Archive of month: November 2008

Upgrading Ubuntu Hardy to Ibex

I’ve just upgraded from 8.04 LTS to 8.10.  Inevitably there were some hiccups – no sound, difficulties with the nVidia drivers. The initial upgrade was flawless, it took under 30 minutes to prepare itself, download the new packages, install everything and reboot. I have an NVidia 8500GT which requires the non-free driver for decent video […]

Girl Geeks, Flash Big Screen, £5 App Xmas Special

Here are three local events that I’m rather looking forward to: Girl Geeks on Tues Dec 2nd with Emily on Building Robots.  Emily will walk you through a history of robotics, show neat demos and then show real live hand-built robots (4 of ’em) Doing Stuff including, just possibly, sumo wrestling.  Someone remind Emily to […]

£5 App Xmas Games Special

We’re plotting our 14th £5 App meet.  This, our second Christmas Special, will have a gamesy happy crimbo feel. Date: Wednesday 10th December, sign-up on Upcoming please.  Location TBC. Our very own Aleks Krotoski will lead the evening with the launch of the Guardian’s new on-line text adventure SpaceShip! We’ll probably run the second half […]

Making Python math 196* faster with shedskin

Dr. Michael Thomas approached me with an interesting A.I. job to see if we could speed up his neural network code from a 10 year old research platform called PlaNet. Using new Sun boxes they weren’t getting the speed-ups they expected, old libs or other monkey business were suspected. As a first investigation I took […]