Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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Installing IE6 on to Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 with ies4linux
I’m pleased to say that my earlier post on Installing IE6 on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) needs only a minor modification to work with Jaunty 9.04.
For Jaunty you just need to replace any references to ‘edgy’ with ‘jaunty’ on the ies4linux Ubuntu install page.
The ./ies4linux installer took 15 minutes to complete under VirtualBox (I was running Jaunty Release Candidate for a preview) – slow but…it worked. Given that IE6 is over 10 years old, this is rather impressive.
Too see wine in action running Internet Explorer 6 on the Jaunty RC, watch this screencast of ie6update that I recorded last night in ProCasts:
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
SlackSpace foray on Saturday, configuring Flickr for location data
I’m joing Matt Weston and co. on Saturday morning (9am @ Brighton Station) for the Slack Space (Guardian, Ivan, BeeKeeper) survey there are probably better ways of doing it than this.
Slack Space is all about re-purposing empty buildings so we can do something better with them than let them sit vacant. The first step is to survey where the empty buildings are…
Matt has suggested using a camera, pen and paper to build a list of locations powered by bikes. I figured with my iPhone I can go one better – I can take photos, upload with GPS locations to flickr and then expose the location info for easy mapping. Coupled with the flickr tag SlackSpaceBrighton we can easily aggregate all the locationed-photos on a map.
There is one configuration step required to get the location data into flickr (it could be done on the day as long as you have web access). Go to Your Account in flickr and then visit Privacy and Permissions and make sure:
- Hide your EXIF data is No (I think this is the default anyway)
- Import EXIF location data is Yes (you MUST set this one)
If Import EXIF location data is left to No (the default) then you’ll lose location data when the pictures are uploaded.
Flickr asked me for one more privacy setting when I flicked Import EXIF location data to Yes, I think it was ‘who can see the location in your photos?’ and I left it at the default of ‘Everyone’.
Hope to see you along on Saturday 🙂
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Informatics Update: Graham McAllister and Video-game Usability (Invited post)
As a part of my efforts with Andy Philippedes at Sussex Uni to get information flowing between the Computer Science dept. and companies in town, Andy has asked Graham McAllister to introduce himself and his work (and new company) in usability design and research for video games.
Over to Graham…
I’m Graham McAllister, a Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction and a member of the Human-Centred Computing Technology (HCT) research group in the Informatics department at the University of Sussex. My research is in the area of video games, in particular trying to ensure that they can be understood and played just as the designers intended.
So if you have ever played a game only to find it frustrating, annoying or even plain boring, my research tries to ensure that this does not happen.
As the UK video game industry grows, and games become more expensive to design and develop, it is becoming even more important to attain the highest quality possible. To help ensure that UK games studios remain among the best in the world, we have started a spin-out company which focusses on analyzing games from the viewpoint of the player, i.e. can they understand the game, are the goals clear, do they enjoy it?
We’re almost ready to launch Vertical Slice, the UK’s first company to focus entirely on the area of video games usability and user experience. Our studios are based at the Sussex Innovation Centre on Sussex University Campus, and feature facilities in which the interaction between players and video games can be observed, captured and analyzed.
For further details, please contact me at g.mcallister@sussex.ac.uk
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
ProCasts gets screencast award
I’m rather chuffed to say that our ProCasts has just received an award from TechSmith for our Adblock Plus open-source advocacy screencast. I’ve blogged a few more details at ProCasts, our video is played 600 times a day and has already won popularity awards in YouTube.
“I liked this screencast for several reasons. Ian made great use of Camtasia Studio’s SmartFocus feature – he used it to focus your attention on certain areas of the screen and show greater detail.
The audio quality is great on this screencast which is important as viewers are generally intolerant of poor audio. The background audio music was a great touch and added polish to the screencast. And, Ian has a great voice for narration! The screencast runs 1:32 and is short and to the point. Perfect!”
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
New Python tutorials at ShowMeDo using Learning Paths
The latest development at ShowMeDo is a new learning system called Learning Paths. The Paths are ordered collections of videos and series where individual items are pulled together to make a journey (a ‘learning trajectory’) for the learner to achieve one particular goal.
The Path also allow for dependencies so ‘Fully worked Python Projects’ depends upon ‘Beginning Python Programming’ and that depends upon ‘Setting up Python’.
At present we have an initial set of Paths and more will follow very soon:
- Beginning Python Programming (15 video series)
- Setting-up Python (4 video series)
- Intermediate Python Programming (6 series including 2 fully-worked projects)
- Python for Strong Pythonistas (note – only has 1 series at present, we’re requesting more community submissions)
- Full Python Projects (5 fully-worked Python projects including GUIs and web-apps)
The Paths mix our free and Club content, all authors have edit rights so everyone can add the right material to the Paths so they tell exactly the right story.
We’re very keen to see the Paths used, I’ve already blogged about this on the main ShowMeDo Blog. If you like what we’re trying to achieve, perhaps you could help us to spread the word by blogging or tweeting?
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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