Like so many geeks I’m a massive XKCD fan. But I’m often troubled by questions like when will the 1000th XKCD appear, or the 1024th or even the 2000th? Even though the first two numbers are getting quite close now, it’s still more fingers and toes than I have so working it out by hand is out. Fortunately we have computers to this kind of heavy lifting for us, and the solution in F# is kinda cute. We need 3 pieces of information to be able to work out when any given XKCD will appear: an epoch date and numb[...]

Just a quick note to say that my upcoming “Beginning F#” course has been moved to 1st & 2nd November to tie it in with the “Progressive F#” tutorials. Participants will receive a free ticket to the “Progressive F#” tutorials as well as a free copy of my Beginning F# book. Book this week and save over £100!

Way back in 2005 Nguyen Van Thien and Dinh Thi Thuy Nga, two computer science students from Vietnam, got in contact asking me to help them share the “Chinese Chess” computer game they’d written in F#. The game plays well and has nice graphics and sounds, quite an achievement given that F# was still in its infancy back in those days. Naturally I want to help them so I gave it a place on my website. Recently I had a couple of emails saying the link was broken (which I never got round to replying too, sorry [...]

I’ve been neglecting strangelights.com a bit lately, mainly due to lack of time. So, today I finally got round to fixing a few things that had been bugging me and clean away some of the old and out of data material, especially in the F# resources section. I’ve also upgraded to the latest version of subtext as a few people have reports some minor bugs with the comments system to me, so hopefully this will fix them. To celebrate this revamp I’m giving away chapter 3 of my book “Beginning F#”. This is the ch[...]

November is going to be a very busy month for me as I’m very happy to announce I’ll be speaking at Stack Overflow Dev Days at London’s ExCeL conference center on the 14th-15th November and the Progressive F# Tutorials at the Skills Matter eXchange on 3rd-4th November. Both events have a great line up of speakers (who wouldn’t be excited to speak on the same program as the legendary Jon Skeet?) and both will be lots of fun and very educational. At Stack Overflow Dev Days I’ll be giving a 50 minute talk ab[...]