Alan Richmond

Popular Sorting Algorithms

Sorting is probably the most common type of algorithm in programming. A sorting algorithm puts elements of a list in a certain order. The most-used orders are numerical, and alphabetical. It’s extremely useful in many applications, because sorted data can be searched or merged very quickly (e.g. by binary search). A sorted data set is one where every item…

A Quick Introduction to Python 3 Programming

hello world

This Quick Introduction to Python 3 aims to teach you just enough Python, so that you can get started in computer programming! First, you’ll want to install Python 3 or you can use the in-browser Trinket near the bottom of the page – just edit the code directly in there. If you have Python installed, you can…

Playing in Python with Pickover’s Premise per Pi

My favourite tweeter is Clifford A. Pickover. His tweets are delightful nuggets of math, physics & more. I have a copy of his fascinating The Physics Book. However, in these tweets, he claims that the string 44899 first occurs in pi at position 44899, counting from the first digit after the decimal point. I thought it might be…

Editors & IDEs

A text editor is all very well for simple notes, but for programming the basic text editor will quickly become very tedious. For example, Python uses code indentation to indicate ‘blocks’, using tabs or spaces (4 spaces recommended for each level of indentation). It will help a lot if the editor you use ‘knows’ Python!…

Make ‘Computer Music’ with a very small program!

This is a fun little program to generate ‘computer music’, specifically ‘bytebeats’ which sound like the chip music featured in the early computer games. As is well-known, sound can be digitised and stored in computers. Conversely, numbers can be converted to sound. But those numbers don’t have to come from a file, they can be generated on the…

How the Web works, in Amazing Detail!

Astonished kitten

Visiting a web site seems so simple – click on a link in your web browser, and soon – within seconds we hope – an interesting web page reveals itself to us. What could be easier? In fact, what happens ‘under the hood (or bonnet)’ is amazingly complex. It’s taken decades of computer and software…

WordPress Tips & Tutorials

WordPress

This WordPress Tips & Tutorials article offers a few tips gained from a few years of experience with building and tuning WordPress websites. It also links to further articles for optimising WordPress, and some tutorials. WordPress started in 2003 as a free, open-source website building and blogging tool. As of Jan 2012, over 24% of…

LFCS: Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator

LFCS

This is an effort to provide a set of links to material that should be helpful in studying for the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam. Their site only provides a list of the required topics, without going into any detail, so I can’t be sure if these links will cover too much or too little depth…