Archives of Life

Social Ties now available for UK iPhones and any Android

This is just a quick post to say that we’ve released the iPhone build of Social Ties to the iTunes app store in the UK. Currently it only supports UK events so we’ve limited it to the UK AppStore, international events will follow later. The latest features include Bookmarking of people you’d like to meet […]

Dell E6420 with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) 32 bit

Having hacked away with Natty Narwahl for a few weeks I’m regressing to the 10.10 distribution provided by Dell here. Installation took 20 minutes, it allowed me to use the previous ext4 partition (I had to edit it using the advanced configuration and set the ext4 partition’s mount point from blank to ‘/’). I formatted […]

SocialTies is coming

Slowly but surely we’re getting there with our social-discovery app for conferences. We aim to have SocialTies in the UK iPhone App Store in the next few weeks. I demoed it to several hundred folk at EuroPython a few weeks back and it was rather well received. Currently the Android BETA is linked from the […]

And on with 2011

Earlier this year I switched back to my long-running artificial intelligence and CUDA high performance computing consultancy work through Mor Consulting. Having sold ProCasts earlier in the year and moved entirely away from screencasting (leaving ShowMeDo in Kyran’s capable hands) I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty of low level algorithms and implementations. […]

Building a Social Microprinter

Over the last couple of months I’ve been building up a social microprinter (inspired by Tom Taylor‘s implementation and Matt Webb‘s original idea). Here’s the current version – Arduino+WiShield+CBM231+off-site server (powered partly by BenOSteen’s Python driver): There’s a second quick video and talk for the £5 App event I ran earlier in the week. The […]

Demoing pyCUDA at the London Financial Python User Group

On Wednesday night I jumped on a train up to London to visit the London Financial Python User Group to give a short demo of pyCUDA. I’m using CUDA heavily for my physics consultancy and I figured the finance guys would be interested in 10-1000* speed-ups for their calculations. The raw figures and the Mandelbrot […]

Selling ProCasts through Flippa.com

A couple of weeks ago I sold ProCasts.co.uk, the screencasting business I built over the last two years. Some of you know that I moved away from the business back at Christmas and left it idle (a rather silly thing to do), here are some notes on how I sold it and how you could […]

Saving power around the house with an EnviR

We took delivery of an EnviR from CurrentCost a week back, we’ve been measuring power usage around the house since then. The unit itself is super easy to install – the LCD panel sits on a window sill and the measurement unit clips to the electric meter (it has a 30m range). Here’s what we […]

22,937* faster Python math using pyCUDA

I’ve just uploaded a new Mandelbrot.py demo for pyCUDA, it adds a new calculation routine that straddles the numpy (C based math) and the pure-CUDA implementations. In total there are 4 variants to choose from. The speed differences are huge! Update – this Reddit thread has more details including real-world timings for two client problems […]

Presenting A.I. at FlashBrighton (using Python!)

A couple of weeks back I presented an Artificial Intelligence evening at FlashBrighton with John Montgomery and Emily Toop. The night covered optical character recognition, face detection, robots and some futurology. A video link should follow. Optical Character Recognition to Read Plaques Recently I’ve been playing with OCR to read photos with text, a particular […]