On Voice Coding

(contains amazon affiliate links) I have had repetitive stress injury (RSI) flareups on and off for many years. I’ve kept them under control mostly through use of a Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard that I’ve had for fifteen years. However, several months ago, I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and instructed to avoid typing if at all possible. I make my living programming and writing. My hobbies are programming and writing.

Continue reading

Python 3 Object-oriented Programming 3rd Edition My publisher unveiled the third edition of Python 3 Object-oriented Programming today! This has been the culmination of several months of work. Editing and updating the second edition was a pleasure. It was gratifying to discover that the content has aged well. This was not the case with the first edition; I did extensive restructuring and rewriting before I was satisfied with the second.

Continue reading

One of many things I love about Python is how whitespace is an integral part of the language. Python was the first popular programming language designed with the idea that “code is read much more often than it is written.” Forcing authors to indent code in a maintainable fashion seemed a brilliant idea when I first encountered Python fifteen years ago. The lack of braces scattered throughout the code made for easier reading.

Continue reading

Parts in this series An Order to Learn to Program, Part 1 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 2 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 3 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 4 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 5 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 6 Part 5: Beginner programming, dynamically typed This is part 5 in my series on the order to study topics related to programming.

Continue reading

The venerable RSA public key encryption algorithm is very elegant. It requires a basic understanding of modular arithmetic, which may sound scary if you haven’t studied it. It reduces to taking the remainder after integer long division. The RSA Wikipedia article describes five simple steps to generate the keys. Encryption and decryption are a matter of basic exponentiation. There’s no advanced math, and it’s easy to understand their example of working with small numbers.

Continue reading

My wife and I both have a tendency to leave the garage door open. You’re in and out, grabbing garden tools or supplies, and at the end of the day you enter the house through the back door and forget to check the garage. Luckily, we live in rural Canada, surrounded by wonderful people, where the door could sit open for days without anything “disappearing”. But it still makes me feel nervous to discover it’s been forgotten, if only because it is a waste of heat in the winter (not to mention the chance of blowing full of snow!

Continue reading

Author's picture

Dusty Phillips

Canadian author and software developer.

Author and software developer

New Brunswick, Canada