All posts of Ian

22nd £5 App Write-up for WildLife, Plaques, Robots, Go and Golf Gadgets

Last night we ran our 22nd £5 App event, videos for each speaker are listed below. The lovely Thayer Prime of Data.Gov.Uk provided us with 3 copies of Programming the Semantic Web to give away, this was particularly well timed given the semantic nature of our two main talks. Thanks Thayer! WildLife Near You by […]

£5 App Tues 30th March – Wildlife, Robots and Plaques

On Tuesday 30th March we’ll have our 22nd £5 App night running from 8pm at The Skiff. We’ll have: Wildlife Near You by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe Open Plaques by Jez Nicholson and Simon Harriyott BotBuilder robots by Steve Carpenter ScoreSure Golf Pro by Chris (video) as a Show n’Tell Jamie Campbell on Google’s […]

Science companies around Brighton

Two years back I posted an entry listing the science companies I knew around Brighton who are involved in high-tech software (i.e. not science companies who make physical products). The list has changed a bit with some nice additions so I’ve updated it below.  If you know of one that I’m missing do send me […]

Fix for ConceptNet error “Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined”

If you’re using ConceptNet and you see: ImportError: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined. then the fix is simple (I’ve been hacking away at an idea whilst at IUI2010 – thanks Rob for the fix). To replicate the error run: from csc.nl import get_nl en_nl = get_nl('en') en_nl.is_stopword('the') The fix is […]

Intelligent User Interfaces 2010 conference

I’m at IUI 2010, this is a mostly academic conference focused on using new techniques to make intelligent user interfaces.  I’ll update this entry as the conference proceeds. Day 1 (Sunday) – Workshops I’m in the Eye Gaze for Intelligent Human Machine Interaction workshop, there’s a full breakdown of this session’s talks here. The talks […]

pyCUDA on Windows and Mac for super-fast Python math using CUDA

I’ve just started to play with pyCUDA which lets you run parallel math operations on a CUDA-compliant NVidia graphics card through Python. Update – I’ve written a High Performance Python tutorial (July 2011, 55 pages) which covers pyCUDA and other technologies, you might find it useful. CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture – it […]

Come to my screencasting SkillSwap in Brighton on Jan 27th

On January 27th here in Brighton I’m co-running a SkillSwap evening, I’ll spend 45 minutes teaching screencasting (based on a Mac) and Andy White will spend 45 minutes teaching podcasting.  We’ll cover planning, recording, editing, distributing and mics between us. We’re both aiming the talks at freelancers (so they can communicate better with clients) and […]

Text to Speech – Festival (cross platform) and MacSpeechX (Python on Mac)

I wanted to play with text to speech, I’ve been looking for a cross-platform open-source solution that sounds reasonable.  I’m really impressed with the festival project, the web demo lets you enter your own text. Update – I’m including this post in my plans for an Artificial Intelligence Handbook. Festival is cross-platform but compiling it […]

ConceptNetDaily Twitter Bot

I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like: “When humans own horses, humans groom and ride horses.” http://tinyurl.com/ydvf7vg The TinyURL expands out to an address like: http://openmind.media.mit.edu/en/assertion/143313/ The aim […]

Eucalyptus Clustering – follow-up

A month back I tried to build an Ubuntu-based Eucalyptus cloud/cluster environment for a client for a parallel processing research project.  The project was thwarted by an overly aggressive corporate firewall and my lack of understanding of low-level network config-fu. I’ve revisited the project using the same machines but with an external public internet connection […]