Category Archives: Programming

Weeknotes: Phones and the Environment

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to follow up a query that I had about tracing the way that the Bluetooth signal is constructed through the various layers of software and hardware. My interest is software but this does interface with hardware sensors on the phone. I took the phone apart using screw drivers […]

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 […]

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 […]

Sonification, Schemas and Microdata

In an ongoing experiment, I am playing around with representing sonification in HTML to enable sharing it within a webpage, focusing on the Event and AudioObject schemas. Following some currently unpublished thesis work, I was curious about trying to model the thing that I was writing about and putting it into the mark-up to allow […]

Notes on recent blogs

A post on Slashdot pointed me towards the post, High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters, on the ACM blog. Posting here as a sticky note for a potential project. However I am also aware that this might become part of the notes graveyard, Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/259098-high-performance-mobile-system-on-chip-clusters/fulltext https://reproof.app/blog/notes-apps-help-us-forget.

Causation, Correlation, and Method

Another short post but John Naughton’s latest column in the Observer is another one for book marking, Yes, DeepMind crunches the numbers – but is it really a magic bullet? . The computational achievements are there but the underlying question about how one understands it still need the scientific method. I might argue that, in […]

Tappigraphy as method?

I am bookmarking this as no doubt if I have time, I will forget the piece. A useful, if slightly unnerving, article about tappigraphy in the Observer, The dawn of tappigraphy. It raises important issues of ethics and privacy, but raises questions in my mind about responses. Hmmm…

OpenAI codex

I was sent the link to the OpenAI Codex coding demo on YouTube, which was a lot of fun and interesting. It makes me think of the no code movement. At one level, I really enjoyed it and I like the fluency of the API that is being used. What worries me slightly is that […]

Safari and web-based digital methods

Tim Perry writes a persuasive blog post on Safari and the state of browsers, Safari isn’t protecting the web. It covers a lot of ground but I get the larger picture now, having struggled with getting relatively simple web APIs working in Safari but without issue in Firefox and Chrome. In this regard, I do […]

Installing and Using ProvConvert on OSX

I have just gone back to earlier work where I am using ProvConvert to visualise a PROV graph. I have had issues with installing and using it before so have been really wary of it. Until I came across Soiland Reye’s excellent blog post on the subject. As I am using openJDK through Homebrew on […]