like this:
header {
position: fixed; /* or sticky */
}
This has the effect of preventing any elements matching the selector in question from properly scrolling out of the browser viewport …
read moreArjen Banerjee is about 2 months old now. Here are a few more photos:
He is definitely growing both physically and mentally. He is showing many more facial expressions and starting to laugh and smile more. It is irresistibly cute. In fact, here is a video of him giving multiple …
read morereddit.com changed the interface of their website a year or two ago. I won't go into more detailed criticism of the changes beyond saying that it has a deficient level of information density for practical use.
After the change was introduced however, the previous styling could still be accessed …
read moreI had never before had to set up an alternate input method for myself. However, today, my wife asked me to help her do so.
An input method helps users type characters in other languages. Two popular input method frameworks are IBus and fcitx. In this example, I'll show how …
read morePython is my favourite language. Some find it surprising that my preferred editor for coding is not an IDE, but vim. Not even vim with plugins, but vim with very few customisations. This won't be an in-depth post on how I use vim - that would take me too long to …
read moreMy wife and I have given birth to our first son, Arjen Banerjee. He was born in early March. Here are a few photos!
We're all adjusting well to life as new parents and life is slowly starting to get back to normal... with the exception of sleep. We're still …
read moreHere is a very helpful but difficult-to-remember portion of configuration taken from my .vimrc file:
highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=lightred guibg=lightred
autocmd VimEnter,InsertEnter * syn match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/ containedin=ALL
highlight Tabs ctermbg=lightgreen guibg=lightgreen
autocmd VimEnter,InsertEnter * syn match Tabs /\t/ containedin=ALL
The above lines …
read moreBehold, my .vimrc file!
set nojoinspaces
set bg=dark
set sw=2
set ts=2
set sts=2
set ruler
set ffs=unix
map Q q
map q: :
map Y y$
let g:leave_my_textwidth_alone=1
let g:python_recommended_style=0
set expandtab
set nojoinspaces
set hlsearch …Over this past weekend, I assembled a desktop computer. This was my first time ever putting a desktop together and I found it more difficult than I expected. I want to write about my experiences and what I learned while they are still fresh.
Below are the hardware …
read moreHere is an example of code samples in a Pelican post:
print("Hello world!")
And here is how one writes it in a post:
:::python
print("Hello world!")
And I created the last block like so:
:::markdown
:::python
print("Hello world!")
I will not include another block explaining how I …
read moreI want to write a short post on why I feel that document typesetters are advantageous to using document processors for generating publications. This is not meant to be a persuasive essay. Rather, I just wanted to take a moment here to comprehensively describe some technical reasons why I prefer …
read moreI decided this past weekend to set up email my on own domain. My previous post detailed why I decided to do this. Now I'll explain how I implented it and why I made some of the choices that I did.
My DNS is registered using Gandi, and they provide …
read moreIt has long been a priority of mine to migrate my email addresses to my own domain name. My reasons for doing this are quite numerous:
Email is probably our most intimate form of communication, and I am growing increasingly uncomfortable about using external services like Gmail to host it …
I created this website using Pelican. I think it's absolutely fantastic. Pelican belongs to a class of software called static site generators. Static site generators are pieces of software which allow users to write articles using very simple markup languages such as Markdown, or Restructured Text and generate them into …
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