Data on billpg industries™

Dear string-to-integer parsers...

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:11:17 +0000

These are very useful functions that any language with distinct string and integer types will include in their standard library. Pass in a string with decimal digits and it’ll return the equivalent in the binary integer form that you can do mathematics with.

I’d like to make a modest proposal that I’d find very useful, and maybe you, dear reader, would too.

"The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. He made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate."

Who me?

Specifically, I’m thinking of parser functions that work like this…

Data-Mining Wikipedia for Fun and Profit

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 18:59:54 +0000

It all started after watching one too many videos narrating the English monarchy, all starting from King William Ⅰ in 1066 as if he’s the first king of England. This annoys me as it completely disregards the handful of Anglo-Saxon kings of England who reigned before the Normans.

They’re Kings of England. If you’re going to make a list of the Kings of England, then you should include the Kings of England.

The Brexit Chart War

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 15:23:00 +0000

There’s a movement among remainers to get Ode To Joy to number one in the charts for Brexit day. We know, even if successful, it won’t change anything. Johnson isn’t going to cancel Brexit because of this. (He totally should, nonetheless.)

So why is there a similar movement among Brexiters to get their own song “Seventeen Million F–k Offs” to number one instead?

They’ve won. Despite only getting about half the votes in 2016, Maximum Brexit is going ahead. But once the party’s over, they still won’t be happy and deep down, they know. Victory feels so much like defeat.