Category Archives: Programming

Notes on Transmediale (Saturday)

These are my notes from the Saturday sessions. The Friday notes are here. The morning started with “Deplatformization and the Ethics of Exclusion”. Eva Marie Giraud began the session talking about food and its communal politics. From this, she raised the questions about how boundaries materialise and the came back to the point that, as […]

Going data intensive?

As a result of a few emails and some long running thoughts, I have finally set up a small, heterogeneous cluster of Raspberry Pis. Using the 2s and 3s that I have from other projects, I put the machines together with a small switch and installed MPI with the Python bindings to test some scripts. […]

Thoughts on Carpentry Connect

Having left ICAD at some ungodly hour in the morning on Wednesday, I arrived in Manchester for Carpentry Connect Manchester, organised by the Carpentries and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). The opening talk, Learning from the Carpentries, was given by Lex Nederbragt. It focused on building skills with practice, finding the cognitive load, and the […]

Working with Web Workers

On a recent scroll through unread emails, I came across Surma’s post, “When You Should be using Web Workers“. This is a thought that I have been coming back to in recent projects. We used workers in the Compage framework to offset the work done with a data object in the browser. The framework loaded […]

eLife announce a reproducible article

Post almost as a bookmark, executable documents have been at the back of my mind for a little bit. Probably since WSSPE4. eLife have written a blog post, “Introducing eLife’s first computationally reproducible article“, about their new Reproducible Document Stack (RDS) that I found intriguing and thought provoking. It is sparking many thoughts, some of […]

A soupcon more social reading…

A short while ago, I noticed a way of reading using Twitter that I had not seen previously. It is something that I would like to investigate a little further but have parked it for now whilst I write a paper or two. I was skimming Twitter looking at something else, I saw this link […]

Pandas, historical dates and formatting error

Programming with dates and times are always fun. I had hoped that after some time working with them at JISCmail on a central service that I could be forgiven their gory details. Sadly some work with pandas bit me again in this area… I have been updating my Digital Humanities Summer School talk on Reproducibility […]

A creaking social media

The Guardian ran a piece by Tim Burrows on Facebook’s Safety Check feature, Safety Check: is Facebook becoming fear’s administrator-in-chief? I do find the social media platform increasingly fascinating, especially as it comes under critique for its social and technical choices. There’s an increasing creakiness that is coming to the fore now. Ruminating on the […]

A day at DMRN

I presented a poster on Joshua Steele at the Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) workshop this week. More on the poster in another post but the day did provide a range of talks. Much enjoyed the keynote by Augusto Sardi about capturing and rendering spatial audio. It reflected on techniques from computer vision and the […]

Prototyping, tracers and the art of throwing things away

I’m a fan of prototyping. Not all the time but I strongly believe that it has a place within the toolkit. If I am unsure of how something might be put together then I might put together a quick version to test out a current approach. If I am working with a team who know […]