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.

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. […]

Facial Recognition and Make up

One of the Saturday talks at Transmediale discussed CV Dazzle through make up to defeat, if temporarily, facial recognition. The Guardian had a small piece, Hiding in Plain Sight, on Dazzle Club’s work using make-up and other techniques to work against it.

Notes on Transmediale (Friday)

I went across to Transmediale as it was on networks, of many types, under the End 2 End theme. Having got up some where in the very early morning, I missed the opening Exchange which turned out to be frustrating as it was heavily referenced later. Olia Liliana‘s end-to-end, peer-to-peer, my-to-me session set up a […]

25 years of blogging

John Naughton has a good piece on the 25th anniversary of blogging. It set of undeveloped trains of thought where I need to re-read some history.

The tacit problem of reproducibility

I was giving a talk at the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School on reproducibility this year and had an intriguing question. A review of a recent conference paper reminds me of this. At the end of the lecture, I pose two questions: Can someone on your group reproduce one of your results using available information […]

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 […]

Thoughts on ICAD 2019 Day 2

Day 2 of ICAD 2019 was sadly my last as I was due to speak somewhere else. It developed Day 1 quite nicely. The opening talk on using sonification in graphs was a well thought out consideration of the role of sound to learn how a network graph might be considered aurally. Whilst it reminds […]

Thoughts on ICAD 2019 Day 1

As International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) was, metaphorically, up the rail line in Newcastle, I thought that it was a must attend conference. The Monday kicked off with the session on Assisting with Every Day Life. Christoph Urbanietz presented on continuing work to aid navigation for the people with visual impairments. The approach, using […]

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 […]

Murals and patronage

JR’s stitched mural, covered in The Guardian, of San Francisco is a great piece of art and social history, covering various strata of a fast changing city. Using a mobile studio, he took hundreds of photos and stitched them into one image. Lynne and Marc Benioff of Salesforce are one of the financial backers raising […]