I have been working at a snail’s pace on some geolocation queries on some locations which are associated with Charles Dickens. Using Python’s NLTK library, I managed to extract around 60 distinct locations from his novel, Bleak House. A bit of human editing has tidied this up for me but it looks useful. Having popped …
Category Archives: Programming
Going to the other place – or a weekend at DrupalScienceCamp
I went to the Drupal ScienceCamp for the weekend to learn more about Drupal and also how one runs a DrupalCamp, since we are thinking of doing one in Oxford. Having come across on the Friday and met some people, the weekend really started on the Saturday, run by some of the team behind the …
Writing specs – a first starting point
Our team have started on Scrum to move forward with our projects. So far, so staggering steps but, hey, we are new to it. We will learn by falling / failing and then learning from where we went wrong and fixing it. One of the things that I have been looking at, partially because, as …
Bridging message queues in STOMP and AMQP
A recent work project has been working with messaging queues and exploring how they work. One of the issues has been how to get systems running different systems to talk to each other. One system uses ActiveMQ and another runs RabbitMQ which has led to some interest in how to effectively bridge the systems into …
An approach to creating groups and persistent URLs in Drupal 7
A major project has been exploring the creation of a collaborative space using Drupal 7. Somebody else has taken this over whilst I concentrate on other parts of our system and integration but I thought I would post about the Persistent URL (PURL) creation. Fortunately Drupal 7 comes with a fair few options which the …
Creating a simple video gallery using Drupal 7
As a side project, I’ve been looking at Media Uploads in Drupal 7. I am interested in using Media as a sort of asset management system at a machine level with web services allowing for the ingestion and listing of files. Anyhow as a side experiment, I wanted to take the idea of a video …
New year, new directions?
We are in the middle of the dead days, as Marcus Sedgwick describes them in one of sequences. It seems like a time for soem reflection, partially based on an intepretation of Steve Poland’s What startup to Build? post on Techcrunch. This is not to say that I an necessarily thinking of building a startup …
Using Tesseract with Python for OCR
Following several conversations with Alex Butterworth over pots of tea in the crypt of St Mary’s Church in Oxford, I’ve been having a look at Python and its bindings with the Tesseract library. A quick Google search brought me to this post by Roy on building an HTTP service using Tornado. I am fairly new …
Streaming MP3s with Node.js
In the midst of doing some research for work into some technologies that we’ve begun, or are thinking of, using, I’ve gone back to playing with Node.js . The ever useful Elegant Code blog has a quick guide to streaming files using Node that pretty much comes out to the box, or Github. Using some …
Reflections on improving my programming skills
I’ve been thinking about programming this week. Perhaps this comes from the new started in our team this week and the energy boost that we’ve had from that. Might also come from the fact that I’m off to Drupalcon tomorrow morning. Either way… I caught a post on Hacker News about becoming a better programmer …