Technical
My career has been in software development so that makes me a signed-up geek. I enjoy writing and designing software, two of my efforts got nominated for BETT awards.
I use Linux based computers and have for years - I only boot Microsoft Windows when I’m playing a Windows-only game or work makes me use it. With things being increasingly ‘in the cloud’ it’s become very easy to ditch Microsoft. So most of the articles concern the open-source and free side of software. It’s also bit of an aide-memoir on various technical HOWTOs for my own systems or experiments, hopefully some of them may be useful to others.
Using images is part and parcel of any website. It’s easy enough to reference and build into jekyll local and remote images. What I really wanted was a way to...
Implementing sticky posts isn’t native to Jekyll, but easy to do. Datapages allows the creation of pages automatically based on data in a database.
Time for a major upgrade to my computer’s operating system.
Connecting the dynamic and server based Mastodon toots with this static Jekyll site places a few constraints on technolgies that can be used.
XTwitter has always been a mess, but increasingly so. So time to find something else that will work for my microblogging needs.
I’ve used Evernote for a while for taking and keeping notes, lists, diaries. But recent changes to their free tier meant looking for another option. And the open source and...
Twitter provides urls for accessing a timeline or to specific posts. These can be used to present twitter content within jekyll. Code for this site in held in git bitbucket...
The site is styled using the W3.css library, while the frontpage grid of ‘postcards’ is done using a jekyll plugin. The postcards system also means dynamic searches for posts can...
Jekyll provides a markdown language and plugin code to add extra capabilities to the system. There is documentation at the Jekyll site, this post is a list of the setup...
Fed up to the back teeth with Drupal as a blogging system so decided to move to a new one: Jekyll
So we have a critical vulnerability in a software library that allows hackers to get access to your machine. It’s a library that huge quantities of other software make use...
Coding is an exercise in managing complexity and the basic technique is ‘divide and conquer’.
Getting code working (aka debugging) inevitably means understanding each discrete step in your code. Placing logging statements at strategic points allows the code to self-report on its internal state. An...
Historically, testing software was something you did at the end of development to see if everything worked. It still is, but the aim is ‘acceptance testing’ - is the customer...
I’d wanted some mobile computing for a while so that I could at least write things while travelling or visting. While feasible on a phone it’s not really practical. Combined...
Coding mostly consists of editing text files. OK - knowing the magic words to put in those text files is ‘writing code’, but essentially it’s editing a lot of text...
Converting ideas into software starts with analysis of the situation and creating a specification, which is a detailed list of what the proposed software should do and achieve. Analysis and...
As a software developer my drives are full of half (or less!) finished bits of code, demos and experiments. Except in a professional capacity it seems rare to complete a...
In hopeful anticipation of resuming travelling post Covid, bought this nifty travel adapter. It adapter to differing international plug configurations and provides ample USB charging in a compact device. Should...
The Epson ET-2750 is a nice printer/scanner/copier combo, with ecotanks of ink so I don’t need to faff with ink cartridges (which was the main reason I bought it) The...
The problem with software like Drupal is that you are running a computer program on a webserver out on the internet. Where the baddies stalk. Any software is at risk...
So after another round of security vulnerabilities in Drupal (the system that does this site) and the need to upgrade, I’d taken the website down rather than get hacked. And...
Following the ECCS conference (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX). This is a way of creating a document with the instructions for precise layout and formats placed in the document with ‘commands’ such as \section{“something”}...
Recently I got offered an interesting little programming job. “The Complete New Yorker” is 8 DVDs worth of magazine stretching back to the 1920’s that needed to be transferred to...
I guess it’s a sign of the times when you talk about ‘googling’ rather than ‘searching’, but… I’m very organised in how I keep my own documents on my PC...
Microsoft’s next generation of operating system, Windows 8, sports a whole new interface. Will this be the end of Microsoft as the default OS on PC’s? Ars Technica has a...
I’ve never been a big online player except perhaps for World of Warcraft. So leaving that meant no simple excuse for an online chat with my brother. Attempting to multiplay...
Some recent coding (a rewrite of the “netMetric” toolset”) required an XML file to be transformed by an XSLT stylesheet and the results that transformed further by another stylesheet. This...
An interesting statistic from Ofcom via the BBC is that on average users download 17Gb a month. Well for a long time I’ve had a niffty tool called vnstat running...
With the impending research I decided to upgrade one of my older machine to have some decent storage capacity. Older means a P750 Pentium III circa 2000(?) with a standard...
The BBC has a story concerning a report on IT projects claiming that most projects run over budget with one in six going over by a staggering 200%. Sadly to...
Almost any web-based application today will do this: it will collect information from a database, merge that information into prepared page layouts and then send the result to the user’s...
In days of old, software was developed and then tested. This generates some serious problems since projects are often late leaving testing to be rushed or skipped to ensure the...
Among the machines I run at home is a Microsoft Windows XP machine and when my Linux Ubuntu machines need to gain network access I’ve used the Samba (smb) tools....
So after our initial great idea we need to try and specify exactly what it is we want to do. To do that involves asking people what they want this...
If you’ve ever wondered how exactly a computer program is built, then this is the series for you. This series of posts will go through the process of idea to...
So it’s “Technical Tuesday” and time to do something I’d been putting off for a while: fix my [no-glossary]network’s[/no-glossary] DNS and DHCP. DNS is a system of swapping between the...
So the assignment comes back with a suggestion to rework the title. Of course never being one to take the easy route I created a ‘wordle’ of the text. Save...
whrrr… click! the death gurgle of a hard drive expiring. My main PC 150Gb Western Digital failed taking with it just about everything. All my code, Open University dissertation work,...
I’ve tried a few 3D modellers over the years, generally with minimal success. They frequently suffer from being way too bloated with every option under the sun available, of being...
arXiv.com is a pre-press site of science papers, a “best of” blog provides a finger on the pulse of latest research phrased in nice simple language. OK, simple enough to...
Although I had previously said I wouldn’t mess about trying to map the relationships between papers, well… it’s hard for techi fingers to resist. Created this little java program to...
In investigating academic stuff, I’d previously wondered why repositories of academic papers didn’t do more with their searching capacities and specifically in visualising the connections between papers. Well a bit...
Palo is an open source, free multidimensional DB (MOLAP). Databases come in a variety of types, most familiar are transactional relational databases like MySQL. But other types exist that don’t...
Recently I’ve completed placing some photos from an old cycling holiday Cycling the ring of Kerry, ‘04 into Google Maps. Although the interface provided is simple and effective, it’s not...
MakeHuman is an interesting bit of software “for the modeling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters”. In the computer world, characters can be represented as a ‘mesh’ of triangles and this software...
My scanner hasn’t been used for years, mainly ‘cos its old and parallel port based. Yes, that old. So a new CanoScan LiDE 100 scanner purchased and hooked up to...
With the revision on the M883 Software Requirements for business systems (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) and it’s rather good. It creates mindmaps, which I tend to use naturally to scribble stuff anyways. So...
My printer doesn’t get used a lot. Generally I only print stuff that I need to sit down, read and annotate ~ which at the moment means academic papers. Problem...
Managed to get a private World of Warcraft server running on my own machines lately, which is fun. The official Blizzard Warcraft game involves a client on your own PC...
Ages ago I’d picked up a cheap webcam at a computer fair on a whim, and eventually got around to seeing if it would install onto my ubuntu linux desktop....
Perhaps I should pay more attention to those ‘end of life’ notices that linux distributions put out. One of my home servers (Ergo) has been happily running Ubuntu 7.04 (codename...
I swear Drupal is doing my head in. Once you’ve twigged something its obvious. Its the twigging thats the trouble! Site content is tagged ie given a taxonomy. The intention...
Think I’ve got my head around the idea of Views and then how to use them in Panels 2 to create the current front page layout (main recent posts and...
A local DNS allows me to give proper names to machines on my network. Its the bit that converts www.bbc.co.uk into 212.58.224.56 The numbers are the IP address and the...