May 30, 2020

My Microblog

May 30, 2020

Charging Your EV

Charging the Kona at Lochee Charging Hub in Dundee Having had our first Electric Vehicle for a little over a year, we’ve made a few long journeys that require the use of public chargers. These are some of the experiences I’ve had and some of the things we learnt along the way. Connectors Most modern EVs have two connectors. This is what they look like. DC or “rapid charge” connector

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February 9, 2017

Docker and .NET Core Linux Performance Tracing

_Note: This is an old post that was sitting in my drafts for a long time. It might be useful to someone still as most of the content is still relevant. _ You should checkout dotnet-monitor if you are using .NET Core 3 and above! - it promises to make the while thing a lot easier. I’ve left the below content for posterity, but it’s very out of date now.

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January 7, 2017

Music and Artificial Intelligence

There was a great BBC click podcast this week, covering some of the advances made in technology and music. There was some interesting stuff around Bjork’s new music video and art exhibit, but also a section on IBM Watson research. They did some interesting work on computer/musician collaboration with Alex Da Kid. They also discussed learning algorithms, used to identify vocal stem samples in songs, and attribute them to the original song.

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January 6, 2017

Registrator, a Docker Service Registry Bridge

I’ve been diving into golang recently, partly by accident, given that we decided to use an open source docker service registration bridge called registrator. Registrator fills in a niche with docker containers - how to get them into an existing service registry such as (the excellent) consul. We plan to use this to keep our existing netflix eureka service registry updated with new container based services as they are brought online, and allow us to integrate containers into our existing VM based microservices environment.

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January 5, 2017

Rise of The Robots

I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of Rise of The Robots, by Martin Ford. It was a fascinating and insightful look at how robots and computers are used today to replace human work, and how the expansion of artificial intelligence and the reduction in costs for new machines are accelerating their creation. It got deep inside my psyche - I’ve been thinking about the implications for a couple of weeks afterwards, and it started a big conversation on Christmas Day with my family.

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January 4, 2017

Coworking and Mental Health, plus Nottingham Co-Working Spaces

There’s a great article here on the benefits of co-working, and how it can transform what can be a lonely and difficult struggle for some people working at home, into an energising and supporting environment. I’ve found it’s becoming more and more important to me too, now in my 10th year of working at home for the majority of the time. The co-working spaces I’ve used in Nottingham are: Antenna This is my regular haunt, which I typically use once or twice a week.

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October 9, 2016

Glastonbury Ticket Site Update

Three years ago I wrote a detailed post with observations and advice on the Glastonbury Festival ticket sale, and how their website appears to work. Again, I was involved in the big refresh this year, trying to buy tickets for friends and family. I wasn’t successful in purchasing tickets this year, although my sister was able to buy two sets of tickets (I.e go through the checkout process twice). I also spent a lot of time dealing with a grey page, with connection errors and the like, like many people.

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October 9, 2016

Glastonbury Ticket Site Update - Comments

Old Article Comments I exported these from my old wordpress blog, so they are a bit out of date, but I thought I’d keep them around for posterity. [James Simpson] - Oct 0, 2016 Yep i know this struggle too - drop me an email for a collaboration approach. Although yes, it may be the case of rate limiting, there is more of an issue with actually getting connected in the first place.

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June 17, 2015

Install a Babun (Cygwin) Shell and Ansible for Windows

Update: You might find this thread useful if you have issues getting ansible to work in babun/cygwin - thanks mcfo for the comments. Update2: Another option is to run ansible inside a docker container using Docker for Windows. This way you are actually using Linux to run ansible in, so are likely to have less problems. Startup time, (after the first time you run it), should be very quick, so has none of the disadvantages of running inside a heavy VM.

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