Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

Follies

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/Sabbatical

Just so you know, I am still alive... ...but the sabbatical finally had to come to an end. I'm very excited to enter the world of work once more. No really. ¬\¬ I'm sure my brand of proactive problem solving will have me going places soon enough... ...especially seeing as I'm no longer long-haired, bearded, nor a wearer of rock t-shirts, combats or skater shoes i.e. a typical software developer. I now own four suits. Four. Rest assured, now the upheaval of relocating and job hunting has ceased, blog posts shall once again resume. Possibly not at the rate of...

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A Restful Weekend
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A Restful Weekend

This is an amusing play-on-words type of blog post as I can't remember the last time I had a restful weekend. I'm simultaneously job hunting and flat hunting in Edinburgh from my base back in Fife (thanks Mum & Dad ;) with most of my stuff, half of my CDs and most importantly my guitar back in Cambridge \sigh\ No matter, I press on with a mini project for a RESTful web service using ASP.Net and WCF. A couple of weeks back I tweeted the following: The awesome rateyourmusic.com do have a section within a user's profile page that provides...

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Beauty in Mathematics
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Beauty in Mathematics

Many people look at the beauty in nature and wonder how it all could have possibly been created. You could also look in awe at the Sistine Chapel and feel likewise impressed but we know this was simply the patient brushstrokes of a talented artist with plenty of time. Quite often the most stunning sights in the universe are a result of simple patterns repeating and evolving over time. Though we can't create a planet in a laboratory and fast-forward a few millenia whilst looking in, we can create simple patterns using mathematics. I'm going to show you three such...

7 min readRead more →
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What University Challenge considers Computer Science

Happy New Year - 2012 is the year of code! The ICT curriculum in the UK is to be overhauled to make it less about word processors and spreadsheets and more about programming. The smartphone application market has kick-started a new generation of programmers who don't need to be in a team of hundreds to make some interesting, cool and worthwhile. But are we i.e. technology enthusiasts, too gung-ho about coding? Shouldn't we try just as hard to promote computer science? Case in point, over the festive break I managed to catch a special edition of University Challenge and was...

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max(e^pi, pi^e)?
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max(e^pi, pi^e)?

Greetings new blog readers and functional programming aficionados. The theme of the content here is rather varied so you're unlikely to see any more functional programming articles for a while. Choosing the next topic for a new audience is crucial though and despite having a couple of ideas I decided to go with the mathematical / coding one. My experiences and advice on effective software development with team members thousands of miles away (told from my personal experience on both sides of the fence ;) will have to wait until next week. Instead I'll talk about a simple mathematical interview...

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Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬\¬ to write up an explanation of a small Fprogram spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the mental parapet....

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