See above.
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Away for a while…I’m off to London this morning (nothing unusual there) on my way to Russia and Germany (something unusual there.) I’ll be checking e-mail semi-regularly for the next 4(-ish) weeks if you need to get in contact with me (Blackberry is seriously expensive.) I should be back in the UK around 12 August having visited Moscow, St Petersburg and Berlin. Not sure whether I’ll get to update my blog, but hopefully there will be photos on my gallery page. |
post-exams postingWell, that was not so good, but at least they are over with. I have just returned to London from France, having had a marvelous time with Sam and Nick, previous to that I had been at the c-change steering committee meeting, which was much better than the last, I feel like things are progressing quite well now… Anyway, one of the problems with not checking your Google Reader in quite some time is that you have to go through a lot of content in order to get anything. So, now I guess I will give it a go and dive right in… First up is a blog called indexed which is made up entirely of scanned index cards with Venn diagrams and graphs on them. Next is the awesome evolver t-shirt (courtesy of boingboing) and also the periodic table of visualisation methods. Finally (for this posting, I want to go to bed!) I have a nice mashup called “Best of Bootie 2006″ and, in answer to all this iPhone hype (opinion coming soon to a blog near you) there is the Zunephone! More soon! |
blog before the computer goes…I’m moving out of hall tomorrow so I really need to close all of my Firefox tabs at some point. Elle is in the shower so I’ll take this moment to do that… First off Evan’s latest LJ post No warmth without her is his best yet. Secondly, if anyone is a daemon knitter and doesn’t know what to get me for Christmas, then a binary scarf would be awesome! I had no less than five e-mails this week asking me how angry I am about the Reading University lecturer who divided by zero. I have to echo the comments on the Bad Science blog, it just sounds like the IEEE specification for not a number (NaN.) Marginal Revolution has an interesting article about what would happen if Christmas didn’t happen from an economic point of view. I finally found (via the Tube Portal on wikipedia) the geographic (as opposed to topological) map of the London Underground (big!) On a slightly odd note (and mainly so I can find it again), how to tie a bow tie. Finally, some wisdom from Mr McGeever:
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frequencyI’m fed up of starting blog entries with apologies about how I’ve failed to blog in quite some time. Therefore I’m not going to apologise. What have I been up to recently? Well… I have had a reading week. This consisted of me going to London (for the General Secretaries interview), to Oxford (for general geek antics with Nick), to London (to see Elle and Ruth) then to Sheffield (for a holiday.) This was a lot of fun, although I neglected to do any work. This lead to me having the past few days as a catch up. This weekend is my last DF Committee meeting (OldNew changeover) and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand I am going to miss DFs but on the other hand I think it will allow me to get more done in St Andrews and for C-Change (which I have neglected so far.) I think it will also be interesting to see who I keep in contact with. I’ve always, in some ways, seen the end of DFs as “the end” but instead I’m now seeing it as an opportunity to work out who out of my friends are going to remain that way and who I will drift away from. Also after the bad experience that was Althing 2006, I will be glad to see the back of DFs in many ways. So, my plans for the next few weeks: write my “Sampling Theory” report/practical/paper thing (which “conveniently” is related to Distance sampling), then start revising for my first set of finals (out of 4) which is currently scaring me a lot. Elle should be coming up in 12th week, which will be nice. Well, a blog post from me would not be complete without some links, and I have a lot, see this post for why this was a problem, although with Firefox 2.0 you can recover sessions, which is nice when everything crashes and you loose the 30 tabs you had open… So, to start with I have a nice article by Ben Goldacre (writer of the Guardian’s “Bad Science” column) on his blog about a Secondly I came across a Facebook group the other day about an economist called Arthur Pigou. then, when reading The Economist in Sheffield station I noticed that the Facebook group was mentioned, the article Pigou or NoPigou? is, of course, available online. Greg Mankiw’s blog has a better introduction (the example case being introducing Pigovian taxes on gasoline) in his Pigou Club manifesto. The gist of the argument is that government should introduce higher taxes on negative externalities (economics-speak for bad things that happen but don’t effect you in terms of market prices.) Radar Online have a funny and revealing article about Scientology in the framework of it being better value for money than going to a Broadway show. Although it is meant to be funny, it also comes across as slightly scary. At this point Firefox crashes but I restart the session and continue seamlessly. This is a Good ThingTM. Now for some smaller stories and sites that caught my eye: a nice demonstration in Washington where the protesters dressed up at the character “V” from V for Vendetta, a download for the school classic the periodic table song, online lecture videos, cities doing away with traffic signs and finally “the mother of all computer science cheat sheets” which looks pretty useful if you aren’t doing a CS degree. Finally, my tip for the week was given to me by my “Quantum Mechanics 1″ tutor. One of the joys of Google Books is that they have scanned a lot of books which are all searchable. “So what?” you say, “I knew that!” But, did you think of using that to search instead of using the index? I hadn’t (maybe I’m just stupid) and it’s a really useful way of getting information out of a book that would usually be very hard to find. The only problem that I have found is that the OCR that Google are using is not perfect. This leads to problems like the following. I am searching for the Horvitz-Thompson estimator in “Introduction to Distance Sampling”, now doing a search for “Horvitz-Thompson” yields no results however, when you search for just “Thompson” you get what you want, which is a little frustrating… Anyway, I hope this satisfies you all for a while… |
2-4-6-8 time for me to matriculate!Yes, there are too many syllables. No, I don’t care. Anyway, I’m back in St Andrews. I’ve moved into Hall and have just matriculated in my third year. This is going pretty quickly. For those interested I am sitting the following modules: MT3503 - Complex Analysis Dan’s dreams are worrying me: (15:58:13) coup, anyone?: i dreamt you died (16:01:39) Dark Side Dave: eek (16:01:47) coup, anyone?: i know (16:01:51) Dark Side Dave: did I go heroically? (16:02:07) coup, anyone?: no you just slipped away during dinner (16:02:45) Dark Side Dave: I guess I wouldn't want to cause a fuss (16:06:23) coup, anyone?: well you certainly didnt apparently i didnt notice for ten minutes, the waitor noticed it, pointed it out, and the woman in front of me, i think she was from general council said she had noticed, but let didnt want to cause a scene (16:06:27) coup, anyone?: ten whole minutes ago Finally, some links: Vince’s new movie, Breathing Earth and Google Fight! |
Post Global Village Post…Wow! The past three weeks have been like no other. I can’t even begin to describe the things that have gone on in detail. However, we (the Media Centre team) did succeed in having 24 hour radio (4 hour repeats), 1/2 hour of TV, a daily newspaper and an up-to-date website from camp. There was a lot blood (Nick’s mainly), sweat (everyones) and tears (everyones) put into the project and I have to say that despite having days that I’d rather not relive, I think that we really did a great job. You can see what we did at the Global Village 2006 website. Highlights include Richard and I going to what basically constituted an arms fair to pick up a tent, Nick injuring himself every day, putting beer in what we thought was a fridge (but was infact a heater), getting the first newspaper run, going to Little Chef on the last day for brunch and being thoroughly embarrased by Julie Thorpe by being thanked personally (and in far too much depth) at the staff party. Press coverage was pretty good, I’ve not catalogued it all but two nice reports are at Society Guardian and co-operatives UK news. In geeky news, I finally met Meinhard who, along with Matt host this site. I also have aquired a new PC (Semperon 3100+, 1GB RAM, blahblah) which is 64-bit which takes a little getting used to. And finally, I saw a really nice bit of geeky news: a Firefox crop circle. |
a few things and a hurting fingerMy finger is infected. It hurts. Ouch. In other news the spanthatworld.com forum broke and thanks to Invision’s shitty business model (“Hey, freeware doesn’t matter we can make big bucks! Screw everyone!”) I’m converting the site over to phpBB (which is nice and OSS.) In doing this I came across a few cool tools. First is a phpBB converter which takes data across from all kinds of forum systems and nice converts it over to phpBB format. Secondly, there is EasyPHP which does a full install of mysql, apache and phpmyadmin on a Windows box in about 5 minutes with no restart. And it just works! Finally, I am a cam-boy again, the ninepointeightone.net davecam is up here at the moment you’ll have to do a manual refresh every 30 seconds, but I’ll sort that out eventually. Oh! And really finally… the nerdcore hip hop compillation is out today! |
marginal updateYes, it has been a while. Yes I am at work. Yes, I’m drinking too much coffee. On the other hand I found my old webcam at home so you can watch me work here. |
resuming normal service……maybe… I think the DNS information has reached me now, even through NTL’s stupid webcache. Anyway, time to get back to the usual irrelevant postings… First I must draw your attention to Nick’s equipment list for Global Village which we drew up at a meeting a few weeks ago. Next, lying is sometimes pointless and there is a massive woman in the desert! The first blue screen of death on a Mac and a nice use of AP news feeds, google maps and Yahoo! geocoding. |
hosting change |
last night a cliche saved my life…Today I learned there is a pub in Greenwich called “The Frog and Radiator” other than that I’ve had a pretty interesting day. I tried my first can of IrnBru32, which is the Scottish equivalent of Red Bull; it tastes kind of like IrnBru but lacks that orange (the colour not the fruit) aftertaste that we all know and love. Anyway, I’m moving hosting at some point so this will all go down in a bit but hopefully not for long! |
new template testing…Just testing out my new template… at the moment it’s only been tested in Opera (don’t ask…) so it might (and probably will) look horrible in real browsers… |
WordPress 2Just testing out my WordPress 2 install… hmmm… seems okay at the moment… |
