Many people today are talking about how uncomfortable they feel about their dependence on devices, and more specifically the content they consume via their devices. Whilst this theme is certainly well established, I have observed very few experimenting with ways of adapting to this trend in a positive manner. What is interesting is how, in […]
Back in 2006, three years in to my degree in “computer systems and software engineering” at the University of York, I embarked on my Masters project. The ambition was quite clear – to use a complementary suite of AI algorithms to simulate speciation. The choice of algorithm for behaviour selection, Rodney Brooks’ subsumption architecture, was […]
Mac OS includes Apache and PHP, which is a bit handy for us developers. We all need a local environment and it helps if the local environment looks and feels a bit like the terminal ssh session we use to manage our production server. Configuration can be a little tricky however, and things change from […]
Ever since I started coding in Java I’ve been regularly obliged to participate in conversations debating whether Java is a pass-by-value or pass-by-reference language. I’ve never been particularly hazy on the matter; Java is strictly a pass-by-value language and the values which are passed are pointers (to a memory location representing the data you are […]
For a day or so now I’ve been battling with Django’s model inheritance, which has a particularly frustrating approach to dynamic polymorphism. The problem is that when one is implementing a group of related models using multi-table inheritance and you attempt to iterate over the bog standard QuerySet for the parent class, we see an […]
It is with great sadness that I inform you all that my Asus eeePC 701 has finally exhaled it’s last 7-inch breath, wheezing under the weight of the many superfluous processes running on it’s aging LinuxMint installation. Please join me in thanking it for many years of service – it really did punch well above […]
This document was written as my submission for the computer science writing course I took in my third year of study at the University of York. It attempts to summarise the privacy issues associated with the development of new technologies in the information communications domain. Please don’t read with too much of a critical eye […]