Archives of Life

Abandoned petrol pump

Here’s a random moment – on Blackman Street just down from Brighton Station is this abandoned petrol pump. I’m curious to know what kind of business it supported – anyone know? This is the cheapside area of Brighton (meaning ‘market area‘ in olde English) known now as the New England Quarter – a few streets […]
14 years ago

Extracting keyword text from screencasts with OCR

Last week I played with the Optical Character Recognition system tesseract applied to video data. The goal – extract keywords from the video frames so Google has useful text to index. I chose to work with ShowMeDo‘s screencasts as many show programming in action – there’s great keyword information in these videos that can be […]
14 years ago

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 […]
14 years ago

£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 […]
14 years ago

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 […]
14 years ago

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 […]
14 years ago

Sharing the Mac OS X clipboard with X11 apps

I’m using WingIDE on my MacBook and I couldn’t get copy/paste to work between WingIDE (running in X11) and native apps.  This meant copying URLs and code snippets was impossible…hugely frustrating! There is a simple fix, as outlined here just run the Property List Editor, open the specifed .plist, tick the 5 checkboxes, save, restart […]
14 years ago

£5 App Music-Themed Xmas Special

On Wednesday night we ran our music-themed £5 App Xmas Special (fivepoundapp.com). It was fab!  John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – it seems that many others did too.  I particularly like: “I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and […]
14 years ago

A quick look at four chatbots

This is a quick review of four chatbot that are easily found on the web.  I’ll take a look at the granddaddy ELIZA (wikip), A.L.I.C.E. (wikip) which uses AIML, Fake Kirk (with speech synthesis and a face) and O2’s Ask Lucy. The goal of these chats was to see how each of the bots broke […]
14 years ago

How I’m writing The Screencasting Handbook

Many people have asked why I’m writing a book without a publisher.  The story has interested a bunch of people so I’ll outline the basics here. Update: there’s a related article by Marc-André Cournoyer covering how he wrote his “Create your own programming language” eBook. I started writing The Screencasting Handbook in the middle of […]
14 years ago