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Huge wave

2006-08-07T18:42:00.000+01:00

This is possibly the most incredible thing I have ever seen...

My photos

2006-03-20T19:54:00.000Z

Check them out here

Podcasting

2006-03-18T20:03:00.000Z

A few years back, I heard of, and was quite taken by, an idea which would let busy executives use their time more productively. This was a time pre-mp3 but post-cdr. It was pretty simple. Either at the office, or at home, the executive would burn off an audio CD packed full of useful information - emails, briefings, news clips. They could then listen to it whilst stuck in traffic.

That I missed the link between this and it's obvious mp3 cousin, the podcast, staggers me.

Java Posse is a pod cast about Java, for Java developers. And I find it quite rewarding to listen to this on the way to and from work. Sometimes I even wish my commute was longer...

restaurantdiary.com

2006-03-18T19:50:00.000Z

These guys: http://www.restaurantdiary.com/ are doing some interesting things.

Like a red rag to a bull

2006-02-17T18:25:00.000Z

Given what's happened recenetly with some cartoons, this just doesn't like a good idea. Is it just me? Am I mad?

Unintentional 133t speak.

2006-02-13T21:36:00.000Z

Advertistment on the UK Freeview digital music channel "Smash Hits! radio" for mobile phone ringtones:

press green for the sh! tones chart.

How appropriate, I thought.

Quote of the day

2006-02-09T13:15:00.000Z

I found this today. I think it's wonderful, on many levels.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of the British Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Charles Babbage
The Inventor of the Analytical Engine - the first computer

Marathon Madness

2006-02-05T23:33:00.000Z

I've not been very impressed with the BBC's recent affection for self-censorship. But now they have really 'taken the biscuit'. They've started censoring cake recipes. Forunately, there is always www.archive.org

News

2006-02-05T22:54:00.000Z

It's been a while since I last posted here...[etc etc blah blah]. Watch this space, I'm going to start blogging again.

Edinburgh Festival

2005-08-12T19:56:00.000+01:00

Being extremely busy writing my dissertation at the moment, I don't have time to enjoy the excellent festival on in Edinburgh at the moment. This guy does though and has some interesting things to say about some of the shows.

ID Cards

2005-06-27T12:37:00.000+01:00

Three things are bothering me in particular at present:

1) Legislation to introduce ID Cards: A Bad Thing ®
2) Legislation to make software patentable: A Bad Thing ®
3) Legislation to track all cars in the UK: A Bad Thing ®

I have already taken some action on 1) and 2), namely signed up for
http://www.pledgebank.com/refuse and written to my MEPs to note my concern. I have yet to decide what to do about 3).

MSc Trip

2005-05-23T14:57:00.000+01:00

kyleakin
Originally uploaded by donaldw.

So that's all my exams finished now. To celebrate one of my fellow students organised a short trip up north. Here is a nice image I took whilst away.

Power to the People

2005-03-20T23:15:00.000Z

It has been a while since I last posted. I've been rather busy. Recently though, I've been contributing to the 'Information Superhighway' in a more effective way.

Three great projects:

If everyone who blogged spent 10 minutes each day working on one of these sites, I think their time would be more productively spent.

Christmas

2004-12-13T02:14:00.000Z

I've not written anything for a while. I'm now on holiday until January 10th. So I really should
write something. I'm banging away here on my new laptop in front of my cool Christmas tree. I'd post a picture of if it were easy to do so.

I spy with my little eye

2004-11-08T01:43:00.000Z

Thought I'd try and see if anybody at all actually reads this thing. So I've added a counter. Of course, the more tech savvy memebers of my 'audience' will probably be using the xml feed from http://p5ychofox.blogspot.com/atom.xml and I can't track that...

Back to my database assignment - implementing an external n-way sort algorithm in a lecturer's homegrown pure Java database.

Fork

2004-11-06T23:01:00.000Z

For my purposes, for C++ I suppose the closest approximation to Intellij for Java would be [GNU|X]emacs. Now, since any serious Mozilla hacking would involve the use of an editor more feature rich than my trusty friend vi, I've been looking into which flavour I should read up on.

The fork of [GNU|X]emacs makes for quite interesting reading. Of course, it is hard to find a wholly impartial assessment of the split.

Some useful resources are
http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html

Left or Right

2004-11-06T18:27:00.000Z

I found an interesting website the other day - a couple of months ago in fact. Its a test in the style of one of those Cosmopiltan style quizzes which indicates your political orientation (left or right).

I'm obviously confused internally because my answers to the questions put me on the wrong side!

Spooooky!

2004-11-06T18:16:00.000Z

http://www.phillg.com/gallery/Halloween-2004

Firefox

2004-11-06T18:07:00.000Z

I was thinking to myself how cool it would be to contribute something to an opensource project. Since I've been thrashing around with Firefox for the past week or so, this seems like a good target. It's been a while since I've used C++ and COM in serious anger - so it might a little tricky. Maybe I should concentrate on doing something with http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/ instead?

On Thursday I tried to build mozilla on the machines at Uni - after the build had been running for 2 hours I accidentally kicked the power switch on the wall: ooops. I'll try again on Monday using the /tmp directory instead of my NFS mounted home - if this is not significantly quicker, forget it, I'm going back to Java :-)

Initial Public Offering

2004-11-06T17:36:00.000Z

Yesterday I took the enormously risky and irrelevant step of passing the URL of this blog to a friend. Hopefully he will forget. If not, hello Mr Smoove.

Rules are made to be broken

2004-10-20T23:06:00.000+01:00

Today I went swimming - found a 100m of front crawl more tiring than I thought. Practice makes perfect. Today I learned that 'breaststroke' is so named because it is a stroke swum on one's breast! The explanation is not as titillating as I'd imagined.

Had a cool lecture today in my Entrepreneurship class - we had a speaker from Stanford named Mike Lyons. He had a number of interesting things to stay. One that will probably stick in my mind is as follows:
You can't make money by selling $1 bills for 95 cents.
And you can certainly can't make it up by volume.

Rules

2004-10-20T13:01:00.000+01:00

Tried to put my two new rules into affect yesterday:

I cycled to Uni and
Visited the museum where I learned that Dolly the sheep lives there. Apparently Dolly has / had a 'sister' named Morag. However, further research has revealed that Morag is much Dolly's sister as Father Christmas is my father.

Musings

2004-10-18T23:15:00.000+01:00

I was thinking the other day that the following would be quite beneficial rules to live by.

Everyday, without fail, make a conscious effort to:

Take at least one form of exercise
Make an effort to learn something simple random and new

Portugal

2004-10-18T22:42:00.000+01:00

Ahhh.... another holiday. Just popped over to the Algarve for a spot of surfing with a friend from the old home town. Excellent fun - my new (and first) wetsuit performed wonderfully - if a little too well - the water was rather warm. No sharks to be seen.

I flew from Glasgow on the 13th leaving at 06:55am - which meant we had to leave the flat shortly before 05:00am. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz . Arrived in Faro and took a bus to the train station. Chatted with an elderly gent on the bus - he seemed to have travelled quite a bit - i.e. always taking advantage of cheap flights. He knew how much he was going to spend on lunch and what a beer would cost etc etc. Nice to see someone enjoy themselves like that at his age.

At the station I had to hang around for half an hour - I took in an Expresso and a tasty iced pastry. Sitting there waiting for the train in the bright sunshine was very enjoyable indeed. It was actually rather relaxing arriving a day before the others - there was no stress. I knew that all I had to do was get there that day - if I had missed the train I would hardly have batted an eyelid. The only slight stress was when I figured out that there was no convenient way to get back in time for my return flight. As it turned out I got lift in our hire car.

Phew..... It is going to take a while to get used to writing these things - here come the bullet points

Wandering about on the first day
Dancing along the breakwater: Spider webs
Nice sandy beaches
No sunglasses
Sorted Accomodation
Tasty anchovy pizza and the lovely San Miguel at Caravela
Wandered along the beach - saw the windsurfer, windsurfing on a barn door sized board.
Very Early to bed

Second day (Thursday)
Got up around lunchtime
Headed along looking for somewhere to eat
Realised I wasn't going to find somewhere - stopped at the Marina for Coffee
Texted by host who was sitting beside me
Head to yacht - dumped stuff and headed for surf!

Stopped at Cape Saint Vincent - the most westernly point of continental Europe.

Caravela for another anchovy pizza!

Third day (Friday)

Couldn't find Mullins - ended up a restaraunt in a backstreet - had some tasty fried prawns.

Fourth day (Saturday)

'Mullins' for dinner: Swordfish

Fifth day (Sunday)
Battered in the morning
Most clean waves seen so far
Two beaches -
one with crazy looking current and strange look turbulence
one with a nice beach break - by the time we had driven round though - the tide had come in and the paddle out was enormous.

Lunch was ciabatta with cheese and iced tea.

Beautiful at night
Ended up being the only people out - after the crazy looking guy with the female cough gave up his feeble paddling. Something clicked - lie further back - wait longer until paddling, then paddle furiously. 5 waves caught in a row - then it became too dark to see...

Back to Caravela for pasta.

Hometime
Nice Italian meal in the Grassmarket

Eastern Europe

2004-09-16T10:53:00.000+01:00

So, here is what we did:

Hungary / Budapest

We flew out on Sept 6th and arrived at Budapest via Luton around midnight local time. There was a bit of a panic that we might not be able to find accomodation when we got there so we'd phoned ahead - this was fortunate because it took about 15 phonecalls to find the place. The others sorted this out whilst I read a book I'd bought. We ended up staying at a place called 'Martos Hostel' - it was a strange place. Quite depressing I thought - vaugely reminiscent of a mental institution. The rooms were clean but bare. Just what we needed.

On the first day there, we went for a dander. We headed for the castle, and eventually found the way in through the massive wall. We visited a military museum. It was strange to be in a museum showing things like daggers with swasticas and other items from former enemies. Every room had a supervisor, some of which were extremely keen to describe the exhibits (despite the total language barrier) and some of which told us we weren't allowed in until we put our bags in the cloakroom...

After the museum we went for lunch - it was very pleasant. I had the first of many salads I would eat over the next week.

Now I'm bored - so I'll summarise:

Labyrinth
Gfeller Baths
Park
Svenz.. Baths
Train Tickets

Slovakia / Bratislva
Bratislava castle
Treasuy Museum
National Museum
Beers
Underground place
Tucked away place with olivers
Money Incident
Dealing with Money Incident
Devlin Castle
Closed
Frisbee
Barbecue
More Beers
Move Out

Czech Republic / Prague

Probably the coolest place we visited - but it came last and I've run out of the will to type.

Holiday

2004-09-15T18:04:00.000+01:00

Whilst I was away on holiday in Eastern Europe over the last week it occured to me that it might be nice to look back in a couple of years over what I actually did during that period. This will be useful if I have an argument with my memory and it decides not to speak to me. Tomorrow when I have some time I'll try and write up a quick diary of events.

How to start?

2004-09-15T17:47:00.000+01:00

My first blog entry. How exciting. I wonder if I'll ever be able to turn this into something that anyone other than me will be interested in reading.