Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Weeknotes: Thesis, tea, and the future

I was delayed last week by sorting out things for my parent for most of last week. I submitted my thesis. That was the big thing and hopefully I will get my preferred external examiner. I began to reconnect to people whom I had not talked to in quite a while, so l am looking […]

Weeknotes: Inventory and Thesising

This week featured some time beginning a device inventory at work, something that we have been thinking of for a while. It reminds me that I must complete the image for the server infrastructure, which I fear I may have made too complicated for now. I completed the skeleton of the text analysis skills sessions […]

Shared Standards

I am parking this here as an example of shared standards between Google and Apple (TechCrunch). Android have announced a feature to identify tracking devices with a view to creating a shared specification at some point. The idea of shared specifications has appeared before but it is something that is worth tracking for now as […]

Weeknotes: Accepting and Coping with Boredom

Recently I have been searching for a purpose, or so it seems. I have many things that I need to do, am doing, and want to do. The task list is endless and sometimes interesting. It can be boring but that is life. I was half listening to some talks on technical leadership and Michael […]

Finding voices

The API apocalypse (if we’re feeling melodramatic) is causing some issues for Digital Methods. I enjoyed David Peirce’s article on the Verge today, asking where everyone will meet now. This is going to be challenging question going fowards. Recently, I have been looking at Mastodon and the Fediverse as perhaps the final set of APIs […]

Parallel social lives?

A recent experiment, which will be discussed in due course, has taken me back to thinking about parallel computing in Python using the multiprocessing library. This also reminds me of a conversation that I had with David De Roure as we walked to a seminar after some experiments using Raspberry Pi (2 and 3) boards […]

Hybrid Modelling

Adel Douad and Devdatt Dubhashi’s article on hybrid models in Statistical Modeling is an idea that is intriguing me at the moment as I restart things. One for the back burner, but linking to it for future research.

ChatGPT as a theme

John Naughton’s article on ChatGPT, The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel, inspired me to use it as the theme for the Digital Methods labs that I teach. It also seems sane that such tools will become part of the everyday. So far, it […]

Which media to be social?

We live in interesting times in terms of social media. I am preparing to teach social media APIs this coming term. Last year, we were caught by the Ukraine invasion and this year, we are wondering how Twitter is going to react, or even if it will last. The Nature article on Twitter and science […]

A hamster wheel of accelerated knowledge?

A line in Beatrice Forman’s article, The soothing, slightly sinister world of productivity hacks, jumped out at me. While discussing various ways of being productive, she nods to a (now deleted) post to replace reading books and articles with Instagram and notes versions, rather than engaging with the 2-300 pages of a book. I had […]