All posts of Ian

Using ZeroFree to shrink a VirtualBox Linux Image

My development Ubuntu image inside VirtualBox was using too much space to store empty but non-zero disk blocks on its virtual drive. This sucked space from my laptop’s SSD (which is already not big enough!). Shrinking it by zeroing the blocks took a little bit of effort. Inside VirtualBox if I boot my Ubuntu 11.04 […]
12 years ago

Encouraging Online Privacy

I’ve begun to think on the increasing need for improved online privacy. Once upon a time my mum’s communications didn’t occur on the Internet, now they routinely do. Once upon a time I had a reasonable idea about how secure my communications were, now it seems that governments are doing things like intercepting our SSL […]
12 years ago

Some international flight tips

Having flown a lot recently I’ve discovered that whilst it isn’t super-fun, it is no longer terribly uncomfortable. Maybe the crutches I use are useful to someone else. Water – it turns out that if you buy water in Duty Free they will bag it and carry it onto the plane for you. This avoids […]
12 years ago

Parallel Computing with Python Tutorial at EuroSciPy (end of August)

I’ll be teaching Parallel Computing with Python (abstract to follow) at EuroSciPy on 23rd August 2012 in Brussels. Early bird tickets for the conference are available until July 22nd (even without the 50% discount the cost is still super-low). In my tutorial we’ll work through parallel processing examples on 1 machine with multiple cores and […]
12 years ago

Jailbreaking iOS 5.1.1

I thought it’d be hard but it turns out to be super-easy. In the last hour I’ve jailbroken my iOS 5.1 iPhone 4S by upgrading to iOS 5.1.1 and then running the Absinthe 2.0.4 jailbreak (via here). It seems that iOS 5.1 doesn’t have an untethered jailbreak (only a tethered one – you have to […]
12 years ago

Round 4.1 Demo Morning at StartupChile

I’m sitting here in the Demo Morning for the newly arrived Round 4.1 (4.2 turns up in a few weeks). Here’s a list of the pitches with my (probably too) short descriptions. The Round 5 applications are open, I think applications close this weekend (there’s a long and recent discussion here about the pros and […]
12 years ago

Featured in BBC News

We’ve just had StrongSteam featured at the end of this BBC Tech article on foreign tech firms in the UK (noting that we’re a UK firm gone to foreign parts…) by Katia Moskvitch. I’ll add a touch of context, I’m quoted as saying that I couldn’t raise funding for StrongSteam in the UK. This quote […]
12 years ago

Bloody awful air in Santiago (“killer air”?)

I’m a London boy. I grey up on clouds of smoke (albeit not Dickensian-smoke but still…much pollution). Having traveled parts of the world I haven’t often encountered really bad pollution. Santiago has reset my levels. When running up San Cristobel (the big hill in the centre of Santiago) a few weeks back it was possible […]
12 years ago

Lean Processes in StartupChile (short talk this morning)

I gave a short talk this morning with Ryan Lou on the Lean Processes that a startup can use. For me I looked back on the start of ShowMeDo in 2005 (and now) and how we iterated using email, google groups, surveys and lots of discovery by talking to users. I then looked at how […]
12 years ago

Mentorship groups in StartupChile

A group of us have been running a mentorship group here in StartupChile, it makes up for the lack of external mentorship (a sad deficiency in the programme). I think that more startups ought to be in mentorship groups so I’ll write about what we do. What is it? A group of 6 of us […]
13 years ago