Main Sections of the Broken Web Site

2022-03-01 | Ramblings on 42 Topics

In this section are some articles, presentations, books, essays or documents in general that warrant the length to expound a coherent argument. Many are not presented in a web friendly form. There is no particular organization here.

2020-11-19 | the New Hugo Blog

So I scraped the old drupal blog.free.draisey.ca for the old posts and the garland look and feel. Throw that together with the very old free.draisey.ca projects pages and the mess that is the gitweb archive and you have the brand new broken web site.

2006-11-30 | the Old Drupal Blog

This is just a little blurb about me and my technology. I am interested in computers, preferably Unix like machines with their usual panoply of compilation and scripting tools. My current machines are a eight year old dell (600MHz coppermine with 192MiB RAM and a whopping 9GiB hard drive) running debian lenny squeeze, a new dell (a barebones Core 2 machine with 2GiB RAM and 160GiB drive) also runnlng debian lenny squeeze, and a cool little Asus Aspire One which I use as an internet appliance, which isn’t running debian… yet.

Summaries of Most Recent Content

Ramblings on Sailing Topics / 2022-03-01 | Handicapping Book

The Book Itself as a PDF

No one has a book on the simple application of handicaps to sailboat races. So I wrote one. The book isn’t complete, but then I doubt it ever will be. Nonetheless it is still worth a read in its current state.

Ramblings on Sailing Topics / 2021-06-22 | A Rule 29 and 30 Submission

Overview

There are difficulties for a race committee in dealing with boats that race but do so by starting badly:

  • they start way too soon
  • they mistake the line and sail through the wrong marks
  • they try to dip start but don’t get near the line

Ramblings on Sailing Topics / 2021-05-04 | Gray Code Starting System

Gray Code

Gray code, also known as reflected binary code, is a way of representing counting numbers. This coding of numbers is derived from the ordinary positional system of base two numerals which we usually refer to as binary numbers. Counting in binary leads to many carries between digits: 0 zero, 1 one, 10 two, 11 three, 100 four, 101 five, 110 six, 111 seven, 1000 eight, 1001 nine, 1010 ten, 1011 eleven, 1100 twelve, 1101 thirteen, 1110 fourteen, 1111 fifteen, 10000 sixteen, and so on.

the New Hugo Blog / 2020-11-19 | the Not-Quite-So-Broken Web Site

So hugo is working well enough although I did have a few moments where I wished I was using mason.pl instead. I adopted hugo mostly because it is still being actively developed, I could just use a theme and not bother writing any code and is just as fast as mason. Mason is irritating as it occasionally requires me to remember how to use cpan. Mason is a little too old and obscure to be properly supported by my distro’s package manager.

the New Hugo Blog / 2020-10-07 | My First Hugo Post

So I scraped the old drupal blog.free.draisey.ca for the old posts and the garland look and feel. Throw that together with the very old free.draisey.ca projects pages and the mess that is the gitweb archive and you have the brand new broken web site.

Ramblings on 42 Topics / 2020-09-14 | Ordinal Numbers are a Little Off

Cardinal and Ordinal Numbers

Put some apples on a table. A cardinal number answers the question of “how many?”. There are seven apples — “seven” or “7” is a cardinal number. Now line them up left to right an pick the centre apple. An ordinal number answers the question “where is it”. The centre apple is the fourth from the left — “fourth” or “4th ” is an ordinal number. You can’t ask the question “how many?” of the centre apple, per se, as it is just a single apple; there is no fourness associated with it. Rather, it is an apple that has three other apples to its left in the sequence of apples from left to right. If we count all the apples starting from the left and stopping at the centre apple then, including the centre apple in our count, we have four apples. In this sense, for every ordinal number there is an associated cardinal number. But we could have just as well counted the apples to the left of our centre apple and that would have answered the question “where is it” with a count of three; this is just as precise and just as well defined as our inclusive count.

Ramblings on 42 Topics / 2020-06-28 | The Euclidean Algorithm and Bezout’s Identity

Number Theory

In it’s simplest form Bezout’s Identity is a statement of the fact that the greatest common divisor of any two numbers can be written as a linear combination of them. Bezout’s Identity, the Euclidean Algorithm and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (a trick in number theory whereby a number is reconstructed given its remainder with respect to different bases) are core concepts in number theory and should be very familiar to any amateur mathematician. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could take thirteen pages in explaining the mechanics of how to calculate the coefficients of Bezout’s Identity, especially as we will not explore any techniques outside of the ordinary one’s of the Euclidean Algorithm.