In a speech to the Conservative Party in 1980, Margaret Thatcher said that the “lady’s not for turning”. Projects are not always like this. Recently a decision was made to change direction completely. A project meeting was held and a demonstration of some technology shown that followed the agreed project path. In the following conversation, […]
Last year I had the pleasure of helping Julia Stewart Lowndes at a Software Carpentry style workshop in Oxford. I got notice of her paper, Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools, [1] via various means and made time to read the other day. It describes the path taken […]
Periodically I get back to profiling code, or at least some of it. Profiling is an tricky art: I do not claim expertise but it is something that I come back to every so often. In a previous project I used strace to follow the ins and outs of a very long running process (about […]
Having managed to damage myself at the end of last week, I forgot to write a week notes. We have made progress on the Museum’s project in a slightly surprising way but more on that in due course. Talks have been written for submission. The work itself has helped the main project and I really […]
After taking a few days off post dissertation submission, I have ended up using formal definitions within some Linked Data work that I am involved in. To some degree, I have largely avoided them so that I can get on with writing the code. This project has gone in a different manner where the definition […]
Last week, I mentioned the Museums project and writing a phone app to test touch through the Android APIs. An annoying bug turned out to be small and easily fixed and, whilst testing, I wrote a small Python and Gnuplot script to plot the way that the fingers moved in a 2d graph. It would […]
Last week was an intriguing one and this is written later than one might like. I’m currently working on a Museums project and am currently writing some code to track how items are touched using the internal sensors on an Android phone. It is my first Android project so is a learning experience but an […]
Last month I instructed at a Software Carpentry workshop with the Reproducible Research Oxford group as Phil Fowler, my co-instructor, a has recently blogged about. He mentions Software Carpentry’s mission about reaching science students and comments: I think researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences have just as much, if not more, to gain from […]
Mark Zuckerberg published a somewhat rambling letter / essay on Facebook, Building Global Community. In itself, it comes across as rambling, trying not to really engage at a deeper level. Surprising for me, Techcrunch called it out in Taylor Hatmaker’s piece, “What Zuck’s letter didn’t say“, pointing out the rhetoric and the reality of Facebook […]
Just came across this post from Open Culture on the first computer generated music. It appears that although Turing had worked out that his computer could be made to produce music but wasn’t interested in pursuing this. Christoper Strachey played with the concept and came up with some recognisable tunes. The Open Culture blog has […]
