Posts from 2012

17 Dec 2012

Iris unimpressed by the concept of a metaphoto

I have a liking for photos of photos. It is clearly not (yet) shared by Iris. Sarah’s “photo of a photo being taken of a photo being taken of a kangaroo” is one of my all time favourites (click for full size version)…

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02 Dec 2012

On time travel

Just finished A Slower Speed of Light, a computer game in which simple relativity is explored - the (simulated) speed of light is slowed bit by bit. As it does so, all sorts of relativistic effects happen (my favourite is the Doppler effect, but others are perhaps more interesting). Travelling sideways is particularly trippy. It took me about 29 minutes. Well, in my frame of reference, it did. In the game’s universe it was a little over half an hour…

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30 Nov 2012

What goes up must come down

There are many electronic services which fall, roughly, under the category of “monitoring”. A mixture of commercial and open-source, the list includes systems like Nagios, and my personal recommendation for monitoring websites, Pingdom. I’ve written before about the importance of “notification by exception”. I could spend part of every day running down a checklist, making sure everything’s ok. Apart from the inefficiency, this relies on me. In a more automated world, I could have an email delivered to me every day, saying that all was well, but if I didn’t notice on the day it came… you get the picture.

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26 Nov 2012

Google Refine and the Fotherington-Thomas issue

If you ever work with spreadsheets (!) you no doubt keep your data meticulously clean. I bet you never ever enter “n/a” into a column that’s otherwise full of numbers, or mix “U.K.” with “United Kingdom”. Today’s news flash: there are spreadsheets out there not created by people like you and me. People who, late at night, mistakenly copy columns and accidentally transpose the data, or make typos and don’t spot them.

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25 Nov 2012

Here is my credit card number

I’ve been continuing to use Anki and Anki web to stretch the capabilities of my memory. As is well known, coming up with your own mnemonic image is a powerful aid to help you memorise something. It works particularly well if the image is personal, powerful and if you take time coming up with it. Since Anki reinforces memories so effectively, I sketched some of my mnemonics out (helps cement them in yer brain) and they get shown every time I review the card.

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21 Nov 2012

Good dialog, bad dialog

A couple of dialog boxes I’ve encountered recently. One I liked (well done, Marketo), and one I didn’t (Microsoft). I used the spelling “dialog box” deliberately. I would tend to use dialogue, except when talking about dialog boxes in a software context. Here’s an interesting Google n-Gram showing the prevalence of related terms over the past century. ‘dialog’ vs ‘dialogue’ vs ‘dialog box’ vs ‘dialogue box’ Also pleased to see there is a StackExchange for English!

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17 Nov 2012

There was a 1 in 3 chance...

…that Iris would be asleep for her megasecond. She seems to partake in sleeping, crying and feeding in approximately equal measures, and pays no attention to other timescales.

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08 Nov 2012

Morrisons += 9lbs 1oz

My wife is amazing and we have a daughter! Iris was born at 20:40:53 on 5th November, which meant that Sarah’s labours were accompanied by the sound of fireworks. I am now enjoying the grammatical conundrums that occur because Iris’s initial matches the first person pronoun. “I and S are in the hospital” now means something different from “S and I are in the hospital.” Henceforth, contextual disambiguation will be required for abbreviated sentences in which I is/am the singular subject.

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29 Oct 2012

Induction by Sod's Law

Sarah and I are waiting for a baby at the moment. I’m certainly excited, but Sarah can’t wait to get on with the whole birth thing! It makes statistics like these highly pertinent: Probably Overthinking It - are first babies more likely to be late?. Highly recommended reading, by the way. There are many traditional methods of “getting things moving” -ahem - but one that only occurred to me recently, I’ve called “Induction by Sod’s Law”.

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08 Oct 2012

URL shuffling and Google juice

I thought I’d write up something I did at work today, in case it’s useful to other “webmasters”. We have a site which, through evolution, history and multiple editors, has ended up with a cluttered URL space. It happens. This is a worthwhile thing to do for tidiness, to enable future redesigns, and to ensure good navigation (and hence Googlability). I was keen to do it in a way that maintained existing links, and in a way which would preserve search engines' knowledge of our pages.

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03 Oct 2012

Email me. In the future.

There are ways to email people in the future. As I mentioned in my previous post about “Getting Things Done”, I’ve set up snooze (David Allen would call it a tickler) folders in Gmail. I often end up sending myself an email as a reminder to do something, and it occurred to me that it’d be useful to be able to send myself an email and have it go straight into a snooze folder, ready to pop back into my Inbox in a set number of days.

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02 Oct 2012

It's time to take the plunge

I’ve read the book and realised, though a process akin to “natural selection”, that I’m pretty close to it already. Allen’s choices of example tasks must be facetious? “Buy Pony for Marcia”, “Refit yacht” and so on. Anyway, I am going to attempt to fully implement GTD. Here’s one thing I’m planning on using straight away: GMail snooze

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19 Sep 2012

Pricing a raffle

I’m selling our campervan. It’s not going to raise a lot of money. But Matthew at work suggested a novel way of selling it, which got me thinking. “Have a raffle,” he said, “two quid a ticket. Bet you could sell loads.” I’m not sure about the legalities, and I am sure it’d be tricky to achieve a few hundred, small-but-traceable transactions (without sitting in town selling tickets), so I’m going to stick to the more conventional methods.

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28 Aug 2012

Have you missed your gigasecond?

I happen to know when I was born (the striking of the hour was, apparently, remarked upon at the precise time). That allowed me to calculate when I would pass the age of 1,000,000,000 (one billion) seconds, and I duly marked the occasion. Now you can find out when your “gigasecond” is (or was), or calculate and count the number of seconds to any date. How many seconds? Here is my age in seconds.

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23 Aug 2012

Prototype pretentions

My latest electronics/as-little-hardware-munging-as-I-can-get-away-with project is definitely at prototype stage, but it has some features already. battery powered and USB rechargeable completely wireless (on the outside!) connects to my home xbee network… …and thus to my computer and the wider world, making it extensible, crucially, without hardware rejigging. It’s interesting how different something feels when it becomes hand-held. The same electronics, performing the same functions, feel very much less useful when they’re spread out over a table in a tangle of wires with other bits all over the place and soldering irons knocking around.

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09 Aug 2012

Is this Richard Morrison?

A couple of screenshots thrown up recently. First one is a cracker from iPhoto. erm, I think you mean “Is this a red-fronted lemur, Eulemur rufifrons?” The second was shared with me by Quentin. Apparently came up during a Skype chat history search…

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06 Aug 2012

Lugging the 1's and 0's

A friend at Owlstone gave an exclamation of bemusement when he received this parcel, big enough to fit a good sized flat screen monitor. The contents? Another box, containing a CD-ROM, containing (in some sense) some 1’s and 0’s! dabs.com must have a very efficient back office or very high bandwidth costs to make this economical. It took several days from order to delivery, which I make to be roughly 0.

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20 Jul 2012

Sodium Fluoride and Arctic Lichen

I sometimes wish it were my job to come up with the pseudoscience that is so prevalent on marketing material, especially for pharmaceuticals. Toothpaste that contains moss and lichen? Whether or not it actually helps, the juxtaposition of “moss” with calcium ions motivated me to grab this shot while brushing my teeth. I particularly like the chart to the right which shows pain varying over time. Here’s another example. I can safely show you this excerpt from one of my household bills, because it contains so little useful information, and the information it does contain is practically impossible to discern.

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13 Jul 2012

The iBat effect

My Dad just sent me this link from the BBC: Can smartphones help us understand more about bats? As someone who’s built their own bat detector (I was inspired after taking a Scudamore’s Punting Bat Safari), my first reaction was one of deflation. Had someone released an app that could do the job? Although it was fun soldering the “digibat” together, I’m all for gadget consolidation, and would prefer it if my phone could perform yet one more function.

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09 Jul 2012

Inverting a deluge

A recent post by Quentin (Too Much Email) prompted this thought… I’m a fan of if this then that and find it a very useful type of digital “glue”. I suspect one of its most popular recipes, in the UK at least, is one that emails you if it’s forecast to rain tomorrow. Very useful for cyclists. I also recommend raintoday. Email is best as an exception management. I get an email every day telling me a backup has succeeded.

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05 Jul 2012

On explanation and memory

I take pride in explaining things: I’m pretty sure it says that on this website somewhere… I’m a relative n00bie when it comes to this blogging business, and one observation that I have already is that the occasions when I’m motivated to write something “ranty” are far more frequent than those when I feel inclined to praise something. I suppose I have to be careful - but this post falls gently within the former category.

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27 Jun 2012

Learning a Monologue

I’ve been asked to give a reading at an upcoming wedding–and I’m truly honoured. I plan to learn it “off by heart”. It’s not your typical reading – it’s a list of bullet points under two headings (“Marry” and “Not marry”) by a certain Charles Darwin. That’s why I want to memorise it: it’ll require a degree of enunication and performance, beyond simply reading it out without making a mistake.

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26 Jun 2012

The Wonder of Webfaction

This site is hosted by Webfaction. I’ve run sites and applications with this company since 2008, and not only have I never had a problem with them, I can actually remember being impressed by their support. They’re proactive, for heaven’s sake! Just now at Owlstone we’re moving host providers, to, you guessed it, Webfaction. I just used their API to create about 45 email addresses with forwarding in 5 minutes.

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25 Jun 2012

Musings on Memory

I believe—and I don’t have anything but my own anecdotal evidence for this—that using computers has wrecked my memory. Why would I need to memorise anything? I can hit Copy & Paste and achieve perfect results, without troubling my neurons. Having started a blog pretentiously called “Mnemozzyne”, I felt it was obligatory to write something on the subject of memory. This is, as a by-product, the equivalent of one of those cringeworthy posts you read on other blogs.

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24 Jun 2012

Over-egging the infographic pudding

This over-the-top infographic set off my geek alarm bells today. A one-dimensional time-dependent variable presented as six two-dimensional charts. For good measure, a trivial complementary variable has been calculated and included, along with the numerical value of both variables to an excessive degree of precision. The BBC website is brilliant at things like this. A couple of favourites from the past: BBC mistake computer game logo for UN Security Council symbol “if the government was a mouse this week, the psychedelic view inside its head might resemble that of a little hippy, addicted to LSD.

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21 Jun 2012

Banana Revelation

From which end do you open a banana? Never thought about it? Neither have I. Until my friend Theo pointed out to me that there is an optimum end, and it’s the other end! http://lifehacker.com/5311002/open-a-banana-like-a-monkey

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14 Jun 2012

Amusing toaster repair... no, really

It can’t be often that a toaster repair report can make someone laugh out loud. We got ours back from repair earlier this week, with this notice attending it. Also interesting for the fact that the word ‘currant’ could almost be exchanged for ‘current’…

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