The family sites

Posted on November 23, 2010 by hds

So in addition to me changing my site to run on WordPress, both Thea and Bruce got WordPress blogs up and running while I was in Australia. I was going to post about this sooner, but I’ve been waiting for them to update, seeing as that hasn’t happened I thought I’d post it here anyway.

Bruce can be found at the same site he’s had for years, moustache.com.au, where he’s got sets of his work up and is planning on updating his blog weekly. The site does change colour every time you reload it, but that’s to match his business cards.

Thea has a new blog at stainsbyte.com, where you’ll probably see family news and lots of her photos. Thea is setting up the site herself from a base WordPress install (I implemented Bruce’s design for his), so it’s still coming along.

That’s all for now, maybe we’ll see Ev set something up too in the future, if he ever has time.

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Real life and fiction

Posted on November 19, 2010 by hds

This afternoon I had almost exactly the opposite of this comic happen to me.

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Goodbye HSBC

Posted on November 19, 2010 by hds

I just phoned up HSBC to close my UK bank account. As useful as it may have been having an account there, it’s a pain trying to manage an account in a country where you’re not living, and the fact that I had my credit card attached to various web sites for automatic payments had caught me out once when I thought that I’d cleared the account.

I thought it was going to be an arduous process, I couldn’t imagine a bank letting go of business easily, at least not easily for me. Amazingly it took me a grand total of 7 minutes on the phone, and most of that was getting through there initial card authentication process, the rest of it was absolutely painless. What a nice surprise.

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Redder

Posted on November 18, 2010 by hds

A beautiful flash game by Anna Anthropy, It’s Nice That described Redder as what Metroid would look like if it was made by Stanley Kubric, which is not far off the mark. The sound track is fantastic, I’ve only spent a few minutes playing with it, but it gave me an enormous feeling of nostalgia, especially when I saw “outside” on the edge of the map.

You can play Redder on Newgrounds.

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The Cartographer

Posted on November 18, 2010 by hds

Today Mike Tyson (again, not the boxer) is releasing his brand new iPhone travel app, The Cartographer. As usual for Mike, it’s a ridiculously pretty app that performs incredibly well – it handles maps, especially for when you’re travelling.

Mike is the most talented iPhone developer I know (and he helps me out a lot as well). So check out the app, it’s got a discount at the moment too, it’s awesome.

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Moved to WordPress

Posted on November 13, 2010 by hds

I’ve just moved this site to WordPress, after a long time having a “hand-crafted” weblog / blog thingy, I’ve finally given in and gone the easy route.

Bear with me while I get the old set of photos up again, and start getting new photos up, probably going to take me a week or two to get it all sorted.

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Kind of forgot about the web site

Posted on October 29, 2010 by hds

Not surprisingly in hindsight, I’m quite busy at the moment. Having just started a doctorate in Number Theory, I have an enormous amount of reading to do, which I’m trying to get through as quickly as possible. I’m reading through books that are older than me (which for a computer scientist is really odd) for the basics, I wish they still made text books so small and easily portable.

Meanwhile I have my ongoing (until time t with t tending towards infinity) secret squirrel project for Titan. I’m not sure it’s really secret, but I don’t like posting work stuff on the open internet. It’s for the iPhone, and it’s pretty much finished.

Anyway, so I’ve not been posting much here, sorry about that. I’m off to Australia on Tuesday for Cat’s wedding, I’ll try to keep up the updates while I’m there.

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What I do now (1)

Posted on October 5, 2010 by hds

I remember a maths class I had in first year uni, one of our lecturers was a guy from the maths department named Stu, or something like that. He is (or at least was in those days) an applied mathematician, and didn’t see a lot of point in pure mathematics. After a side note about how some property of vectors could be extended to n dimensions if you were into that sort of pure maths stuff, he set about justifying his point of view.

“At the same time that Einstein was developing the theory of relativity, some joker was proving that anything multiplied by zero is really zero”

The reason for this story is that while reading through some preliminary stuff on number theory I came across a proof that anything multiplied by zero is really zero.

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Masters (2) complete

Posted on October 4, 2010 by hds

Last week I defended (re: presented) my end of course project for the Masters in Multimedia Design that I was doing last (academic) year. Basically trying to fit as much as possible of my 164 page dissertation into a twenty minute presentation. It went really well, although I’m happy it’s finished. I enjoyed the masters, some subjects were fantastically interesting, but by the end it was just a little too much, and having spent all of June and most of July madly writing and preparing one masters thesis, having a second one a month later was a bit of a chore.

Anyway, I’m now officially in the mathematics department (Departament de Matemàtiques), and madly trying to work my way through all the things I need to know before I can start proper research.

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More masters madness

Posted on September 23, 2010 by hds

And other things beginning with M.

Yesterday I handed in my masters thesis dissertation (or tesina) for the masters in multimedia that I did last year. I’ve just gone back and checked my git logs, I started writing my first tesina on the 15th of May. Which means that in the space of 130 days I managed to write two tesinas from start to finish, and made it to Finland for holidays, London to work, and the Festa de Gràcia in there as well. I don’t think that’s a bad effort.

Anyway, I’ve now got the defence next Thursday, and I’ll be in the mathematics department from next week as well. So keeping busy.

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