Have a Seat

I sat. It had been a while, so I was not anticipating much. I suppose, were I more practised, I shouldn’t expect anything. My knees were reluctant to bend into a half lotus, but once achieved, I was straight and free on my cushion. I shut my eyes, relaxed the muscles in my neck and shoulders, and breathed. Deeply.

Continue reading

Posted in Personal, Writing | Leave a comment

Everything You Wanted to Know About TeX, but Were Too Afraid to Ask

My previous website was well-known for perhaps one thing: a LaTeX tutorial which I wrote when I was young and foolish. Despite being fairly rudimentary and not especially well-written, it gained a lot of credence — there was a time when it was the top Google result for “TeX tutorial”; I kid you not! — and because the spiders have picked up upon the HTTP 301, I have decided to edit and reinstate the best bits in this one enormous post. (I’m a traffic whore; what can  I say!?) Moreover, I will probably write further tutorials in time, so keep an eye out on my LaTeX category (or even subscribe to it, if you’re feeling particularly saucy)!

Continue reading

Posted in LaTeX | 3 Comments

Computer Science?

You’ll have noticed that I have a Computer Science category on this blog. My question here, however, is: Why is Computer Science called “Computer Science”?

Continue reading

Posted in Computer Science, Rants, Science | 2 Comments

If Everyone Jumped Off A Cliff, Would You Too?…

Damn right, I would!

My First SQL Sudoku Solver

Writing a sudoku solver in SQL (or, at least, using the RDBMS as a platform) seems to have become a rite de passage; so who am I to argue? While my solution isn’t particularly sophisticated — using some exotic Oracle functionality, it’s been done in a single select — and only works by process of elimination (so it cannot solve every puzzle), it does the job and is pretty straightforward to comprehend.

Continue reading

Posted in Distractions, Oracle, PL/SQL, Random, SQL | Tagged | Leave a comment

A New Home!

Xophmeister’s World is now self-hosted at xoph.co.

That is all.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Building a Better Search Engine

I should qualify this post’s somewhat shameless title with the fact that I am considering domain-specific applications; inspired by a question I posted on Stack Overflow. I make no pretence in ousting the Googles of this world!

Continue reading

Posted in Database Design, Day Job, Linguistics, NLP, Oracle, Phonetics and Phonology, PL/SQL, Software Engineering, SQL, User Experience | Tagged | 2 Comments