Blog — Page 20

These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.

Easter's Approach

Written on Tuesday 19 Apr 2011

Not too many years ago, Easter fell early in the month of April. I spent it camping in a blizzard somewhere near Birmingham, packing in as many people as our tent would hold so that we wouldn’t freeze overnight. My choice to spend the daylight hours running around a frozen...

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Of Abandonment and Starlight

Written on Friday 15 Apr 2011

Winfrith’s “Starlight” children’s nursery has always struggled to stay open despite a lack of demand for its services. After one of many closures, it opened again late last year – only to close again in February after one of its staff was arrested (though never charged). Now it is abandoned...

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The Platform Blues

Written on Friday 15 Apr 2011

Hearts sink as the display updates from showing wildly inaccurate times to showing Delayed, Delayed, Delayed from top to bottom. “Signalling fault at Bournemouth”, it says, and we know then that all hope is lost. It is April now, and somewhere lilac trees and fields of dandelions are blooming. But...

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In Praise of Disjointed Communities

Written on Thursday 14 Apr 2011

Prime Minister David Cameron is set to make a speech on immigration today which, to the very vocal displeasure of Vince Cable and doubtless many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Conservative party. According to the BBC article: Communities have been affected by...

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Data and the Generation Gap

Written on Monday 4 Apr 2011

I returned to my parents’ house after my final year at university approximately an eternity ago* to discover that they had at last entered the Cretaceous and acquired a broadband internet connection. I was less than impressed with the limits imposed on this connection, though - it came with a...

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When Science met Big Society

Written on Monday 28 Mar 2011

Yesterday’s announcement that the Arts and Humanities Research Council will, on pain of losing funding, devote a “significant” amount of time to studying the notion of “Big Society” is frankly shocking. If it is indeed true, it smacks of incredible egotism on the part of the government. The government’s money...

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Debt Rating for the Internet Age

Written on Friday 25 Mar 2011

With the recent financial crisis, and unrest in the Middle East and north Africa, there has been much talk in the news of changes to countries’ debt ratings – usually for the worse. But their scale, not to put too fine a point on it, is mad. There’s an A,...

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SuccessWhale: Considering the Reply UI

Written on Thursday 17 Mar 2011

What was once my simple Twitter client, SuccessWhale, is undergoing a lot of changes in the build-up to version 2. One of the biggest changes is the support for multiple services, of which Facebook is the first to be integrated. This, combined with the Twitter website’s new design, brings into...

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UX is in the Radio

Written on Wednesday 9 Mar 2011

This morning, on the daily hour-long moan-fest we call “commuting”, we engaged in our normal pattern of radio use – working our way across the entire spectrum several times, not finding anything particularly appealing, before at last settling on the least annoying option. Then, a minute and a half later...

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Madness and the TableModel

Written on Thursday 3 Mar 2011

What follows is a lengthy rant about a particularly annoying situation in some of my code. Programmers, please let me know - is it the toolkit that is mad, or is it me? Everyone else, feel free to skip it! :) For one of my current Java projects, I am...

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