March 2013
1 post
1 tag
min(weight) = 90.0kg! (gotta work on avg(weight))
I’ve been doing the 5:2 diet now for around three months now, and just this week my min weight hit 90.0kg! As you can see from above there is a lot of volatility in my measurements; I measure myself every weekday at around the same time, but there is still easily a range of 2kg in the measurements. My fast days are Monday and Thursday, and my weight, unsurprisingly, is lowest after those...
January 2013
2 posts
7 tags
BrowserStack: thumbs up on first minimal try-out.
I just tried out http://www.browserstack.com/ for testing my minimal IE8/IE9 changes for Nice to have. It’s actually really quite handy. Take my review below with a pinch of salt though, as I only used it for 30 mins. I did a free registration around xmas and forgot about it, so that’s all I had left today! Silly mike.
All the standard debugging tools are set up (e.g. firebug lite),...
5 tags
Brickman Experiment 1
I had some fun making snow bricks at the weekend. Technically, Nils was present but it would be unfair to say I was playing with him; “directing”, perhaps.
So, anyway, obviously you should try to use snow bricks to make a Lego man. Obviously.
It turns out that moo milk cartons are quite good brick molds if you cut off one side and leave the flap on.
This one got to the point...
December 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Reading the Tea Leaves
When I was at Amazon I looked at a lot of graphs. Graphs of hits, graphs of cpu, graphs of all sorts of shit. Graphs are great, I loves them. However, the problem is that if you aren’t in a habit of looking at the relevant graphs every day, and then something happens, you’re faced with the problem of deciding what’s normal. It is so easy to find patterns, especially if you have a...
4 tags
Resources for a designer transitioning from print...
A friend of mine who has a background in print design (copy, layout, some photography) is wanting to move his skills over into web design. I am most definitely on the other-side of this divide, so I asked another web designer friend what resources (website/book/whatever) they’d recommend:
Most things by Jakob Nielsen
About face 3
Steve Krugs Don’t Make Me Think!
Seductive...
7 tags
"Nice to have" v0.0000001
Ugh. Enough holiday hacking for now. I had an idea for an app a few weeks ago, and finally had some time between xmas celebrations to hack up a first version. Here it is: http://nicetohave.houseofmoran.com/ (source: https://github.com/mikemoraned/nicetohave-app)
I’m not gonna talk much more about it until I’ve dog-fooded it a bit myself for my own personal backlog. Feel free to use...
3 tags
July 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Heed!
And so, the saga continues, baldie once again.
Interestingly, this time, I was very conscious of when it started happening. It may just be my imagination, but soon after I got a few midgy (or Mücken) bites in Germany, I noticed my head was a bit itchy. In the following days, the hair loss seemed to accelerate rapidly.
My hypothesis is that given that aa is an auto-immune disease a reaction...
9 tags
Truth is more depressing than fiction?
This holiday, I finally finished “The City & The City” by China Miéville.
My paper version of the Miéville book was a gift. Its hugeness makes it hard to carry, so I never got round to reading it. I bought it again for my Kindle (I wonder how often that happens?). Alongside his newly coined words there are many that lie just outside my vocabulary, so the built-in Kindle...
May 2012
1 post
2 tags
Boomeranging returns
Yesterday, I went out with Nils and threw my boomerangs for the first time in 10 years. It was really cool, not least because Nils decided to go get them for me, unbidden! On a windy day like that it makes a big difference having someone fetching them.
None of my boomerangs are suitable for Nils, so I’ve ordered some online. Apart from boomerangs.com most of the sites seem to have been...
April 2012
3 posts
3 tags
LEDs in the rain
The NVA Speed of Light practice session was the best time I’ve spent in the rain for a while! However, I am sooooo glad I bought myself a proper thermal top and rain jacket. Not cheap, but worth it.
I really enjoyed myself tonight. I would love to have seen the faces of any passers-by stumbling upon the lines of led-encrusted runners, all trotting along like some sort of Alien Congo...
2 tags
The hair, eet ees back ...
… sort-of. As I had expected might happen, my Alopecia has receded and the patches that were bald before are now white. I’m gonna give it a go, as I’m happy having a bald head but to be honest I’d be happier not having to shave it every other day. However, I’m not gonna change my Gravatar just yet.
I took the photo above during our visit to the Newcastle Centre...
8 tags
La Grand Weekend, Gromit
On Friday, I had the opportunity to see La Grand Illusion at the Filmhouse,
I can totally see why this film was so hated by the Nazis, because it portrays war as ultimately pointless. There is no great ‘enemy’ within these prison camps, on either side. There are only world-weary men waiting, and hoping, for the end to come.
My only criticism is that the characters seem almost too...
March 2012
5 posts
5 tags
You've never had it so good
What’s the opposite of Nostalgia? Nowadays, I can think of an idea, code it up and have it on heroku in minutes. Working at a start-up in 2001—2004 was somewhat different.
Back then, the first task was to decide which of the many (over-priced) Cisco routers you should stick in your closet. The people at our service provider were all friendly and helpful, but the idea of personally...
10 tags
My my, that took a while ('about this site'... →
Harsh, but accurate →
3 tags
Beach Facts
Some things established today on the beach:
The statutory countdown sequence for throwing stones is “3, 2, 1, <throw>”, and not “10, 9, … 1, 0” which is reserved for Rockets.
It is surprisingly hard to guide water pools to the sea.
Nils didn’t do anything interesting, and wanted just to pretend he was pushing a car (rock) through snow (sand), but he...
1 tag
Normal service will resume ...
You may have noticed some blog posts are missing. This is because I am migrating them across gradually from my old blogging system to Tumblr.
Also, the RSS feed for tumblr (which I use on the main site) takes a super-long time to update; may have to work round that.
S’all
February 2012
2 posts
5 tags
Note to self: do not invent time machine
If I did have a time machine, I’d be spending a lot of my life getting slapped in the face by my future self.
Last week I spent far too long debugging why Heroku was refusing to accept my rails app when I did a “git push heroku master”. I had all sorts of theories and learned about the various reasons Heroku has for saying “Heroku push rejected, no Cedar-supported app...
4 tags
Glasgow Science Centre Visit
Once again, simple physics wins against ambitious simulations on computer displays.
For example, we briefly played with an illustration of a red/cyan Anaglyph. It allowed some very simple computer models (e.g. a box, a molecule) to be rotated on-screen and viewed through glasses. However the refresh rate was abysmal and overall the interface was not responsive. Nils’ attention was lost...
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Getting in the holiday mood
Got in the holiday mood last night by watching the film of The Road. This is right up there with “Grave of the Fireflies” on the brilliant-but-sad scale (see 2008-03-22).
November 2011
1 post
5 tags
That's it, all gone!
Those of you who’ve seen me around recently will have noticed a gradual disappearance of hair on my left side. This was accompanied by a gradual increase in attempts to make a comb-over look like a real haircut. No more.
About a year ago I started developing a small bald patch on each side of my head. This developed into a large patch on one side. I got this diagnosed as Alopecia Areata....
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
Frazzled
Totally frazzled. Between work, festival, and home-life, I’ve been burning the candle at three ends. It’s been good though. Hopefully, when I regain some energy, I’ll write-up what I saw that’s worth shouting about. However, for now, I hereby declare my festival: OVER.
July 2011
2 posts
3 tags
EIFF top picks
Despite overly expensive films and the usual EIFF website broken-ness, I managed to see a few films this year.
There were five shorts in Mapping the Extraordinary. All were good, but these three make me we want to see more from the directors:
Pentecost by Peter McDonald
I suspect this will mean more to you if you had any sort of Catholic upbringing. The end is a righteous, well deserved,...
5 tags
Taking R for a drive
I’ve been playing with data from the Project365 group I am a member of. I would usually do this analysis using some combination of perl, ruby, and unix shell (sort, uniq etc). This time I thought I’d stretch myself a bit.
These are the two books I’ve been using to learn “R”. Why R? Apart from being ‘interesting’ to google for, “R” is...
January 2011
1 post
7 tags
No Java, no Eclipse
This is the first time I’ve been on holiday in Germany and not launched Eclipse. Also: not a single line of Java. It’s refreshing.
I now know I can write incredibly slow Ruby, albeit for a good cause (“The Diagonal Method vs. The Rule of Thirds”). I rediscovered a love for Unix. I finally admit: maybe this Rails thing is quite good, and: git is better than svn.
Oh ye,...
December 2010
1 post
1 tag
Aim Low
The key to achieving a New Years resolution seems to be to aim low and then forget about it.
Wired magazine has always been high on style and low on content. This didn’t stop me from buying it once every few months. Not only that, but reading about geeks doing cool stuff was actually consuming the time I could be doing, well, something. My one and only resolution was to give up...
October 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Waterstones is a Charity
Waterstones: £18.99. Amazon: £11.89, free delivery. This is one of the books I flipped through whilst sitting in the Starbucks. I may never buy this book, but if I do, I’m not paying an extra 7 quid out of the goodness of my heart. I feel a little bit guilty for writing this, as they let me flip through it without first purchasing it. But hey, maybe that’s a quid max of guilt money...
3 tags
Today, I accidentally ran 10k
It started as a 5k run for burma in Inverleith park. After a frantic ride on my bike to make registration, I started at 11. We looped round a couple of times and I passed the steward, who said “go right if you’ve seen me twice”. I couldn’t remember seeing her in particular, but it felt about right. I ran on and, curious about my time, checked my phones SportyPal app....
7 tags
Who was in Tron and Babylon 5?
More specifically, how can I find this out using freebase? Turns out the steps you should take are:
Find the film you want to use as a constraint.
Slap the film id and type as constraints into the query editor, using “*”: null to get all properties of that type.
Expand your query until you find the actor somewhere within the tree (keep on using "*": null at each level down to get...
August 2010
3 posts
3 tags
"How can I tell which of these damn tabs is making...
Hmm, I’m out two for two on random summer holiday projects. First, the hadoop quickstart example doesn’t reduce. Now, my idea to list what tabs in Chrome are making a noise is also a non-starter. Seems I’m not alone in wanting this. It’s pretty trivial to make a Chrome extension, quite nice in fact, but there seems to be no api to help find what tabs contain something...
4 tags
Segway tour of Berlin
The Segway has always intrigued me. Even after the overblown hype of 2001 died away.
Given I was in Berlin, I took the chance to look like a dork and try out a Segway tour of the area.
How do you they drive them? Simple answer, to go forward: lean on your toes, backwards: stick out your ass. Friends I talked to after were surprised that there really are no controls. There is some steering via...
5 tags
Festival goers + Bike = ...
Day six of Carmen and Nils being way and I’ve started talking to myself. The day after she left I went to work and realised, “shit, I’ve not talked to anyone for over twelve hours”.
In other time-based news, in one day I have gone from avoiding cycling into tourists to actively aiming for them. If you visited Edinburgh this year and had some arsehole on a bike go...
April 2010
1 post
1 tag
Back on the road again ...
And so, another german holiday ends. As always, there are regrets; I didn’t get to wander around Berlin for long, I missed some nice german bread by staying in bed too long, etc. On the plus side, I got a regular (wonderful) lie-in, and made some solid progress on a programming project (not as interesting to link to as LSystems).
What have I been reading?
What would you do if you...
March 2010
1 post
3 tags
LSystem Sunday
It’s LSystem Sunday! I was curious about investigating an assertion that I’d made the other day: that the dragon curve loops back and traces over itself. Turns out, I was talking nonsense:
The above shows the dragon curve at it’s 7th expansion, with an animation of how this is drawn on the right. As you can see, it has overlapping points, but not overlapping line...
February 2010
1 post
3 tags
LSystem Distractions
LSystems have once-again distracted me, this time from German homework:
July 2009
1 post
3 tags
More arsing around with Scala. This time, trying to reimplement lesscss. This is about two hours worth of hacking:
object LessParser extends RegexParsers {
def parse(spec: String) : Sequence = {
parseAll(sequence, spec) match {
case Success(l, _) => l
case Failure(m, _) => throw new IllegalArgumentException(m)
case Error(m, _) => throw new...
June 2009
1 post
3 tags
LSystem Explorations
So, another summer holiday is at an end, and another programming interval. This time I was using my LSystem Explorations as a way to get more practice with Scala and Android.
Random aside: I find it hard to get excited about non-JVM languages nowadays. I develop on a Mac and deploy to Linux, Windows (sometimes) and now Android. I really don’t want to worry about whether the language or...
March 2008
1 post
2 tags
Grave of the Fireflies
Grave of the Fireflies is not a film I’d recommend be seen by anyone with children.
After we had Nils, I imagined myself being affected by all the schmaltzy Speilberg movies featuring children in trouble. Thankfully, that never happened. However, this one caught me by surprise. It was one of the few movies in a Studio Giblhi collection that we didn’t recognise. We put in on, naively...
