Here's an awesome music video of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. I've seen some of his videos about "What happens with you do X in space", which are really interesting... Continue reading

I organised an event with the STEMNET (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths Network) team at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), based on the Manchester Raspberry Jam I run monthly at Madlab. The STEM Raspberry Jam was to be a new activity the STEM Ambassador network could offer to schools, so we ran a pilot (pi-lot) to give the idea a whirl... Continue reading

Last month I attended the Manchester Girl Geeks Barcamp - affectionately known as bracamp. I did a talk on Free Software Culture, covering the varying definitions of "free" (libre/gratis), the principles of free and open source, why people do it, how development is managed and demonstrated use cases, as well as battle some gripes from a misunderstood audience member - which really helped me get my point across better... Continue reading

Manchester recently held the first ever Raspberry Pi conference - Raspberry Jamboree, held at Manchester Central. It's been a year since the launch of the Pi, and this event was to review what we did in the last year, and look forward to what we're going to do this year and in the future... Continue reading

A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III. Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch's family. Richard was killed in battle in 1485 but his grave was lost when the church around it was demolished in the 16th Century. The bones, which are of a man in his late 20s or early 30s, have been carbon dated to a period from 1455-1540... Continue reading

Python is a wonderful dynamic language offering various functional programming features, including standard library modules itertools and functools borrowed from Haskell and Standard ML. Some see it as the best of both worlds as not only can you perform complex tasks with these functional programming tools but you can do it using simple readable code thanks to Python's beautiful syntax... Continue reading

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, and after browsing the challenges set, we liked the idea of Intechnica's Bacon Number problem the most... Continue reading

Here's a great tech talk given by Rob from the Raspberry Pi Foundation at the Google campus in Mountain View... Continue reading

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 Friday evening hackathon social, I got chatting [...]... Continue reading

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, which exponentially increased the level of fun... Continue reading

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 high and running very fast... Continue reading

So many programmers think of problems in terms of Classes. If something is a noun, it's a Class. For simple problems this makes excessive amounts of code, abstracted out in to various areas of the code base. Many of the examples in this video show classes with 2 methods, one of which is __init__, the other is a data structure... Continue reading

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 in the news in the Raspberry Pi community, featuring announcements like Raspbian and the Gertboard, and showed examples of what people have been doing with their Pis - including Freaky Clown ruinning Metasploit (a pen testing tool) to the Pi and my personal favourite, Pi in the Sky - the first Raspberry Pi to visit near space... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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 I didn't know where any settings were. I really didn't give it time to grow on me, I just changed back to Gnome 2... Continue reading

This scene from Beavis & 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.... Continue reading

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, demonstrate what we've been doing with the Pi, and getting kids interested in building games and writing code as well as inspiring people all over the UK (and the world) to set up their own groups... Continue reading

I wrote a bash script which automatically installs a list of applications on Ubuntu. You list all the names of the apps you want to install in an array (newline-separated) and installs them one after the other, without (or with minimal) user input once it's started... Continue reading

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 be used to represent things... Continue reading

I just read an article on BBC News. All quotes are taken directly from that article. When I read this I imagined the boy in question had illegally obtained pictures of the new kit, and posted them to facebook/twitter/blogs/etc. I read on. Yep. Sounds about right. I'm guessing he had access to the pictures, or maybe he stole them from somewhere, or broke in to a place holding them and took pictures himself. I read on... Continue reading

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 wonderful and beautiful city of Edinburgh, near the castle, it was quite a trek for us in Preston... Continue reading

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 Metropolitan University); and of course, organiser Alan O'Donahoe... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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 series of busks... Continue reading

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 love to use... Continue reading

So the other day, Rasmus tweeted that PHP 5.4 was fully released (following several release candidates). There are some great additions, the highlights (other than a huge increase in speed, apparently) being square bracket notation for arrays, array dereferencing and the ability to use traits. I'm quite excited (sadly) about the use of square brackets to initialise an array, and to be able to code up their contents in this way... Continue reading

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 be sending me 3D objects in the post to my work... Continue reading

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 world of XP and TDD... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

I lost my bus pass last week, but fortunately it was handed in to the Stagecoach office so I was able to go and collect it (I must have dropped it while on the bus and it must have got handed in to the driver). I started getting ready to leave the house earlier this afternoon to go to the office to pick it up, when I thought "I wonder if they'll ask me to provide ID to collect it" and amused myself at the thought of being asked for identification to collect my own ID card... Continue reading

The X-Factor winner has won the Christmas Number One every year since 2005, and it would have been the same this year if it hadn't been for one man. A guy called Jon Morter decided he was sick of seeing people being spoon-fed what music they should like by Simon Cowell so he set up aFacebook group and Twitter profile to get people to buy Rage Against The Machine's 1992 single Killing In The Name in the hope that it would beat Joe McElderry's The Climb... Continue reading