Yesterday, I broke WanderingThoughts ' syndication feeds (and madethe main page not validate). I did this by accidentally putting a ^Dcharacter into an entry ; oneof the editors I use makes this unfortunately easy to do by accident,and hard to spot.

Neither HTML 4.01 Transitional nor XML (which the Atom syndicationformat is a dialect of) allow control characters (apart from tabs(and linefeeds)). A lot of things are forgiving of crappy HTML, butthings that eat Atom

One of the surprising advantages of using a completely non-standardshell (in my case, Byron Rakitzis' Unix version of rc ) is all of the things that are not automatically set up for you by modern systems. As someone I read found out recently ,these days this includes colourized ls listings, colourizedsuper-intelligent vi , and so on.

(I might not mind colourization so much if it paid any attention to whatthe baseline terminal colours were, but I haven't seen that happen yet.

So that I don't have to redo this again if I ever need it, the GNU bcmagic for the Birthday paradox stuff isas follows. First, you need to start GNU bc as bc -l to load the mathlibrary, then:

define p(n, m) {return 1 - e( (-(n * (n-1))) / (2*m))}define p32(n, m) {return p(n, 2^