“Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can’t create until you’re willing to subordinate the creative impulses to the constriction of a form.”
Anthony Burgess
Well now! What was once “Jon Hanna’s Vaguely Defined Web Thing” is beginning to take on definition! Its own domain, a stab at putting some consistency into the layout, and even the beginnings of a bit of forethought into what I put up here. It was never meant to be like this!
This site is, in the main, a site about the craft of hacking (the name is modelled after “witchcraft”, but also “stagecraft”, “woodcraft”, “tradecraft”, etc.). The articles here are written primarily with two audiences in mind — the main audience is those who may learn something useful from what I write, but always I welcome review by those who know more than I and can help if an article reveals ignorance or misunderstanding on my part.
There is little order and no system to the contents of this site, though now I’ve decided to take it a bit more seriously that may gradually change. Originally I had a few articles and pieces of code that my former employers hosted for me at <http://www.spin.ie/jon/>. The articles came first, and the homepage came some time later when it got to the point where I had a tiny little website on my hand that I’d had no intention of creating.
It existed mainly because some people looking at the articles had expected there to be something in the directory above it.
So I found myself with a personal site; something I’d been swearing I’d never have since the days of Mosaic when personal sites were a much more visible portion of the web than they are now, something I’d sworn I’d never have when weblogs came on the scene, and something I still feel is a bit of a narcissistic thing to do.
Still one problem I had with personal sites is dealt with; I’ve never quite gotten the point of sites about the range of one’s interests — if you share my interesting in programming you are not necessarily going to share my interest in politics, even if you share my appreciation of the work of Tori Amos you might loathe The Pixies. Anyway that’s solved by the direction things took; this site is about hacking, which is variously defined, but which can be summarised as “making computers do what you want them to do”. (Yes, I know “hacking” is often used to mean cracking, but as coarse as my language often is I still use a different lexicon to the gutter press).
So anyway, here is my personal site, though vanity is restricted to just one page about me. And of course a link to google, which it seems some unwritten law dictates all personal sites must have, though it beats me why.
Since I agree that Cool URIs Don’t Change I have done my best so that any links to the old version of this site (i.e. links beginning with “http://www.spin.ie/jon/”) will redirect to the same or an equivalent representation. However I cannot guarantee that http://www.spin.ie/jon/ will continue to redirect to here, so if you have any links to there please update them.
In general any URI within this site that is used directly (i.e. not a URI used only in an embedded image or stylesheet) can be relied on to be maintained.
The introduction of templates to C++ brought a new paradigm to C++ coding — Generic Programming. This is now a major part of the toolkit of the C++ programmer, the basis of much of the standard library, and something which many of us younger C++ hackers never experienced C++ without. Generic Programming is often discussed in contrast with Object Orientated Programming’s concept of inheritance. However a truly multi-paradigm approach prompts us to examine how the two interact.
Webpage buttons.
Crossinary is a simple dictionary tool to help both creating and solving crosswords and other word puzzles. It compactly stores a massive (over a quarter of a million words) list of English words (including some proper nouns) and allows you to quickly perform searches to find all the words that match a pattern such as something-A-I-something-E.
On witchvox.com
On witchvox.com
A book, What Thou Wilt, based on my essay, “Traditional and Innovative Trends in Post-Gardnerian Witchcraft”, has been published by Evertype.
As well as benefitting some insightful comments by readers, and from a deadline forcing me to finally rectify some errors and make some necessary additions, the oversight of an editor is a wonderful thing—I don’t know why some writers complain about editors; seeing what I’ve tried to express made clearer by editting is a joy.
Comparison of New-Forest descended Wicca (British Traditional Wicca) with forms of witchcraft it has inspired.
Coming soon as a paperback book!
