Last month I attended Hack Manchester – a 24 coding event as part of the Manchester Science Festival, held at MOSI. Having only arranged to team up with Mike, we ended up joining two guys Shaf introduced us to, his colleagues from the BBC, by the names of Jack and Tom. The four of us formed a team,...
This weekend I attended the fifth (my third) PHPNW annual conference. As a member of the local PHPNW user group and community, I volunteer as a helper which involves getting delegates registered, getting the speakers to the right place and making sure everything's running smoothly. Starting on the...
This weekend was Barcamp Blackpool – held at the Norbreck Castle Hotel in North Blackpool. It's the fourth event they've run since it kicked off in 2009 – and the second I've attended. Last year was great fun but I only stayed for the day – this time I stayed the night before and the night after,...
Last Wednesday, 26th September 2012, two friends and I took advantage of the rainfall and headed to the River Irwell in Bury to paddle from Nuttall Park to the Burrs Activity Centre. Upon arrival at the park the rain began again, and as we approached the bank to put on, the water was extremely...
I've now hosted four Raspberry Jams in Manchester. I posted about the first and second, here's a summary of what went on at III & IV. Manchester Raspberry Jam III The August Manchester Raspberry Jam kicked off when Kat opened up the Madlab and I gave an opening talk about what had been going on...
I did a backflip off a rock in to a river on a kayaking trip one day. My friend Leif took this picture using my cheap point-and-shoot camera, he somehow managed to capture this perfectly. The sky is photoshopped but the rest is true. Original here. It was on the River Lune in the Lake District...
Like a lot of other Ubuntu users, when I installed Ubuntu 10.10 I hated the new desktop environment Unity. I wanted to get back to the Gnome desktop with the Applications | Places | System menu where I knew where things were, I didn't feel comfortable with the silly oversized icons on the left, and...
This scene from Beavis and Butthead Do America makes me laugh every time. Next time you hear a sentence ending in a preposition, try to correct it in your head. Not out loud, you'll get something thrown at you.
I've now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas,...
This trick was inspired by Brian Suda who I saw speak at Whisky Web. Take a string, any string. Hash it using MD5. Substring the hash to get a 6-digit hex code. Take a look at what colour that hex code represents. A really simple, really cool way of generating seemingly random colours, that can...
I just read an article on BBC News: Norwich City kit published on internet by boy ahead of launch. All quotes are taken directly from that article. Norwich City kit published on internet by boy ahead of launch When I read this I imagined the boy in question had illegally obtained pictures of...
I've just been to Whisky Web, a language-agnostic web conference in Edinburgh organised by a group of local tech guys. It's the first one they've run and it just came from the idea they had to get a bunch of web folk together for a fun conference and social gathering. Held in the heart of the...
The BBC wrote about Hack To The Future on their Research & Development blog, including a short video featuring their coverage of me explaining my nontransitive dice session! Also some screen time with Sam of Manchester Girl Geeks (who gave a brilliant keynote); Tom Crick (Cardiff...
So you have some data. Let's say it's a record of the number of instances of some things. Let's say it's the number of movies you own, grouped by the year they were released. Let's say you have those data in the form of a dictionary in Python, like so: years = {2000: 2, 2001: 9, 2002: 10, 2003:...
Today I participated in Maths Busking as part of the Science Festival of Leeds. "What is Maths Busking?" I hear you ask. Maths Busking is a street performance of mathematics whereby the buskers demonstrate mathematical ideas and engage the public in thinking like a mathematician in the form of a...
Here's an amazing video from Bret Victor about how some software tools he built allow him to see change immediately upon editing or writing code, how he can control the value of variables with sliders where moving them up and down renders the output accordingly, and many other features we'd all...
So I'm sitting in my office, bashing away at my keyboard, when a small parcel arrives on my desk. I wasn't expecting anything, I'm new here so it wouldn't be work-related, it wasn't just a letter but a small parcel containing an object quite clearly in the third dimension. Who on Earth would...
Don't Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association beginning in 1992. The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as "MC Double Def DP," was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. and produced by cooperation between the SPA,...
Yesterday was XP Manchester's XL event – a Saturday coding session of pairing, katas and a team bot tournament hosted at the MadLab. I managed to persuade Kris, a friend I used to work with, to come along – it's his first experience of this sort of thing, so I'm really glad he got introduced to...
The ternary operator is a shorthand way of writing an if/else statement where a particular action occurs in both cases, but the value associated with that action depends on the condition stated. For example, the traditional if/else construct (C/Java/JavScript syntax): if (a > b) { result =...
