James Gardner
Welcome! You may well have noticed a rift in space-time has transported this site's design all the way from 2002 into 2009, banishing the horrible green wordpress theme en route. I intend to maintain the site in the same way I did from 1999-2002, using hard coded HTML and static generation to free me from the constraints of modern web publishing tools. It will be interesting to see how the experiment goes.
Latest Updates
| Sat 13th June 2009 | Finally got around to setting up some secure mercurial repositories using a GoDaddy SSL certificate. Also had a great evening bowling in Brick Lane with Adrian, Dave and Alex. Must remember to order "fishy smelling pork" (unless that's Alex making it up!) next time I'm at a Chineese. |
| Sun 7th June 2009 | God. As I write we have more MEPs (1) from the British National Party than from the Liberal Democrats (0). Let's hope we don't get any more. |
| Fri 5th June 2009 | I encourage you to read this article and Support Simon Singh who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for an article he wrote in the comment section of the Guardian newspaper. At stake are our right to open scientific debate and the ability of journalists to critisise organisations who make scientific claims without providing any evidence to back them up. I can't find the original article but there are plenty of articles about it going around. |
| Fri 5th June 2009 | Just come back from another couple of days working in Oxford at the John Radcliffe R&D Department. I can highly recommend Pickwicks B&B in Headington (but don't tell too many people, I want to be able to get a room next time!). |
| Mon 1st June 2009 | Chris Adams and my entry to SiCamp, Carbage, was not one of the shortlisted few ;-(. We are a little disappointed but it gives us more time to refine the ideas and make a better job of the execution. |
| Wed 27th May 2009 | Finished reading Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Heard some good things about the book but failed to see either what was new about it or where the coherent theory about tipping points was. The book is nearly 10 years old so its possible that whilst these ideas were revolutionary at the time that they are now just widely accepted. Either way I enjoyed the book as a collection of interesting case studies and would recommend it on that basis anyway. |
| Sat 23rd May 2009 | I've finally achieved an ambition I've had since I was about 16: to own a Tera Nova Voyger tent. |
| Fri 22nd May 2009 | Had another very enjoyable day working at the John Radcliffe today (was there last Thurs too) and afterwards went with Chris to a Cameron Direct meeting a Larkmead school in Abingdon, Oxford. I came away with the impression that I'd be very happy to have David Cameron as our next Prime Minister, he came across as very straightforward, clear thinking, widely knowledgable and in touch. Although Conservative ministers are virtually all rich white men, Cameron made the point that reforms he's put in place mean that if they win the next election there will be 60 women and 10 non-white people. That's a start but however credible David Cameron is (and he is), I don't think the Conservatives as a whole will be credible until their membership better reflects the membership of the country (in gender, race, backgound and income) and Cameron knows this. I'm not sure who I'm voting for but a major consideration is that the Liberal Democrats have been shown to be correct on every important issue (the war in Iraq, the economy etc) and so seem better qualified to govern than parties who have badly mis-read things (notably Labour of late) or have failed to oppose those things adequately (the Conservatives). |
| Thurs 21st May 2009 | Enjoyed the TV programme "This Week". Very interested to see how much talk there is of huge electoral reform off the back of the MPs expenses debacle. |
| Sat 16th May 2009 | Today's dive trip to Wittering was cancelled (Force 7 gusts don't make for comfortable travel in a rib) and Wolfram Alpha launches and can integrate things faster than me (no real challenge actually!) but can't yet seem to generate a PDF about caffeine vs. aspirin. |
| Wed 11th May 2009 | Lego Imagination |
| Wed 9th May 2009 | Had an epic Shogun battle (the 1986 board game) with Tom, James and Roland in Victoria and saw the new Star Trek movie at the Tottenham Court Road Odeon. Totally geeked out.. |
| Wed 6th May 2009 | Added a few new posts: a rant about barriers at St Pancras station in London, some notes on using ImageMagick and ffmpeg for a photo gallery, my first sighting of the Pylons Book in the wild, and probably most usefuly, a fairly detailed tutorial on using subprocess in Python. |
| Sat 2nd May 2009 | 5:02am Just got back from a superb night out with Jahlia, Dave, Alex and Greg at Coronet in Elephant and Castle. Flourescent glasses, glow in the dark paint and German electronica make for an excellent combination. |
| Thurs 30th April 2009 | Finally got around to posting an introduction to Arduino. The tutorial explains how to build a "tea light" which glows green at the least carbon-costly time for you to be making tea. |
| Wed 29th April 2009 | 13:03 Note to self, always open your take-away pasta carbonara the right way up or you will end up with a lot of plain-tasting pasta to start with and then a lot of cheesey bacon at end! |
| Tue 28th April 2009 |
12:45 Ahh! Typed rm *.py when I meant rm *.pyc to prepare
for an hg ci and after an hg add. Lost the file I was working
on all last night while the train was delayed. The ext3 filesystem doesn't
support undelete so I'm currently doing a binary grep of the entire disk in
case fragments of the file still remain. (During the grep the load average was
so high the clock took 52 minutes before it updated). While looking for solutions I came across an online Python 2.5 decompiler and a commercial company offering a costly Python decompilation service. For Python 1.5-2.3 there is also decompyle, a command line tool. |
| Mon 27th April 2009 | Stayed late after work and got the 10:25pm train from St Pancras. Unfortunately an earlier train apprantly caught fire (although there's no mention of that on the National Rail site) and caused damage to an overhead power line. It took me nearly 7 hours to get home! Luckily I had some battery for the first hour or two so got some work done. |
| Sat 25th April 2009 | Missing out on a surfing trip with Darwin to concentrate on getting up to speed with some work. Not totally convinced it is the right choice. Being productive though. |
| Wed 22nd April 2009 | 12:04 Hopefully getting my new bike wheels today, the delivery has come in, Cycle King are checking the contents now to see if it includes by two racing bike wheels. Update: Yep, now busy assmebling the bits. |
| Mon 20th April 2009 | Got Mel's designs for my new startup implemented in Dreamweaver for Richard to work on the copy for. |
| Sun 19th April 2009 | Planned to have a working weekend but have ended up writing a 157 page guide to RAID1, Encryption and LVM2 for Debian Lenny! |
| Sat 18th April 2009 | Found that reStructuredText doesn't render field lists with more than 14 characters in the name correctly. See the blog post. |
| Finally got my Android G1 phone working. It has been locked since April 15th because I couldn't remember the username for my Google account and neither t-mobile nor Google could remind me. Turns out if you are willing to lose all your data you can do a master reset by holding down the power and home buttons for 20 seconds then pressing Alt+w. After that you can create a new Google account and the phone works again! | |
| Sun 12th April 2009 | Had a great day at Jahlia's Birthday/Easter party (even painted an egg and did a jigsaw) but both my bike wheels were stolen while the bike was outside so I had to walk back to St Pancras with just the frame! I was quoted £248 to replace them in London, £130 in Bedford. In fact it would be interesting to document just how many thousands I've lost due to bike thefts over the years. Bike theft is by far the worst crime I've experienced and in that respect I count myself very lucky. |