Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
More about Ian
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Big pile of technic Lego for sale

Life March 21, 2009

Linc Smith of Sussex Uni departs our shores in a week to return to Canada.  He has pictures of the very big pile of technic lego to sell, contact him if you’re interested. Linc is a keen robot builder, helps at the Robot Brighton nights and has been a presenter and helper at our £5 App nights.

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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Hand-carved spinning tops

Life March 21, 2009

At likemind on Friday I met a Thomas Forsyth, a recent graduate from Brighton Uni’s design dept. who hand-carves wooden spinning tops.  You push a pencil through the rubber grommet and spin it in your hands, it wanders over a sheet of paper making lovely pictures:

His business cards are lovely – they’re cut from a large piece of card where he’s run the spinning top (using pencil) many times so they’re scrawled with spirograph-like lines on nice textured card…all very tactile and real.

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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Does a PhotoBin exist? (a PasteBin for photos)

Life March 21, 2009

From the ‘I want something like this…’ dept:  Whilst working in my log-book for my long-running science/physic client I sketched a ‘Win32 Console App -> DLL/COM interface -> Matlab -> (wicked pointer casts) DLL/COM interface -> fn in Console app’ diagram.

You don’t need to know what the above does, just imagine three big boxes and six arrows.

Having implemented the process (and discovering that it doesn’t work for various interesting reasons) I wrote up the process in MS Word to generate a short report.  Rather than try to re-implement the diagram I just wanted to photograph it (with my iPhone), upload it ‘somewhere’, then take the resulting jpg and embed it in the Word doc.

It occurs to me that this is a photo-equivalent of a programming PasteBin (wikip), but I don’t know of any such facility.  I could use Flickr but that feels permanent (and public), I just want a throwaway URL with no association to myself that dies a bit later when I’m done with it.

Does such a service exist?

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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ProCasts’ third open-src advocacy video – AdBlockPlus

ProCasts, Screencasting March 13, 2009

I’m rather chuffed to say that Wladimir Palant, the chap behind the excellent AdBlockPlus.org ad-filter for Firefox, has added our advocacy video to his frontpage – it shows you in just over a minute how and why to install AdBlockPlus.  As Wladimir says:

Ian and Richard […] offered me to create a screencast for Adblock Plus. They then went on analyzing what potential users need to know and the result is quite remarkable

We created the video to show how Richard and I can work together inside ProCasts combining animation and screencasting techniques, backed by music and scripting, to teach new users exactly why they will want to use this new tool and how they should get started.

We went through the full process of:

  1. understanding who the users are
  2. learning what they need
  3. asking about what confuses them
  4. figuring out how to tell the story
  5. screencasting prototypes
  6. wrapping everything in animated segments

I plan to blog at ProCasts about all the steps including showing some of the draft videos, this should give others some ideas for how to iterate on larger  screencasting projects.

The previous advocacy videos have been Django (Python web-framework) in Under a Minute and Internet Explorer 8 vs Firefox 3.

Richard has blogged an AdBlockPlus entry too.

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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ShowMeDo server move + Python 3 videos

Life, Python, ShowMeDo March 13, 2009

We’ve spent the last few weeks migrating ShowMeDo to its own server after 3 years operating out of a shared box.  Moving the site was a pain as I’m not a low-level Apache hacker but all in everything seems fine now and we have extra capacity to grow.

Kyran has skinned the blog so it fits with the overall theme.  The new Learning Paths feature is close to being released, this’ll really tie together all the learning resources in the site so visitors can get a threaded path through all the videos.

Kyran has explained some of the move and has configured ShowMeDo’s frontpage to show some of the posts, this is a really nice way to integrate the blog into the main site.  We also have a Hall of Fame now where all authors are ranked by a number of measures.

Two authors have added Python 3 videos, Gasto summarises some of the changes in 3.0 and chyld shows 3.0 in action in 2 videos on lists and del.icio.us.  These and all the other Python videos are here.

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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