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| Thursday, May 21st, 2009 | | 10:00 pm |
For anyone who didn't think rail ticketing in the UK was complicated, see this thread (click on Expand All and see post 12 onwards). My head has rather exploded after the first hundred posts... | | Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | | 11:15 pm |
Job vs Halifax plc
[Previously locked until the judgement was released] Today I was in Nottingham County Court watching the civil case of Job vs Halifax plc. Alain Job is an asylum seeker from Cameroon who reported some disputed transactions on his Chip and PIN card in February 2005. He has had the courage to sue the Halifax for the money he alleges was taken from his account that they have refused to refund. This is the first time the veracity of Chip and PIN has been disputed in court. ( Read more... ) | | Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 | | 10:19 pm |
Printing photos with EXIF information
Today I had a pile of photos I wanted to print out. Since I have access to a duplex colour printer I thought it would be neat to print out the EXIF information (datestamp, exposure information, camera model etc) on the back of each picture, and proceeded to knock up the following shell script to do so: ( Read more... ) | | Friday, December 21st, 2007 | | 12:58 am |
| | Sunday, April 29th, 2007 | | 10:56 pm |
Greek house design assessed
A while ago I came across Christopher Alexander's book "A Pattern Language", which has been most useful in understand elements of architecture: it puts forward bold statements of what works and what doesn't in vernacular architecture.
I can't find my paper copy, so I spent the afternoon flicking through the electronic version seeing which patterns our nascent design fits and which it doesn't. We succeed at many of the patterns, but there are still a few we fail on... and a few that we need to be a bit more conservative (funky features might work in your own house, but might be a bit offputting to strangers who rent it).
The one I come back to again and again... the orientation. Is is a good idea to put the living rooms at the back (north facing) and bedrooms at the front (south facing)?
( The Patterns... ) | | Saturday, April 28th, 2007 | | 2:31 pm |
| | Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 | | 9:59 pm |
Greek house progress
Received first draft of house plans from Maria the architect. (Have scanned them, but not sure the copyright implications of putting them here). ( Read more... )Annoyingly the site is just off the edge of a high res mapping tile on Google Earth. It seems the low res tile it's on is 15m per pixel and the high res is 2 foot per pixel. The mapping tile is available from DigitalGlobe, for $400. Might be worth it, though I suspect waiting for a while until Google update their feed might be more sensible. | | Monday, February 5th, 2007 | | 3:49 am |
The danger of being an engineer is that you tend to build up a queue of things that are broken. Enumerating my to-be-taken apart list just now, I came up with: - Laser printer (mirrors need cleaning)
- Radio (crackly audio, suspect DC passthrough into speaker)
- Two Siemens mobiles (need track cut for unlocking)
- MP3 player (look at suitability for firmware upgrade)
- Router (reflash with Debian)
- Tape player (slipping belt)
- Lawnmower (won't start)
Is it just me, or does everyone have a pile of slightly-nonfunctional hardware lying around waiting to be fixed? | | Sunday, January 21st, 2007 | | 1:10 pm |
House in Greece updates
According to what we found out in November As it's an archeologically sensitive area, the maximum area we can build is 100m 2 but that's footprint, so we can have two floors. Swimming pool is OK (Maria thinks) Architects prices triple in January, so Maria will draw up a plan now and then be subject to changes later. Topographic plan suggests we have more than 500m 2Because of the price rises we instructed Maria to draw up plans in December. No sign of them yet, but this is the specification I sent her: ( version 1.0 5 December 2006 ) | | Sunday, November 5th, 2006 | | 10:20 am |
So we're going to build a house in Kefalonia... we have a building plot - 500m 2 in the village - we have an architect, Maria, a contractor, Malcolm (neither of whom know it yet). We have the legal title to the land. First things to acquire are a topographic plan, and find out from the πολεοδομική (poleodomiki, town planning authority) what the building rules are. Spiros at the cafe says the village, being an archaeological site, has special rules: max 100m 2, 6m height. With the lie of the land we might be able to squeeze two stories into that. Maria says the rules are 380m 2 and height 7.5m-9.5m. We're not quite sure who to believe. Maria is going to check with the πολεοδομική. Been reading Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language (core ideas online). It sets out 253 'patterns' or design ideas for buildings and communities. It's a bit utopian, having been published in 1977, but there are definitely ideas worth following up. I notice that the Computer Lab seems to have been designed with some of these, notably (107) Wings of light, (195) Alcoves, (127) Intimacy gradient and many more. Also of note are the ways in which the patterns are violated by the CL, and maybe that's where some of the building's problems stem from. I might write a full article about this at some point. Definitely worth looking at for building design ideas. I probably need some other input on architectural theory... must ask Claudia what her opinions are when she gets back. | | Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 | | 2:43 pm |
| | Monday, June 12th, 2006 | | 3:30 pm |
Nice to be loved
I was feeling left out. Over the last few months some spammer has been sending me randomly selected paragraphs from Anna Karenina at the rate of about one every two days. But they'd stopped and I was feeling withdrawal symptoms. But they're doing it again. Hurrah for Internet randomness! | | Sunday, February 19th, 2006 | | 11:12 pm |
Little St Mary's today
Went to Little St Mary's for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) atreic's confirmation this morning. This is the third time I've been to Anglocatholic LSM, and the first Sunday. It was odd in many ways, not least because as soon as the procession came in and music started I couldn't stop tears flowing. There was such a sense of community, musical heritage and the Church worshipping down the ages, a living, vibrant, faith. I was reminded of the effect of seeing St Augustine's Gospels in the flesh: this 1400-year-old book has been in England as long as Christendom, that it is a faith rooted in history and in that small way we can touch those roots for ourselves. The reason that often causes me to cry, trying to grasp the idea that God has reached out just for me. And tears of joy that atreic was being admitted to the Church in this way. I think much of my past uncomfortableness with particular worship styles and why things were done a particular way could be resolved in summary by saying "don't be afraid of that which you don't understand". Perhaps this was my defence mechanism stemming from my gradual entry into the Church where everything was strange and new, and maybe I was holding fast to those parts I could understand so as not to be swamped by a flood of new ideas and practices. Church-lite is rather easier to swallow than God and his Church in all their mind-boggling breadth and depth. There are many things in this way that I still struggle with, but I think I can be less fearful of the unknown now. Current Music: Chant of "kyrie eleison" still going around in my head | | Monday, December 5th, 2005 | | 7:12 pm |
| | Monday, November 21st, 2005 | | 11:17 pm |
Visibility 30m
I love living in the country. Tonight there's very, very, thick fog and I've just been walking around the fields in it. It's almost pitch black; I could see about 5m of the path in front of me and 5m behind me and a dark grey mass in all directions. I knew exactly where I was going but even then the fog played tricks on me - disconcerted by a drainage ditch I'd never noticed before I wondered whether I was lost... but I couldn't be. Everything muffled and almost completely silent. Screeching from an invisible animal, a bat or a bird, came unexpectedly out of the ether to startle me then all fell silent again. 30m ahead the main railway line loomed out of the mist... pity the train drivers who have to see signals in this mist. Forget 'Stop, Look, Listen: beware of trains' at this five bar gate - I can only do the last. I wondered if I'd even hear the horn... but I crossed safely. I walked alongside the track for a while, looking for the floodlit building site that was just a few hundred yards away but entirely invisible, and crossed back at the next gate. Homeward bound, leaving the railway I was enclosed by the mist once more. The loneliness hit me - anyone could loom out of the mist and I wouldn't hear them or see them until they were upon me. What's that a faint patch of light up ahead - I can't have reached the houses already? Suddenly I was caught in the full beam of a car's headlights. What that car was doing up a farm track in the middle of the night and this weather I didn't stop to find out. A sharp left down the ghost of a track returned me to the sodium-lit security of home once more. A train whistled muffled in the distance. | | 10:28 pm |
Cagers
I did my first driving around Cambridge today, mostly around Shelford/Mowbray Rd/Cherry Hinton Rd/Mill Rd and into town. I thought I knew it as a cyclist, but... ( Read more... ) | | 5:25 pm |
A4 slayer
So it's official: I have the kiss of death to Acorn A4s. I received another two A4s from Meadowhead School today, bringing my A4 collection to four. Both 2MB floppy drive only machines - the lack of hard drive noises was disconcerting. Both powered up with the LCD off - some blind typing revealed their CMOS batteries were flat and a power-on delete fixed that for the second machine. The first machine powered up fine (floppy drive seek, caps/num lock lights respond to their keypresses), but evidently my blind typing wasn't enough to awaken it. Switched the power brick to the second machine and got that working. Swapped back again by removing the brick's 9way D connector from the second machine and inserting it into the first, which was switched off. A loud crack was heard. That didn't sound good. The machine then only has the 'mains adaptor' light and not the 'battery charging' light on, and refuses to power up. I think I've fried the internal PSU system :-( Hopefully the crack means something fairly obvious has blown, and the A4 logic is OK. So the moral of this story is... never connect the power brick when energised. In other news it might be nice to find some suitable ZIP DRAM to expand these to 4MB. Not that it's exactly first on the priority list. | | Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 | | 12:47 pm |
All Saints
Went to Sung Mass for All Saints at Little St Mary's yesterday at the invitation of yrieithydd. There wasn't anything that was completely new to me having been to various highish Anglican and Greek Orthodox services in the past (though at least it was in a language I could understand). One thing that struck me was that it seemed more theologically rigorous than we usually find in the lower end of the spectrum: each ritual having theological justification behind it makes one think more about exactly why it is done - the symbolism comes out more. And it seems to me that if you're going to do ritualistic worship you might as well do it properly. (St Mary & St Michael, Trumpington makes a quarter-hearted attempt at it which is interesting but it doesn't really work). LSM is obviously alive so it isn't ritualism for the sake of ritualism, but because people believe it. The quiet before the service was something I appreciated... having just done my first cycling in four months to get there I was feeling in need of a bit of calm to recover. There was quite a bit I found difficult too. I can't read music so the sung reponses required a lot of concentration to attempt to keep up and I couldn't really think about the words at the same time. I enjoyed the music when not trying to participate so perhaps I should have just listened more. I also felt self-conscious with people genuflecting around me because it wasn't something I felt I could do. I looked suitably confused when I walked in that someone gave me a blue book of liturgy - but it felt slightly odd that most people weren't given one, or were available in the pews, and were expected to know the responses (which I mostly did as it turned out, but having been a sidesperson it's easy to fail to be proactive in spotting newcomers: if I'd been missed out I might have been completely lost. As I indeed was a few weeks ago at Mass in Spanish with no books, service sheets or notices whatsoever). Had dinner with Father Andrew, Sarah, yrieithydd, emperor and mr_ricarno which was interesting. When I said to people at drinks after the service and dinner that I went to St Paul's I was told about a dozen times the anecdote about Michael Beckett (our vicar) coming to preach at LSM and saying that he was struck by how much more Scripture LSM uses in services than we do. Which is true, and is something we need to think about. (Though hymns and liturgy contain Scripture too). I think some people at LSM have misconceptions about us as some people at St Paul's do about LSM. There was suggestion of making the vicar exchange an annual feature, which I'll prod Michael about. The cycling was obviously a bit much, even with a motor to help... my legs were in pain so didn't manage to get to sleep until about 2am and then didn't sleep very well. And the morning meeting I got up for was cancelled. I think I'll go back to bed after lunch. | | Saturday, October 29th, 2005 | | 12:03 pm |
A4 power supplies
Yesterday I collected the Acorn A4 that Julia Cooke very kindly gave to me. The most pristine A4 I've ever seen - my battered example looks a poor relation next to it! This is my second A4, if you don't count the Triumph Alder 386-in-A4-case (well, actually the A4 is in the TA 386 case). Worked very well last night... screen is very clear with no defects (it's one of the Sharp panels with better contrast than the Epson panel in my A4 and that I was selling). She also provided a parallel port Zip which worked fine and an Eesox parallel port CD-Rom that I couldn't persuade to read data CDs (even properly mastered ones). However it seems to suffer from the power supply problems that dog many A4s. Left the A4 on charge and later in the evening it had died. Charging light was still orange (charge) and the LEDs claimed the computer was on but the screen was black and the keyboard LEDs wouldn't change - it was dead, in other words. Switch off and on again: hard drive spins up and all three keyboard LEDs come on but no floppy drive seek (which indicates that the processor and OS have booted correctly). That tells me the +5V power rail is up but for some reason the machine hasn't booted. Tried again this morning to the same effect. The battery isn't holding enough charge to be able to run the machine for more than a second but from the LEDs it might be booting properly in that time. Another odd symptom is that when switched off and the charger is unplugged the top LED (computer on IIRC) is faintly on. I've never seen that before. After running the machine from battery that's stopped... I wonder if the battery is somehow powering the LED when the machine is off? Which seems to suggest something funny in the PSU circuit. This is different to the A4 PSU faults I've seen before. So either I have the kiss of death to such things or this A4 hasn't come out of the cupboard very well. I have the spare room back so I think a dissection is called for at some point. | | Friday, September 2nd, 2005 | | 10:20 pm |
Guided buses
On the way back from CHES this morning I had a bit of time in Edinburgh to wait for my train and didn't have the energy to wander around Princes St any more, so I thought I'd do something else. Transport geek that I am, I went to sample Edinburgh's guided busway. This is slightly more than a passing interested because I've been involved with the CAST.IRON plan to oppose Cambridgeshire County Council's proposed busway between Cambridge and St Ives. I approached this with an open mind as I do think that guided bus has a part to play as a transport system: just that Cambridge-St Ives is the wrong place for it. But I'm prepared to be convinced that guided bus isn't misguided. ( Read more... ) |
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