Damian’s notes

Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!

English spelling dictionaries in the format used by the built-in spell-check on macOS, amongst other things. Unlike the built-in dictionaries it permits all the spellings supported by the OED, including ‘Oxford’ or ‘world english’ spellings like ‘organize’ and ‘realize’.

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.

Arial is a knock-off of designers’ favourite Helvetica which is ubiquitous because bundled with Microsoft Windows. Here’s a detailed history & critique by Mark Simonson

Red bean: a zip file of web pages bundled into an Actually Portable Executable file that will run as a web server on any modern x64-based computer—Linux, macOS, or Windows. It can serve millions of static pages a second on quite ordinary hardware.

Justine Tunney’s Cosmopolitan Libc ‘makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.’

Put on my coat and gloves, set off for my morning bike ride. Was about 100 metres down Rymers Lane when I suddenly thought ‘Oh no! Forgot my mask!’

Then I realized I was wearing my mask & had forgotten I was wearing it.

Whimsical 1959 Japanese animated short about a cat making a film with mice actors in a super-automated film studio.

The new identity system for financial firm Robinhood includes commissioning these wonderful illustrations on the theme of the future in the style of French science fiction comics.