Last Wednesday, Grace and I went up to the NEC in Birmingham for Gadget Show Live.
Archive for the ‘misc’ Category
Gadget Show Live 2011
Monday, April 18th, 2011Welcome to Eastleigh
Sunday, December 26th, 2010This is a video that my (at the time) five year old, Grace, made last summer.
It was in the school holidays when I was looking for things that would keep her occupied for a couple of days – and I suggested that she might want to do some filming. She decided to make a documentary about the town where we live.
I would have posted this at the time, but it all got a little out of hand and ended up over twenty minutes long – which made it too long for me to upload to YouTube. But today, my YouTube account got approved for posting longer videos, so I thought that (even if five or six months late!) it’d still be worth sharing.
Grace was, unsurprisingly, in charge of everything – acting as presenter, director, narrator, location scout, and all-around bossy boots. My job was to point the camera where I was told in the bits where she wanted to talk. 🙂
It was all filmed using a normal digital stills camera that happens to let you record video clips. So the quality isn’t great (the microphone in particular doesn’t handle the wind well!).
Great South Run
Friday, October 29th, 2010It’s safe to say that I’ve been a stereotypical geek where sports are concerned. You know the sort – always picked last for sports at school, and came up with a variety of ways to avoid P.E. lessons wherever possible (helped by a secondary school that let me swap PE classes for additional academic classes).
Last February, a mate suggested that I join him to do the Great South Run – a ten mile run in Portsmouth. My initial reaction was that I could never do that. I’d never run a mile before, let alone ten. And I hadn’t done any running at all since school.
But then… the fact that I’d never done anything like it before also seemed like a good reason to do it. So, I signed up.
Why you want code monkeys who tinker in their own time
Thursday, October 14th, 2010This post is a modified version (in other words, shameless rip-off!) of an interesting post on seo-chicks.com. It talked about why companies should expect their SEO specialists to moonlight in their own time, and the benefits of this. You should go and read the original article as it’s really good.
But as I read it, I saw a parallel with how big software companies like my own employer should view their developers…
There are many reasons why you should expect your developer to be working on their own projects. Your developer should be doing something besides showing up to work, working on clients (or in house) and going home.
Working on their own projects is essential because it gives them experiences beyond their immediate work and gives them a platform for experimentation. Better that they try and fail on their own side projects than on your enterprise software products or your client’s live systems.
Software development is an art and a craft. It takes skill, knowledge, understanding and learning. Training is sparse once beyond the beginning stages, particularly in recent times where training budgets are getting harder to justify. Practice and experience are good forms of training – finding out the hard way what works and what doesn’t.
A passionate developer, someone who is bitten by the bug and craves to learn more, will go on to do more code development in their free time. That is the code monkey that you want – someone who has passion and strives to learn more. This is the developer that you should want to find and keep. The professional who will test, push boundaries, experiment and learn more in their free time is valuable and should be kept and nurtured. This developer will bring more to an organisation than you may be able to utilise however they are worth their weight in gold over the long term.
Eating in the dark
Thursday, September 30th, 2010
Friday was Amy‘s birthday. I probably shouldn’t share which birthday.
For her birthday, we went to London for the weekend, doing touristy things like the London Eye and shopping stuff like Selfridges and Liberty. For her birthday meal, I thought of trying something a bit different and booked us a table at Dans Le Noir. It’s an unusual restaurant, so I thought it was worth sharing a little about the experience.
I know I tend to ramble, so let me get a short version out of the way: you have to eat in the dark, and it’s pretty intense.
Seven years at Hursley
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Seven years ago this week, I started at IBM. Two years ago this week, I started my current job. Thought those were worth noting.
I joined IBM thinking it’d be for a couple of years to get training and experience before going to do something more fun at a start-up.
But seven years (four changes of jobs, three promotions, six changes of office and nine changes of manager) later, I’m still here and still loving what I do.
What are our rights while stranded abroad?
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010I’m in Cyprus. Still.
My flight home at the weekend was cancelled, and we’ve been given a new flight on the 29th – turning our 7 day break into an eighteen day holiday.
For the unplanned 11 days, our package holiday operator – easyjet – is putting us up in a series of nice full-board hotels, and providing a coach to transport us between them.
I’m very grateful – we’d saved for a couple of years to pay for the original week as it is. I wouldn’t have been able to afford extending the holiday.
But I’m also curious. Why are they doing this? Do they have to?
Book review: Matplotlib for Python Developers
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Matplotlib for Python Developers, Sandro Tosi
Let me get the boring disclaimer-y bit out of the way first: I didn’t buy this book – Packt Publishing sent me a free copy in return for me writing a review of it. They’ve not made any specific requests about the contents of my review, just that I should write a review. And, in fact, I should give them props for not hassling me for not getting around to writing this until now – about eight weeks after they sent it. So either they forgot they sent it to me, or they are terribly patient. I’m choosing to assume it’s the latter 🙂
With that out of the way… matplotlib is a graphing library. I’ve used it a lot for my CurrentCost energy monitoring app – all of the graphs in the app are created using matplotlib. And while it is very powerful, it can be a little tricky to get your head around. I still struggle with getting the graphs exactly how I want them even now.
That was why I agreed to do this review – I liked the sound of the book and thought it’d be useful for me.
Overall, it’s a really good book. It starts off going through all the basics, both in terms of explaining the ideas and concepts, and in the practical steps needed to get set up. I’m not normally a big fan of reading text books, preferring to figure stuff out for myself as I go along, but found that even here I picked up tips that I never knew and subtle features that I’d missed.
A nice flow-chart kicks off the detail into producing different types of graphs and chart. It starts from asking “What would you like to show?” (e.g. comparison; distribution; composition; relationship; etc.).
Following this through for what you want to show, and what type of data you have, leads you to a suggestion for the type of graph that is most appropriate for your needs (e.g. line histogram; waterfall chart; pie chart; stacked column chart; scatter chart; etc.). For someone like me who doesn’t have the world’s strongest maths background, this was a really useful guide.