I am (what could charitably be called) a Star Wars fanboi. When I was a nipper, there were only 3 Star Warses, and I wore out the video tapes watching them repeatedly. When the Timothy Zahn books came out, I was starved of new content and devoured them eagerly. And... that was pretty much all there was for Star Wars. Oh, sure, there were the Droid and Ewok cartoons but - although I didn't have…
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I've been reading various entrepreneur books and blog posts. One thing they all emphasise is that success often comes from finding a problem that you yourself would pay money to solve. And that's a problem for me. I don't tend to want to spend money solving problems. I'm not claiming to be a hermit, but I find it weird just how little cash I'm willing to part with to improve my life. So I'm…
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I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. Symfony has a concept of Cache Contracts. You can call an expensive / slow / intensive operation and immediately cache the result for a specific time period. Next time you call the operation, the results are served from the cache until the expiry time has been hit. Nifty! But I couldn't get it to work. …
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I'm just getting started with Symfony, so I'm blogging some of the weird things I'm finding. I want to use Doctrine dbal to search a database for a partial match. For example searching for "smith" should find "blacksmith" and "smithy". I have a prepared statement like this: $queryBuilder = $conn->createQueryBuilder(); $queryBuilder ->select("whatever") ->from("table") ->where("name …
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It was only after I started editing my MSc down to its prescribed word-count, that I finally understood the phrase Kill Your Darlings. I spent ages writing florid prose, only to realise it was needless verbiage. The delete key was hammered mercilessly. But... As all fans of Jasper Fforde know - there is a "Well of Lost Plots"; where rejected sentences live on in the eternal library... As I was …
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Welcome to acronym city! I recently published my Master's Dissertation. I say "published" - I just shoved it up on a website. But real academic publications should have a DOI - it's an identifier which is supposed to make it easier for people to find and cite paper. You know how books have a unique ISBN? It's like that. I couldn't find a way to publish this via my university, which was a little …
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This blog has a calendar showing my yearly archives. It was in a table layout - which made sense when I first designed it - but had a few spacing niggles and was hard to make responsive. Now, it behaves like this: The code is relatively straightforward. The HTML for the calendar looks like this: <div class="calendars"> <div class="calendar"> <div class="calendar-year">2018</div> …
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Today is a day of mixed emotions for me. The UK's COVID tracing app is finally closing. The app was, by any reasonable measure, a success. A team of experts at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford and Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick estimate the NHS COVID-19 app prevented around 1 million cases, 44,000 hospitalisations and 9,600 deaths during its…
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I think the computer programming industry is about to reach a reckoning. No, not because ChatGPT can poorly plagiarise buggy code - but because a whole generation of kids have grown up with Scratch. And they'll want professional tools which have Scratch's level of usability. Hand-coding YAML files is a mug's game; one wrong whitespace and everything is broken. Left a semi-colon off the end of a…
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I was in one of those interminably dull video-conferences a few weeks ago. The presenter was pitching their grand vision of what our next steps should be. "So!" They said, "Any comments before we launch?" No one said anything. After half a minute the presenter said "As there are no objections, we'll proceed. Silence is consent." At that phrase, my whole body did an involuntary spasm which I'm …
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Metawork is so much more fun than real work. Sharpening your pencils. Colour coordinating your filing system. Creating Gantt charts of what you intend to do. Marvellous! In that spirit, here's how I used the venerable pandoc to convert my MSc dissertation from .md into a variety of more readable formats. Prep I've no idea what you already have installed on your system but, at a minimum, you…
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Much like "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race" this is a book that's a little tricky for me - a white apathist man - to review. I'll cheerfully admit that I don't get religion - any religion. And I doubly don't get why people tie themselves to a religion which seems to persecute them. As I read on, I was surprised to discover just how much I agreed with some of these t…
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