Archive for the ‘CodeUsage’ Category

ELOS

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The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. is a succinct do-and-don’ts text on writing. There is an updated version by Strunk and White. Over a decade ago I made a LaTeX version of the 1918 out-of-copyright version. More recent I made a Kindle version. I put them up for DOWNLOAD. Looking at the decade old Makefile (that still worked) I realized how much my Makefiles have changed over time. There are several particularities with LaTeX that make it hard for make to handle. It needs a number of passes, if it fails it needs a clean up, and the output is way to verbose most of the time. Therefor I coded a Makefile to run LaTeX as often as required, cleanup after a failed compilation attempt, display a progress bar, and redirect LaTeX’s output to a file named ‘out’. If you like you can look at it and take whatever you like from it for your own Makefiles.


Dog Code

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On Saturday, coder Adam found a dog wandering the highway. He took it upon himself to find the owner. So he did what he did best, write code:
Code to find a dog's owner.
I texted the first number, explaining I had found this dog on the highway and sure enough, it was the owner! He promptly drove to my house to pick up “Izzy”. When he arrived he was very glad to have his dog back but also confused as to how I found his phone number. I told him I “scraped” the dog registration site and left it at that (yeah it’s a bit unnerving how easy it is to find information on people). (Adam Gotch) [In a message to Perlbuzz]