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Archive for December, 2009

Gobbledegook

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

This relates to something I will blog more at length about in the next few days, but I thought I’d ask this question first to see if anyone who reads this might know the answer.

I’m going to try and approximate, using the simplest way possible, an English language sentence. The method I’m going to use is to pick a number, N, and make my selection of words from random strings of at most N letters.

  • If N = 2 a sentence would look like this: d fo mh j e l tx df d
  • If N = 5 a sentence would look like this: gh e kj jegns tyu dfa o wdu tah ttauo kk

So here’s my question:

If I want to approximate the distribution of word-lengths in the English language, which value of N should I choose?

I know it won’t be a very close approximation, but it’s very quick and easy to generate the words using this set-up.

What’s up, firebug?

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

In the space of one day (in real-time, not blog-post-spacing time) I’ve found not one, but two incongruities in firebug’s error reporting.

The second is that if you mistakenly leave the src attribute of a script tag blank, i.e.

<script type="text/javascript" src="" ></script>

you will get the following (or similar) doctype error:

syntax error
I’m well aware this doesn’t make interesting reading, but it might help somebody spend less time than I did trying to resolve the issue.