2025

I always thought that the “types” that are created using Go’s type keyword were, in some vague sense, new, unique, original; but in any case separate and distinct types. It turns out, this is a misunderstanding.

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.

Der alte Dubslav von Stechlin wird gerne als Selbstportrait Fontane’s betrachtet. Liegt ja auch nahe: beides ältere Manner, Sympathieträger, und beides ausgesprochen “fontanesche Figuren”. Was denn sonst?

How does one actually read a plain text file in Go? Some searching through the standard library revealed the bufio.Scanner utility, which seems to be the most convenient way to accomplish this task.

I am currently working (again) on a larger writing project in Latex. Doing so made me revisit the Latex ecosystem, and I discovered several useful packages that I had not known before.

Erich Kästners Mutterkomplex ist bekannt, hinreichend dokumentiert, und sowieso nicht zu übersehen. Daher ist es interessant, dass es in seinen Kinder- und Jugendbüchern noch zumindest ein anderes durchgehendes Thema gibt, das aber nicht in der gleichen Weise erkannt zu werden scheint: in allen von Kästners Kinderbüchern treten Kinder auf, die von ihren Eltern verlassen worden sind.

The Token Bucket (or Leaking Bucket) algorithm is a mechanism to rate-limit the average traffic in a stream, while allowing for a certain amount of burstiness as well.

The functional equation of the logarithm is well-known:

\[ \log(xy) = \log(x) + \log(y) \]

But why is this so?

When I discovered the first edition of Carl D. Meyer’s book on “Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra”, I considered it the best book on Linear Algebra I was aware of — and surely the best available book for an application-minded reader. In short: the book I really wished had been available when I was a graduate student and encountering this material for the first time.

So it was with great excitement and curiosity when I saw that a new, second edition was available. How could a near-perfect book be made even better?

The proof that $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational is part of the standard high-school curriculum. The same cannot be said for the proof that $e$, the base of the natural logarithm, is irrational as well. Yet the proof is short, simple, elegant.