Computer books clear out

Continuing my general spring clean clear out, I have the following computer books (all in excellent condition) which I no longer need and are free to a good home:

1. DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & Dom (SitePoint)
2. Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP (Wrox)
3. Texinfo (Free Software Foundation)
4. SEO Warrior (O’Reilly)
5. The Art of SEO (O’Reilly)
6. Open Source Game Development – Qt Games for KDE, PDAs and Windows (Thomson Delmar Learning)
7. Beyond IBM (Penguin)
8. Beautiful Code (O’Reilly)
9. C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (Prentice Hall)

As with the previous batch of stuff, I’d prefer to give them to local people, but I can probably post one or two of the books in exchange for beer at a future date. Feel free to drop me an email if you want further info about any of the books – I will put links up to their Amazon pages at some point tomorrow.

posted by Paul at 9:47pm on Tuesday 9th March 2010 | 1 Comment »

Free stuff giveaway clearout

I’m having an early spring clean at my flat in an attempt to free up space so that I can fit everything on my bookcase and see the floor for once. The following items are currently earmarked for good homes:

1. Stargate SG-1 seasons 1-5 (boxed sets).
2. Various Doctor Who videos, including Dalek and Cybermen boxed sets.
3. Boxed set of all the Hornblower DVDs.
4. Free Software Free Society book.
5. Baldur’s Gate 2 + Throne of Bhaal Expansion (one pack).
6. Throne of Bhaal Expansion CD (separate disk).
7. Civilization II.
8. JavaStation Krups.

If you want any of the above and can take them off my hands without me having to post them to you (preferably at an event which I’ll be going to anyway, such as Currybeer), the best way to get in touch is to drop me an email. Anything which I haven’t managed to clear by the end of the month will probably make its way to Oxfam or the Warped Library.

(Yes, I know I could flog them on Amazon for a few quid, but I really can’t be bothered making all the trips to the Post Office and ending up having to refund people because the Royal Mail has lost, damaged or destroyed them).

posted by Paul at 8:27pm on Monday 15th February 2010 | 2 Comments »

Pub site progress

Thanks to Kirk, I now have a rough idea of the equipment I need to work on my pub site—in short it seems that buying a new digital camera and using my existing GPS logger and then syncronising the two will suffice. I’ve also registered the relevant domains (one with a short URL for redirects) and got a user authentication system working, with a simple registration form not far off completion. I was going to use a framework such as Symfony for the project, but I realised that it would take too much time to learn and I’d have more control by simply knocking together my own minimal framework.

Once the database schema is complete, the next step will be collecting and uploading the initial data. I don’t think this will be too difficult as there are lots of pubs near me to start with—I can probably cover most of Didsbury Village one Sunday, plus my usual haunts for Manchester Free Software, Currybeer etc. I suspect it will be towards the end of March before I launch the site, and it will probably look a bit shoddy to start with as my design skills are not that great, but it will at least be free of pop-up ads.

posted by Paul at 8:36pm on Wednesday 10th February 2010 | 4 Comments »

GPS, camera and notebook gadget help

For one of the sites I’m going to be working on I need a gadget which can perform the following tasks:

1. Take photos.
2. Log the GPS coordinates of the photo automatically, either as part of the meta-data associated with the photo or in a separate file.
3. Make notes about the photo, e.g. ‘this is the Rosetta Stone, main entrance, British Museum’.
4. Transfer this data easily to a computer.

Can anyone suggest a handy device which will do all of this? I suspect an iPhone would work but I’m not a big fan of Apple and I don’t want to pay a monthly fee to a telecoms company.

posted by Paul at 7:50pm on Thursday 28th January 2010 | 7 Comments »

Where to from here?

Now that my thesis corrections have been accepted I am looking for the next challenge, though I’m struggling to find an area to focus on. My main interests seem to be politics, business (which includes finance and insurance) and law. I’m not as interested as I used to be in computing—I now see IT in general as a tool, a means to an end (preferably profitable), rather than something interesting in itself. I still enjoy writing software, which is just as well as that’s what my job involves, but I prefer the overall management of a project over trying to optimise an SQL query. Hmm.

Goals for 2010 are also slowing moving along: CV has been tweaked, domains for two companies have been registered and I will get round to doing some open source development once VirtualBox starts working on my new desktop. Still need to think of a catchy name for my pubs site as unfortunately tothepub.co.uk has already been registered.

Finally, should you be really bored, you can now find the final corrected version of my thesis on my publications page. Hard bound copies are available at £40 each, if you are suffering from insomnia or want to have a thesis on your bookcase to increase peoples’ perception of your intelligence (having a chunk of the Loeb Classical Library also works).

posted by Paul at 9:40pm on Monday 18th January 2010 | No Comments »

Goals for 2010

Lucy’s LJ post reminded me that I hadn’t posted this yet. I’ve been thinking about what I want to achieve in 2010 for the last few weeks, now that my general situation is stable—as opposed to previous years where I have been flipping between courses, jobs etc. So, my goals for 2010 in no particular order are:

1. Redesign and rewrite my portfolio site, it’s currently a bit drab and doesn’t promote me that well (I don’t need it really now that I have a full time job, but I like to keep things up to date).
2. Learn how to prepare and analyse accounts for small companies, especially now that I am responsible for UKUUG and MERCi and prepare the IT budget at work.
3. Sign up two more clients to my web/email hosting package (this more or less runs itself).
4. Take and pass driving test—I don’t really want to get a car, but I could do with a licence just in case.
5. Start pubs web site as Beer in the Evening was sold a while ago and now has loads of ads and pop-ups. This is definitely not a cunningly disguised method of justifying going to lots of pubs (including on Alderney).
6. Keep Data Circle up to date with regular posts—at least one a week. The same goes for Politics Watch, I enjoy writing about politics and don’t do enough of it.
7. Launch at least one of the three company ideas which I have—these are all things which require upfront development time or capital, but once up and running will not need much maintenance.
8. Contribute to an open source project of some description. I have coding skills and can proof read documentation (especially useful for projects where the main author doesn’t have English as their first language) and will probably try and improve the symfony documents first as I want to learn that particular framework anyway.

There are lots of other goals too, but the above are probably enough to be getting on with for now.

posted by Paul at 9:51pm on Tuesday 5th January 2010 | 2 Comments »

Happy New Year

The wonders of WordPress enable me to post this without necessarily being up at midnight.

posted by Paul at 12:00am on Friday 1st January 2010 | No Comments »

Merry Christmas

Quick thoughts from today:

1. I now have every James Bond film on DVD, thanks to my sister.
2. Doctor Who was awful—if you haven’t watched it yet it’s probably not worth the trouble.
3. Purchasing the majority of presents for yourself from other people online and then getting your mum to wrap them immensely improves the whole experience.
4. Christmas gets boring the older you get—I think this is only likely to be reversed by marriage or additions to the family.
5. I really need to get a move on if I want to email my supervisor a draft copy of a conference paper by Tuesday.

Still busy, have a huge number of things to get done before I am back at work next week…

posted by Paul at 10:41pm on Friday 25th December 2009 | 3 Comments »

Master of Philosophy

Yesterday I had my MPhil viva, which somehow I managed to pass, despite having spent the last two weeks worrying about it. I still have to make some minor corrections requested by the examiners—things like “this section would be clearer with a diagram”—but assuming that I complete those by Christmas, I’ll get the certificate sometime in the new year and will have five more letters to add after my name.

On top of the thesis corrections, my supervisor has asked me if I’d like to write a paper for a conference, which I’ve agreed to do (with help and guidance), but after mid-January (the conference deadline) I will have left academia altogether. This feels a bit strange, as for the last six years I’ve been either studying at or working for the University, or writing up my thesis. In some ways I regret not sticking with it for another year or so to get the PhD—I would have quite liked to be Dr Waring—but I don’t think my heart was really in it, and a research grant, albeit untaxed, pales somewhat in comparison with a full time salary.

posted by Paul at 10:20pm on Thursday 12th November 2009 | No Comments »

LugRadio Live 2009

At an hour which should never be seen on a Saturday morning, I hauled myself onto a train to Wolverhampton for LugRadio Live 2009, after Lucy kindly let me have her ticket. I hadn’t been to previous LugRadio Live events, but I’d been assured that they were not to be missed.

Starting with the good stuff—the venue was also easy to get to from the train station and seemed to have the capacity to cope with the numbers (some people were standing up during talks, but there were plenty of free seats too). The talk on OpenStreetMap was both interesting and entertaining, and Gervase’s discussion of his first computer program had us all in stitches. I also had chance to meet up with people who I hadn’t seen for a while and mock Pokebook.

On the downside, the programme left some room for improvement. Most speakers had a one hour slot, which is fine if you are prepared to talk for that long, but most weren’t. This lead to an embarrassing moment at the end of two of the talks I attended, where the speaker finished after about half an hour and tried to keep the questions going to pad the remaining time. There were also two “no shows” that I was aware of, which was a real shame and quite a high proportion of the total number of speakers, although it’s something that the organisers have no control over.

In comparison to OpenTech—an event of a similar size and cost—LRL seemed a bit subdued. However, on its own merits, LRL stood up reasonably well—albeit to a lesser extent than I expected from the hype—and was worth attending, though it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

posted by Paul at 10:24pm on Saturday 24th October 2009 | No Comments »