www.quickrota.com is a site that allows a group of people to co-manage a regular rota. Participants of an active rota are emailed one-at-a-time to indicate when “its their turn”. Tom Joyce and I developed this over the last 3 months in response to a problem we see in my jobs, flats and in Edinburgh Hacklab. Read more about Hacklab inspired “QuickRota” out now![…]
So after much waiting the first Raspberry Pis to arrive put in an appearance at last Tuesdays open night. After no small task of finding a USB keyboard and mouse and doing an HDMI monitor bodge we were ready to go. So what is the first thing to do with the Raspberry Pi, lets play Read more about PIs and Eyes[…]
The hacklab will be open tonight (Thursday 29th March) from 7:30pm for the weekly Software night. Bit later than usual to give everyone a chance to enjoy the sunshine. Why Clementines? If it’s still warm then refreshing fruit may be just the thing for a night of code hacking. Don’t worry we still have Coffee! Read more about Clementines (Coffee) & Code[…]
Computers are the most flexible tool in the engineers toolbox. When I grew up I think I was lucky to be born into the start of the home computer boom of the 80s. Computers like the BBC micro and spectrum were very easy to program, and because computers were so novel, our expectations of what could be achieved were easily within the reach of single programmer. Now were in the millennium, and PCs do so much more, the methods we use to program them are much more complicated. Learning to program has become very difficult on standard computing kit found in the home. So how should the next generation learn how to program?
On a wet and windy night when anybody sensible would be staying inside, a few hardy individuals ventured out to the Hacklab to celebrate 30 years of the BBC Micro. Several BBCs, now in Martin’s possession, had made the trip north and after a bit of swapping of keyboards etc one was ready to go. Read more about 30 Years of BBC Micro[…]
Make search go mega fast! O(log(n)) inserts and deletes on ordered lists, but with the twist that the original list before modification remains intact! Implemented by using path-copying as per “Making Data Structures Persistent” Driscoll, Sarnak, Sleator and Tarjan. PersistentRedBlackTreeSet This was quite tricky to implement, because you are not allowed parent pointers, so you Read more about A Java implementation of persistent red-black trees open sourced[…]
Organised by Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, the first Culture Hack Scotland event took place on 6/7 May. It brought together 50 developers & designers and 50 arts professionals for 24 hours of hacking and making. A number of the datasets were released specifically for the event, including footfall data collected across 19 locations in central Read more about Culture Hack Scotland[…]
Software night is on again tonight from 7pm – check out the previous projects list and the Edinburgh software projects spreadsheet, and bring any other ideas/discussions/code. Software News: No-one else seems to have cared, but I’ve been ecstatic since Google finally made the Maps API accessible over HTTPS for free (previously a £10k yearly subscription).. Read more about 20110330: Software Night[…]
Software night is rolling around again – the lab will be open from 7pm onwards tomorrow evening (Wed 23rd March). I’ve been doing some work integrating Janrain’s social sign-on into one of my websites and will be happy to talk about the upsides and downsides of that. Meanwhile, Markos/@qnoid has posted a good summary of Read more about Software Night 20110323[…]
Software night will be back as usual this evening – feel free to post any ideas for stuff you might be working on, and come along with laptops, drinks and/or nibbles. The project list from last time is available here. There should be some tinkering with the ‘pattern’ NLP library for Python going on as Read more about 20110316: Software Night – business as usual[…]