Wednesday, August 21, 2013

It's a Tubular Miracle

Some weeks back, I went out on the Tube. Somewhere around Tooting Broadway, I lost my Fitbit. To be honest I assumed it was gone and after pondering, ordered a replacement. But for a laugh, I put in a lost property query with London Transport.

Today they got back to me. They found it! They identified it based on the journey I'd given. And its waiting for me to give the £4 restoration fee to them at Baker Street where it will be returned to me.

Thats rather splendid.

If you lose something you'll want to go to the online Lost Property Office where you can put in your query.




Saturday, August 17, 2013

As I went looking for some music...

There's a BBC trailer for "What Remains" with a version of "You're Not Alone". It wasn't Olive so I went looking. It's Arlissa and there's a copy of it up on Soundcloud. Enjoy it here.

Codescaling, behind the scenes

In the background on Codescaling, I've been refining the way I write stories. I've gone for the simple route of writing the core text in Markdown in Sublime Text (and Editorial on the iPad soon) and then converting to HTML and pasting into Wordpress.com for topping-and-tailing. It seems to be the easiest way to embed links and formatting without being in Wordpress.com's dashboard. I've dropped making links open a new window, an old habit from The H, and gone for in place link opening.

The thing that worries me is there's so few following on social media... six on @codescaling on Twitter and three on the codescaling Google+ page. Maybe I need more cat pictures or a "Cat on the coding keyboard" video... "Make them System.exit(1) coding cat!"

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

A little bit of music....

Still loving this track and wondering how to make a short film using it...


...though Person of Interest may have beaten me to it...

... yet it has to lose a potent line of the song to do it. Did you spot it?

A small revamp...

I've brought all the old codepapacy content onto this blog and from now on, this old mess will continue to be my personal blog. I just couldn't rationalise having two rather similar blogs now that codescaling.com is a go. Apologies for any hassles in advance.


Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Codescaling.com kicks off....

And now the new project...

Codescaling.com

It's news about code at different scales, from embedded to clouds.

Friday, August 02, 2013

Papal Indulgences - PyPy, Timelines, Moto X, HTTPS and Lego


  • PyPy 2.1 ARMs up - The Raspberry Pi Foundation helped support the work in finishing PyPy's ARM support and now, PyPy 2.1 has arrived with official ARM support. The update bring JIT support of ARM6 and ARM7 architectures with hard and soft float. PyPy 2.1 targets Python 2.7.2 but also arriving is a beta of version 2.1 of PyPy3, the version of PyPy that targets Python 3 (3.2.3 to be exact).


  • JavaScript Timelines - Timelines can always help put things in context and TimelineJS looks an interesting way of making them. The developers have a generator which starts with a Google spreadsheet which is generated with their template, you publish it to the web and then tell their application where to find it and it churns out all the assets and bits needed to embed a timeline in a site. And the timeline component (which can read JSON, JSONP and Google Docs) is up on Github under the MPL 2.0.


  • Moto X - So, Motorola... your new phone... Always on phone listening for voice commands... interesting. Only hearing one activation command which includes the company name, "Ok Google"? not interested. Fast activating camera by flipping the phone over twice? The engineers need to get out more. Not available in Europe? Well, that saves us some time... put the Popemobile away chaps, we aren't going not shopping.


  • Compression sucks - In the war on HTTPS, a lot has been made of oracle attacks on the compressed data which exploits compression to help reveal the contents of smaller encrypted chunks of data. Ars Technica takes a look at the latest to use that trick, BREACH, which builds off the older CRIME attack.


  • XKeyShootsAndScores - And while HTTPS is being whittled away at, Wikimedia joins the HTTPS-by-default club though its got lots of work to do.


  • Let me Lego - Now some may be interested in the new $350 Lego Mindstorms EV3 Robot, due in the US and UK in September. But I'm more interested in the Lego Architecture Studio which looks like a wonderfully creative thing to work with... but its only in the US because obviously Lego must think we don't have architecture in Europe