Category: Miscellaneous

Odds and ends that don't fit into the main categories usually holidays, photography and personal stuff

Review of the year: 2015

Another year comes to an end and it time to write my annual review. As usual my blog has been a mixture, with book reviews the most frequent item. I also wrote a bit about politics and some technology blog posts. You can see a list of my posts this year on the index page. My technology blog posts are about programming, and the tools that go with it – designed as much to remind me of how I did things as anything else.

My most read blog post this year was a technical one on setting up Docker to work on a Windows 10 PC – it appears to have gone out in an email to the whole Docker community. For the non-technical reader, Docker is like a little pop up workshop which a programmer can take with them wherever they go, all their familiar tools will be found in their Docker container. It makes sharing the development of software, and deploying it different places, much easier. 

Actually my most read blog post this year was the review of my telescope, which I wrote a few years ago – it clearly has enduring appeal! Sadly, I haven’t made much use of my telescope recently but I did reuse my experience to photograph the partial eclipse, visible in north west England in March. I took a whole pile of photographs and wrote a short blog post. It is a montage of my eclipse photos which graces the top of this post. I think the surprising thing for me was how long the whole thing took.

In book reading there was a mixture of technical books which I read in relation to my work, and because I am interested. My favourite of these was High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick and Ian Ozsvald, which lead me to thinking more deeply about my favoured programming language. I read a number of books relating to the history of science. The Values of Precision by edited by M. Norton Wise stood out – this was an edited collection about the evolution of precision in the sciences since population studies in pre-Revolutionary France. Many of the themes spoke directly to my experience as a scientist, and it was interesting to read about them from the point of view of historians. Andrea Wulf’s biography of Alexander von Humboldt was also very good. 

There was a General Election this year, which led to a little blogging on my part and then substantial trauma (as a Liberal Democrat). I stood for the local council in the “Chester Villages” ward, where I beat UKIP and the Greens (full results here), sadly the Chester Liberal Democrats lost their only seat on the Cheshire West and Chester Council.

I did a couple of little technical projects for my own interest over the year. I made my London Underground – Can I walk it? tool which helps the user decide whether to walk between London Underground stations, the distance between them often being surprisingly short in the central part of London. The distinguishing features of this tool is that it is dynamic, and covers walking distances which are not just nearest neighbour of the current line. You can find the website here. This little project incorporated a number of bits of technology I’d learnt about over the past few years, and featured help from David Hughes on the design side – you can see the result bellow.

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My second project was looking at the recently released LIDAR data from the Environment Agency, I wrote about it here. LIDAR is a laser technique for determining the height of the land surface (or buildings, if they are in the way) to a high resolution – typically 1 metre but down to 25cm in some places. The data cover about 85% of England. The Environment Agency use the data to help plan flood and coastal defences, amongst other applications. I had fun overlaying the LIDAR imagery onto maps, and rendering it in 3D, below you can see St Paul’s cathedral rendered in 3D.

I changed job in the Autumn, moving from ScraperWiki in Liverpool to GB Group in Chester. In my new job I’m spending my days playing with data, and attending virtually no meetings – so all good there! Also my commute to work is a 25 minute cycle which I really enjoy. But I really value the experience I got at ScraperWiki. As a startup with an open source mentally I learnt lots of new things and could talk about them. I also got to work with some really interesting customers. It brought home to me how difficult it is to make a business work, it’s not enough just to do something clever – somebody has to pay you enough to do it – and that’s actually the really hard part.

I wrote a now obligatory holiday blog post. We stayed in Portinscale, just outside Keswick for our holiday at a time when the weather was rather better. The highlight of the trip for me was the Threlkeld Mining Museum, a place where older men collect old mining equipment for their entertainment and that of small children. Although Allan Bank in Grasmere was a close second, Allan Bank is a laid back hippy commune style National Trust property. Below you can see a view of Derwent Water to Catbells from Keswick.

A couple of things I haven’t blogged about: I started running in May and since then I’ve gone from running 5km in 34 minutes to 5km in 24 minutes, I’ve also lost 10kg. I should probably write a blog about this, since it involves data collection. There are some technical bits and pieces I’d quite like to write about (Python modules and sqlite) either because I use them so often or they’ve turned out to be useful. The other thing I haven’t written about is my CBT.

Portinscale 2015

We had an abortive trip to Portinscale in the Lake District for our summer holiday last year, ended prematurely by illness. This year we’re back and have improved greatly on last years performance! Portinscale is just outside Keswick, a small town at the head of Derwentwater. In the past we would have stayed a little further from civilisation so we could go for longish walks from the door but with 3 year old Thomas a bunch of attractions in easy distance is preferable.

Day 1 – Sunday

Rather than fit packing and driving the relatively short distance to Portinscale from Chester into a day, whilst simultaneously meeting the arrival time requirements, we travelled up on Sunday morning. In the afternoon we went to Whinlatter Forest Park, a few miles up the road. The entrance is guarded by a fine sculpture of an osprey.

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It has an extensive collection of trails for pedestrians and cyclists. A Go Ape franchise for people who like swinging from trees, some Gruffalo / Superworm themed trails for children. And a wild play area featuring Thomas’ favourite thing – a pair of Archimedes Screws:

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There’s also a very nice cafe. We visited Whinlatter several times of an afternoon.

Day 2 – Monday

We went to Mirehouse in the morning, a lakeside estate with a smallish garden and a rather pleasant walk down to Bassenthwaite Lake.

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There’s a fine view from the lake down towards Keswick.

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In the afternoon we went to the Pencil Museum in Keswick, not a large attraction but Thomas liked Drew the giant and we got 5 pencils for an outlay of £3.

Day 3 – Tuesday

In the morning we went to Threlkeld Mining Museum. Its full of cranes and various bits of mining machinery from the past 100 years or so. There is a narrow gauge railway line which runs half a mile or so to the head of the quarry from the visitor centre. Threlkeld is not a slick affair but it is great fun for a small child fond of cranes, and the volunteers are obviously enthused by what they are doing. To be honest, I’m rather fond of industrial archaeology too!

Basically, they collect cranes.

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All of which are in some degree of elegant decay

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For our visit they were running a little diesel train:

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In the afternoon we walked down to Nichols End, a marina on Derwentwater close by our house in Portinscale.

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Day 4 – Wednesday

My records show that we last visited Maryport 15 years ago. It has the benefit of being close to Keswick – only half an hour or so away. We enjoyed a brief paddle in the sea, on a beach of our own before heading to the small aquarium in town.

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Whinlatter Forest Park once again in the afternoon.

Day 5 – Thursday

On leaving the house we thought we would be mooching around Keswick whilst our car was being seen to for “mysterious dripping”, as it was Crosthwaite Garage instantly diagnosed an innocuous air conditioning overflow. So we headed off to Lodore Falls, alongside Derwentwater before returning to Hope Park in Keswick.

Thomas declared the gently dripping woods on the way to Lodore Falls to be “amazing”:

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The falls themselves are impressive enough, although the view is a little distant when you are with a small child, who coincidently loves waterfalls and demands their presence on every walk:

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Hope Park was busy, but it is a pretty lakeside area with formal gardens and golf a little back from the shore.

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In the afternoon we visited Dodd Wood, which is just over the road from Mirehouse, where we did a rather steep walk.

Day 6 – Friday

On our final day we visited Allan Bank in Grasmere, this is a stealth National Trust property, formerly home to William Wordsworth and one of the founders of the National Trust, Canon Rawnsley. “Stealth” because it is barely advertised or sign posted, and is run in manner far more relaxed than any other National Trust place I’ve visited. It’s a smallish house:

Allan Bank, Grasmere

With glorious views:

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The house was damaged by fire a few years ago, and has only really been refurbished in as far as making it weather proof. Teas and coffees are available on unmatching crockery for a donation (you pay for cake though), and you’re invited to take them where you please to drink. There is a playroom ideally suited to Thomas’ age group, along with rooms Wordsworth and Rawnsley occupied upstairs.

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It has the air of a hippy commune, and it’s sort of glorious.

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Outside the grounds are thickly wooded on a steep slope, there is a path approximately around the perimeter which takes in the wild woods, several dens and some lovely views.

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We glimpsed a red squirrel in the woods.

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As Thomas wrote, it was "”Fun”!

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In the afternoon a final trip to Whinlatter Forest Park.

We left on Saturday amidst heavy early morning rain, the only serious daytime rain of the holiday – probably the best week of weather I’ve had in the Lake District!

Review of the year: 2014

Once again I look back on a year of blogging. You can see what I’ve been up to on the index page of this blog.

I get the feeling that my blog is just for me and a few students trying to fake having done their set reading. I regularly use my blog to remember how to fix my Ubuntu installation, and to help me remember what I’ve read.

A couple of posts this year broke that pattern.

Of Matlab and Python compared the older, proprietary way of doing scientific computing with Matlab to the rapidly growing, now mature, alternative of the Python ecosystem. I’ve used Matlab for 15 years or so as a scientist. At my new job, which is more open source and software developer oriented, I use Python. My blog post struck a cord with those burnt by licensing issues with Matlab. Basically, with Matlab you pay for a core license and then pay for toolboxes which add functionality (and sometimes you only use a small part of that functionality). It’s even more painful if you are managing networked licenses serving users across the world.

My second blog post with a larger readership was Feminism. This started with the unprofessional attire choice of a scientist on the Rosetta/Philae comet landing mission but turned into a wider, somewhat confessional post on feminism. In a nutshell: women routinely experience abuse and threat of which I believe men are almost entirely oblivious. 

As before my blogging energies have been split between my own blog here, and the ScraperWiki blog. My personal blogging is dominated by book reviews these days as, to be honest, is my blogging at ScraperWiki. I blog about data science books on the ScraperWiki blog  – typically books about software – and anything else on this blog. “Anything else” is usually broadly related to the history of science and technology.

This year has been quite eclectic. I read about the precursors to Darwin and his theory of evolution, macroeconomics, the Bell Laboratories, railways, parenthood, technology in society, finding the longitude (twice), Lord Kelvin, ballooning, Pompeii and I’ve just finished a book on Nevil Maskelyne – Astronomer Royal in the second half of the 18th century. I think my favourite of these was Finding Longitude by Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt not only is the content well written but it is beautifully presented.

Over on the ScraperWiki blog I reviewed a further 12 books, bingeing on graph theory and data mining. My favourites from the "work" set were Matthew A. Russell’s Mining the Social Web and Seven Databases in Seven Weeks. Mining the Social Web because it introduces a bunch of machine learning algorithms around interesting social data, and the examples are supplied as IPython notebooks run in a virtual machine. Seven Databases is different – it gives a whistle stop tour of various types of database but manages to give deep coverage quite quickly.

I continue to read a lot whilst not doing a huge amount of programming – as I observed last year. I did write a large chunk of the API to the EU NewsReader project we’re working on which involved me learning SPARQL – a query language for the semantic web. Obviously to learn SPARQL I read a book, Learning SPARQL, I also had some help from colleagues on the project.

I had a lot of fun visualising the traffic and history of the London Underground, I did a second visualisation post on whether to walk between Underground stations in London.

Back on this blog I did some writing about technology, talking about my favourite text editor (Sublime Text), my experiences with Apple, Ubuntu and Windows operating systems, the dinky Asus T100 Transformer laptop, and replacing my hard drive with an SSD (much easier than I thought it would be). The Asus is sadly unused it just doesn’t serve a useful purpose beside my tablet and ultrabook format laptop. The SSD drive is a revelation, it just makes everything feel quicker.

The telescope has been in the loft for much of the last year but I did a blog post on the Messier objects – nebulae and so forth, and I actually took an acceptable photo of the Orion nebula although this went unblogged.

Finally, the source of the photo at the top of the page, I visited San Sebastian for an EU project I’m working on. I only had my phone so the pictures aren’t that good.

Happy New Year!

San Sebastian, aka Donostia

Once again I travel for work, more specifically to a NewsReader project meeting in San Sebastian, or in the Basque language, Donostia.

My trip there was mildly stressful, Easyjet fly direct Manchester-Bilbao but only on three days of the week – the wrong days for my meeting. Therefore I travelled via Charles De Gaulle Airport, which made a 1.5 hour transfer rather tight and led to me being obviously irritated with an immigration official. I should add that Charles De Gaulle Airport was the only stressful part of my trip.

Once at Bilbao it is a little over an hour on an express bus to reach Donostia. And it’s a rather odd experience. I’ve only visited Spain once in the past, to Barcelona and the rest of my knowledge of the country is from trashy TV about Brits on holiday and art house films (and books). The Basque country reminded me of the transfers from the airport to the ski resort I’ve made across the Alps. Steep-wooded valleys, chalet-style buildings scattered across hillsides with orchards and hay-meadows. Small towns wedged into the bottoms of valleys, apartment blocks creeping up the hillsides in the manner of the French rather than Austrian Alps. The only oddity is the occasional palm tree.

There is a fair amount of geology on display, I didn’t catch any photos from the bus but you get a hint of it from this photo of the bay at Donostia.

San Sebastian, the bay

It was unseasonably warm whilst I was in Donostia, I remarked that I’d consider the temperature normal for Spain to one of my hosts, who replied; “You’ve made two mistakes there: (1) you’re not in Spain…”.

Once in Donostia, it is strikingly reminiscent of the North Wales coast and Llandudno! Fine buildings along a bay with a steep promontory looking down on the town.

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The quality of the street furniture is rather better, and the buildings have a rather more wealthy feel. The local vegetation also reminds you that you’re not in Llandudno.

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Apparently the Spanish royal family used to holiday in Donostia at the Miramar Palace, not really that palatial but it has fine views over the bay and the grounds reach down to the sea:

Miramar Palace

I wonder whether they used this rather ornate beach house:

Bathing hut on the sea front

The town hall is pretty impressive too:

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I failed a bit on local cuisine only making it out one night of three, to the Cider House. Apparently a typically Basque thing. The dining room is reached past large barrels of cider, which are the main event. The cider drinking scheme is as follows: at regular intervals the patron shouted something, and the willing and able followed him to a selected barrel. He opened a small tap producing a two metre or so stream of cider, projected horizontally. The assembled drinkers catch a an inch or so of cider each in large plastic beakers. Points are awarded for catching the stream as far from the barrel as possible, and once started the drinker moves up the stream. The next drinker aligns themselves to catch the stream when the previous drinker moves out of the way. The result is quite splashy.

Between drinks there is a fixed menu of bread, cod omelette, cod and greens, the largest barbeque steaks I’ve ever seen, finishing with walnuts, quince jelly and cheese.

Aside from this my colleagues were keen on pintxos, the local take on the more widely known tapas.

I stayed at the NH Aranzazu which was very nice, not particularly expensive and very convenient for the university but not so much for the town centre.

Trainspotting

eurostar-logoI am something of a trainspotter.

That’s not to say I have ever stood at the end of a platform writing down the numbers of the trains that go by, rather that have an interest in things of a railway nature. So obviously I was very excited to get the opportunity to go to Paris on the train.

I’ve been to Paris on the train before. Fifteen years or so ago HappyMouffetard and I travelled from Cambridge to Paris for the odd weekend. In fact that’s where HappyMouffetard picked up her twitter handle. In those days the terminus for the Eurostar was at Waterloo, so the trip meant crossing London from Kings Cross where the Cambridge train came in. Once on the Eurostar you pottered through Kent to the Dover end of the tunnel at what seemed like barely more than walking pace. After passing through the tunnel to France the train accelerated for a while before the guard told us we were travelling at some unimaginable velocity. He sounded a bit smug. The Eurostar would then whine rapidly through northern France to arrive at Gare du Nord.

Things have changed. Now the Eurostar terminus is at St Pancras which is next door to Kings Cross and a short step down the road from Euston, the station I arrive at from Chester. St Pancras International is a rather fine station, particularly when compared to the competition: airports. Not only does it offer a long bank of charging points but also free Wifi! The trip to Dover is transformed, the train plunges underground for the first few miles but then whizzes along at positively unBritish speeds to the Channel. A little over two hours after leaving London, you are in Paris. Pick the right trains and there are just two scheduled stops between Chester and Paris (at Crewe and in London)!

This makes the whole journey rather more of a practical proposition, even if you are travelling from northern England. Chester to London is currently a little over two hours travel time, it would take me an hour and a bit to reach Manchester airport. Check-in for Eurostar is an hour or so, and then a couple of hours to Paris and you end up at Gare du Nord in the centre of Paris rather than Charles de Gaulle Airport – some distance away. Once at Gare du Nord you walk straight off the train onto the street. Similarly on my return trip, I walk straight off the train and I’m on the platform at Euston in 15 minutes.

I’ve rarely found airports relaxing, they seem hellholes of “duty-free” shopping, stressed travellers, over-crowding, bad food, building works to insert more shopping opportunities, suffused with baseline low-level dread that the implausibility of powered flight invokes. The only exceptions I’ve found are when I’ve been able to travel business class and take refuge in the business lounge. In fact, I’m not bothered about the business class flying experience – it’s the lounge I’d pay for myself! And once you’re on the plane it’s cheek by jowl with your fellow man, and air hostesses trying to force plastic food upon you, hand luggage woes as there is insufficient space for the hand luggage everyone now carries since you get gouged for hold luggage.

Cost wise things aren’t so happy, a train to London is expensive unless you travel “off peak”, a small window in the middle of the day and later in the evening.

In summary, from Chester to Paris:

Flying: 1 hour 30 minutes + 2hours check-in + 1 hour 30 minutes flight + 1 hour to Paris + airport hell = nasty 6 hours

Train: 2 hours + 1 hour check-in + 2 hours + shiny nice things = nice 5 hours