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	<title>/~colmmacc/</title>
	<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc</link>
	<description>An Irishman's Fiery</description>
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		<title>Weighty matters</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of my favourite programming exercises is to write a text generator using Markov Chains. It usually takes a relatively small amount of code and is especially useful for learning new programming languages. A useful goal is to able to have a tool that ingests a large body of text, breaks it into N-tuples (where [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2011/05/15/weighty-matters/</link>
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		<title>Prime and Proper</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A common software engineering pattern is the need to test elements for set membership. Practical questions like &#8220;is this item in my cache&#8221; arise surprisingly often. Bloom Filters are a great mechanism for performing this test, and if you haven&#8217;t encountered them before &#8211; they&#8217;re well worth knowing about. But over the last year, I&#8217;ve [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/09/02/prime-and-proper/</link>
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		<title>Fact-checking Ireland Offline</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the saddest things about Ireland and technology is the degree to which the incumbent telco, Eircom, has been permitted to dominate and skew the market. The privatisation of Eircom was very very badly designed, effectively creating a monopoly for important national infrastructure. There have been multiple legal cases between Eircom and the Regulator, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/03/29/fact-checking-ireland-offline/</link>
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		<title>Holy Orders</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So, yesterday marked the day that the new Blasphemy law came into force in Ireland. It also marked the day when Atheist Ireland published 25 &#8220;blasphemous&#8221; quotes, in a supposed act of defiance. Atheist Ireland have gone about it in a very strange way; the url in their blog post is not a hyperlink, and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2010/01/02/holy-orders/</link>
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		<title>Point Break</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So, about 2 minutes after taking this photo; I slipped on the paraffin-laden solid granite pavement, everything went flying, and I ended up getting a very different kind of photo entirely; That&#8217;s my right arm, and somewhere in there a minimally-deforming radial fracture that I don&#8217;t remotely have the training to actually see. Though I [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/12/28/point-break/</link>
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	<item>
		<title>Con-science</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m sitting on a train, the Enterprise, moving along at about 140 kilometers per hour between Drogheda and Dublin. Something is causing practically every particle in my body to spark into a new life at a different position in space one instant to the next. For each one of those particles, there&#8217;s some chance it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/12/16/con-science/</link>
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		<title>Role Models</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Consciously, I&#8217;ve never been keen on the idea of role-models. Thinking it synonymous with hero-worship, it has always seemed a bit of an anti-pattern to me. Why try to emulate anyone? There are enough people in the world behaving the same as someone else, being different and original is definitely more useful, even if it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/12/13/role-models/</link>
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		<title>Period Pain 3</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As promised, though it&#8217;s been a while coming, I wrote that there&#8217;d be a followup on scheduling periodic tasks. The most important point to get is that for nearly all real-world use cases the actual time that a &#8220;scheduled&#8221; task runs at doesn&#8217;t matter. Tasks that have to occur at a specific time on Tuesday [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/11/26/period-pain-3/</link>
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		<title>Period Pain part 2</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last week I wrote about problems with periodicity but it was only half of the problem. But before moving on to the second half, it seems like a good time to post with some clarifications. I wrote that using some locally unique well-distributed value, such as a mac address, was better than choosing a random [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/09/27/period-pain-part-2/</link>
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		<title>Period Pain</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Imagine it was your job &#8211; along with 1,000 other people &#8211; to pick a number between 1 and 60. You can use any method you like (though you must use the same one), but if more than 30 of you choose the the same number, those of you who did would be shot. Would [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/09/14/period-pain/</link>
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