Revfad Blog

Author: David Faden

  • Regex in C++

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    David Faden
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    I’ve missed out on a few things. It was fun to learn (or be reminded?) today that regular expressions have been part of the C++ std library for a while: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/regex

  • Wayback Machine rescues pytest posts

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    David Faden
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    I’ve been curious about how pytest‘s assertion rewriting works. (As someone used to Abseil’s testing framework, the usage of bare asserts was a shock.) I was happy to come across a Reddit post: “How does pytest work?”. Unfortunately, the site it points to, pythoninsight.com, seems to be mostly dead. Luckily, the wonderful Wayback Machine has…

  • Playing with iNaturalist taxonomy data in MariaDB

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    David Faden
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    You can download the iNaturalist taxonomy data (updated monthly) from https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers under “iNaturalist Taxonomy DarwinCore Archive” (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip). After unzipping, you’ll find “taxa.csv”. Here’s one way of importing this into MariaDB (and I guess MySQL too). I know that the schema for my table isn’t optimal. (I would love to hear suggestions on how to improve…

  • Snooping on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine bot

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    David Faden
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    I’m reading Jon Duckett’s “PHP & MYSQL” and got up to a section where he discusses $_SERVER, which contains info on HTTP headers, etc. I thought it might be fun to see what Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine bot looks like in terms of this. So, here’s my take on dumping parts of $_SERVER: https://github.com/fadend/server-vars-php/blob/main/server_vars.php. Hopefully…

  • Wolfram’s Cellular Automata

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    David Faden
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    I’ve had fun reviving another old PHP project — code to draw the evolution of 1D cellular automata using the codes described by Stephen Wolfram in his book “A New Kind of Science”. See https://github.com/fadend/wolfram-ca-php. One thing I added over my 2004 version is the ability to easily start with just a single point turned…

  • J. Gordon Edwards Entomology Museum

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    David Faden
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    Our youngin is interested in entomology so we were happy to get a chance to visit the J. Gordon Edwards Entomology Museum at San Jose State University. We were very grateful to Dr. Fred Larabee for being up for showing us around; from his enthusiastic introduction to the collection and the work being done around…

  • Viceroys aren’t faking it

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    David Faden
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    I finally finished Doug Tallamy‘s book “Bringing Nature Home” today. I’d highly recommend it. You might also like this talk from him and his site homegrownnationalpark.org. One aside in the book that caught my attention: One of my favorite butterflies, the viceroy (Limenitis archippus), is most commonly found near willow hosts… The adults are the…

  • Clifford Pickover “million-point” structures in PHP

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    David Faden
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    Back in 2004, I wrote some PHP to render the “million-point” structures Clifford Pickover described in his book “Computers and the Imagination”. I’ve got a project coming up that may require PHP so I decided to give it another look. Code is here: https://github.com/fadend/pickover-dots-php/blob/main/pickover_dots.php You can play with it here: https://revfad.com/cgi-bin/pickover_dots.php. A couple references I…

  • These words need not die

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    David Faden
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    Here’s a little poem I’ve been kicking around for a while: These words need not dieThough the original medium will perish.In your mind this moment they live,And wait to come alive again in any copyJust as I have copied them from othersAnd they have lived again through me. It’s based partly on the obvious observation…

  • Muwekma Ohlone Garden at Monta Loma Elementary

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    David Faden
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    When I first heard about the Castro Mound in the Monta Loma neighborhood and its subsequent destruction, I was further saddened to learn that there’s no marker acknowledging it. Now there is a memorial though, in the form of a garden, the new Living Classroom Muwekma Ohlone Garden at Monta Loma Elementary. I was happy…