Guides

Formal perturbation theory, and in particular singular perturbation theory, are standard topics in applied mathematics, but seem to be largely unknown outside that specific community. Which is a shame, because they are both useful, and intellectually fascinating.

Perturbation expansions, in particular for higher orders, have a reputation for being “cumbersome”, as the say: the algebra quickly becomes both tedious and error-prone. Which is true, but it turns out that the SymPy computer-algebra system can be put to good use in this context.

What does it take to stand up a minimal REST service in Go, using only facilities provided by the standard library? This is a useful fingering exercise, and also provides an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the net/http package. The net/http package can be a bit confusing at first, but once the appropriate idioms have been identified, the resulting code is actually quite compact and convenient.

Git has been around for going on 20 years, yet people still continue to write “getting-started” and “common-challenges” tutorials. This is mine.

Containers are not usually associated with GUI applications, but there may be times when one might still want to run such a program inside a container, for example to isolate the application’s dependencies. Installing a GUI application in a container means that not only the application, but also all its specific dependencies are encapsulated inside the container (respectively, the container image), and can therefore reliably be removed from the system in a single step.

The primary challenge is to let a container communicate with the host’s display system, so that it can create GUI windows on the host. A GUI application will likely also need to share files with the host system, which in turn requires the appropriate user permissions.

In praise of what? Pic? Pic? Pic, the old diagram generation “little language” and half brother of roff (or troff or groff), from the days when Unix was young? Yes, indeed, that pic.

Hugo is a static site generator: it takes some plain-text content, marries it to a bunch of HTML templates, and produces a set of complete, static HTML pages that can be served by any generic, stand-alone web server. Simple.

This article attempts to give an approachable introduction to the topic of database normalization and to the five Normal Forms.