Bruno’s Blanket

Last June Andrea’s sister Mamen gave birth to Bruno. I decided I wanted to knit him something, and summer being a horrible time to knit, I figured a Christmas present would be a good opportunity.

I selected a pattern for a great looking blanket that I found on the fantastic Ravelry and at the beginning of November I got to work. Two months, over 59,000 stiches, 1.5Km of yarn, and countless hours later I finished my biggest knitting project to date.

I’m not sure Bruno was aware of the blanket (he did enjoy tearing up the wrapping paper though), but I hope that it’s something that will serve him for years to come.

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Évariste Galois

The science library at uni has a display out the front where they put topical exhibitions up which change from time to time.

This week they put one up celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Évariste Galois (b. 25 Oct, 1811).

Galois was a french mathematician who founded that basis for a large part of modern number theory, part of which was named after him, Galois Theory.

He was arrogant and worked somewhat messily, he had a lot of his work rejected by his peers during his life. It was only after his death that a friend of his, Joseph Liouville,  took the time to make what he had started understandable, and Galois Theory was founded.

He was a revolutionary during his life, served in the the Republican artillery, and spent a few stretches in prison for activities mainly related to protests.

He managed all of this before dying  at the age of twenty, from wounds suffered in a dual, spending his last hours preparing his notes for Liouville to read upon his death.

Compared to this, modern mathematicians can be considered a fairly boring lot.

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Choose your own (adventure)

When I was somewhere around the end of primary school we had a guy come to talk to us at school. He was a native american, who worked as an undercover cop in the states.

I don’t remember exactly what he was there to talk to us about, but the bit that I remember is when he talked about his faith, or rather why it was his faith.

He followed the faith of his ancestors, the sort of totemic tribal faith that native americans always followed. He learned it from his grandmother.

But when his grandmother taught him, she explained the faith to him, yet urged him to leaner about other faiths and make up his own mind.

He had travelled, spoken to many people of many different faiths, and in the end he had returned to his roots, but he chose to return to his roots.

At the time I understood that his case was unusual, although growing up in the liberal environment I did, I didn’t understand exactly how unusual, yet it’s a story that I still remember.

 

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Simulated knitting

David Chudzicki has created a python package (Knit3d on github) which simulates in 3D the shape that will be produced by a knitted pattern. I haven’t really looked at it yet, but it looks very interesting. Check out his blog post on simulated knitting.

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Now he’s sixty-four

Bruce has written a post about the Beatle’s song When I’m sixty-four, the occasion being his 64th birthday. He left this out of the post, creative is as creative does, and all that.

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Differing goals

Last week our email server finally tanked. This was pretty bad timing as we’ll be moving to a hosted email server before the end of the year.

In order to get things up and running as quickly as possible, we installed a new server from scratch, imported all the users, and configured email. Some users didn’t have their history, but at least they were receiving and sending email.

One of the things that I love about this sort of administration is how much can be done remotely.

After breaking the new server again on Friday just before the end of the day, I had a freshly installed, but completely unconfigured server and a photo of the serial number from the back of the machine when I got home on Friday.

Using this, I could set up the server from scratch from my apartment in Barcelona, I always loved this sort of central control when I was doing server admin and tech support.

But at the same time, when I was in London, I was always the first to leave the office and run up the stairs to fix a problem on a user’s computer.

As much as I love central control, I always preferred actually being physically present when resolving people’s tech problems.

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Looking for …

Since the book I’m reading at the moment is prohibitively large, I’ve not been carrying it around everywhere as I usually do with books. Needing something to read at Andrea’s place, I picked up Looking for Alibrandi.

Having not done VCE at the end of secondary school, I had’t read the book, although it’s pretty similar to the film with Pia Miranda based on the book. At one point, Josie’s grandmother is telling her about when she first came to Australia, she didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak the language.

It occurred to me that, coming from a country of immigrants, there is a certain irony in my emigrating from Australia back to the old world.

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I’m alive

This is just a post to say that I am still alive, I’ve not been posting anything because I’ve been busy with work and my studies, and other work. Sorry about that.

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The birthday girl

Today is Andrea’s birthday (15th of October, just above the text there in orange).

So a big Happy Birthday to her!

¡Feliz Cumpleaños!

P.S. I’m sure she won’t be happy about it, but here’s a photo of Andrea in Salamanca before heading off to the wedding last May.

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The new 52

I essentially work for a comic book store. Yet aside from a couple of issues of Spawn I bought when I was about 11, I’ve never really been in to comics.

I got into some Marvel titles with the Civil War event a few years ago when I discovered that you could ahem find ahem comics on the internet. But I always found the whole thing daunting, since unless you were prepared to read through 10 years worth of back store, you invariably started in the middle.

It’s actually worse than that, a combination of changing writers, editors, and the industry practice of rewriting history tends to make comics very confusing – especially if you’re trying to take it all in at once.

With the advent of the iPad (I have one for development) I’m getting into some comics again, but mostly paying for them now. While there are always newer, less convoluted comics around, the same generally holds true of the classics, you always feel like you’re missing something when you jump into a series part way through.

This is were DC have played a winning card from the point of view of those of us getting into comics off the back of the digital distribution which is rapidly coming in to place. They have just re-launched their entire base universe.

Starting from the 31st of August, DC are bring out 52 brand new issue #1s, not baggage, no back existing back story to keep track of, just like if you picked up the comic when it was first released – at least that’s the promise.

I’ve grabbed a couple from Comixology and read them, and it’s nice to know that you’re as up to date as anyone, at least with respect to this current iteration. For the time being at least, I think I may be getting into some DC comics.

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