From yesterday’s walk at Wandlebury.
The Holly and the Ivy
December 21st, 2011
You can’t see me, but I can see you!
December 20th, 2011
I met this fellow on a walk today. Isn’t he magnificent?
He seemed very placid, but I was grateful that there was a fence between us, unlike the time when I met one of his cousins a few years back.
Aeropress-gang
December 19th, 2011
Friends and long-term readers will know that I’m a huge fan of my Aeropress coffee maker. I’ve used mine several times per day since the day it arrived.
It isn’t particularly speedy, though, if you need to make more than one cup at a time. If that’s an issue for you, you may need one of these. Or these. Or even one of these.
If, on the other hand, you’re not in a hurry, then (with thanks to Michael Dales for the recommendation), I suggest one of these Porlex grinders. Small, portable, tidy, well-engineered, a good source of exercise, and it makes the coffee taste better, partly because of the quality of the grind, and partly because you really feel you’ve earned it by the end…
TSB Grant Variations
December 19th, 2011
I’ve just been through the interesting process of applying for (and failing to get) a TSB Proof of Concept grant for an idea I’m working on.
For those who haven’t tried this, it involves filling in a substantial form where each section has strident word limits – it always seems to have plenty of space for the things that would appear to me to be relatively unimportant at the ‘Proof of Concept’ stage, and not enough space for the things about which one can say quite a bit. It took me a couple of days to fill out the forms. None the less, it’s worth persevering, because the size of the grants on offer can be significant – up to £100K for the Proof of Concept, for example, though that would have to be matched with £67K from elsewhere.
I wasn’t surprised at not getting the grant – there were complaints recently that the board had spent most of the available funds in the first half of the year, meaning that only around 10% of applicants even got past the first stage if, like me, they were unlucky enough to apply after the autumn (as opposed to over 40% beforehand). But I was surprised to get what appeared to be useful feedback from the three assessors – something which had never happened in the days of the Regional Development Agencies.
So I decided to re-apply – you’re allowed a second chance – taking the feedback into account, and in particular addressing the one section where I’d had a very low score due to a slight misunderstanding of what was required. To most of the other sections I only made minimal alterations because the scores were pretty good, but I hope I improved them a bit based on the feedback. Another day of work, and then a six-week wait, before another rejection. Oh well – c’est la vie!
But I am interested in one aspect of this. There were only two assessors on my second attempt, and, almost without exception, the scores were substantially lower. If we leave out the question on which I had concentrated, where the score did go up by a small amount, on average my ‘improved’ version scored 1.6 points less on each section. That’s 1.6 out of 10, which is quite a variation, if you remember that the changes were pretty minimal and always in line with the feedback from the first attempt. But it’s also pretty consistent – on none of the other sections did my score go up, and on most of them it went down between 1.3 and 2.3 points.
All of which makes me think that the assessors for the second attempt may have had rather different scoring habits from the first ones, and I wonder if that is taken into account in the final reckoning of this closely-fought competition?
I make no claims about whether the higher or lower score is a better assessment of my own project’s worth, and my knowledge of statistics is too rusty to work out what reasonable error bars might be here: we’re talking, after all, about very small statistical samples. But it does suggest that applicants should take any scores and feedback with a big pinch of salt. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t re-apply, and in particular if you can spare the time for the paperwork you shouldn’t be put off if you get a low score – the lottery may go in your favour second time around…
Gutenberg to Zuckerberg
December 19th, 2011
Congrats to John on the birth of his new child.
I’m honoured to the be the recipient of an early copy: it’s actually released on the 5th January, which is a pity, because it would be a great Christmas present. But it’s well worth remembering for birthdays in the New Year and spring. And you can always pre-order it for yourself now – you know you deserve some presents too…
Dropbox Workflow
December 14th, 2011
Here’s a trivial but perhaps useful tip for those involved in remote collaboration…
I’ve been helping a client with some proof-reading recently, a process which involves a large number of small documents going through various stages of approval involving the client, their designer, and me.
We start with the PDF produced by the designer from the raw text, which I then proof-read and mark up, sometimes coming up with questions which need clarification from the client, and then the designer uses all of this to produce the final PDFs. We are all geographically separated, and often working at different times of day.
The designer in this case is Rick Lecoat at Shark Attack Design, who suggested a nice system to handle the workflow. He shared a folder on Dropbox, within which he’d created several numbered subfolders, something like this:
As the proofs became available, he would put them into the first folder. I’d mark them up and move them into one of the secondary ones, depending on whether I had any pending questions about them (which I’d add as comments in the PDF). If they ended up in ‘2b’, the client could check my questions, and add appropriate responses, before moving the file into folder ‘2’. Lastly, the various comments would be taken into account by Rick and used to produce the final versions in the last folder. (Our actual workflow was slightly different, but you get the idea.)
I really like this system. It works even though some of us are on Windows, some on Macs, and I’m mostly working on my iPad. Computer scientists will recognise it as a simple ‘state machine’ but implemented in a way that non-computer scientists can easily understand! It’s also trivial to modify on the fly. I could, for example, add a folder called ‘1b – Quentin currently checking’, into which I could move a document when I started to proof-read it, if I wanted to make that stage more explicit. As long as the folder titles are sufficiently explanatory for their use to be clear, and a document is only moved and never copied, it all works very nicely.
The numbers help clarify the general flow, and also ensure that the folders are displayed in a sensible order when sorted alphabetically. You can lay out the icons in the folder to make it even more obvious (on the Mac at least – I don’t know if Windows can do this now). As a variation, you could include in a folder’s title the name of the person responsible for examining its contents, for example, or add a README file in the folder explaining its use and where things should go next. Dropbox keeps everything nicely in sync, can give you desktop notifications as things change, and, as long as one of you has a paid account, will keep backups of all the past versions of the documents as well.
Your workflow may be very different, but if it involves files and collaboration, you may find something along these lines useful. I once modified a bug-tracking system to handle the CVs and covering letters of incoming job-applicants, as they went through the various stages of interviewing, rejection, offers, acceptance etc. It worked well, but the admin staff needed to be taught how to use the web-based system. I think this might have been a better approach.
Thanks, Rick!
English pronunciation is hard…
December 13th, 2011
It sometimes amazes me that anybody can learn our language who didn’t grow up with it.
English Pronunciation is a pleasing bit of verse by G. Nolst Trenité. It begins:
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse…
And you can read the rest here. Lovely.
Many thanks to Dave Hodgkinson for the link.
There was a time (back when I was at school with Dave) when I could speak a reasonable amount of Esperanto. Don’t remember much now, but I still can’t help thinking it’s a good idea.
The Minstrel’s Tale
December 10th, 2011
I’m not sure if this little story really works, but I had fun writing it. Don’t worry, I won’t give up my day job. Or wouldn’t, if I had one…
Nostalgia
December 10th, 2011
Status-Q as it appeared about a decade ago, thanks to the Internet Archive.
All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air…
December 10th, 2011
The very pretty Nest thermostat has justifiably attracted a certain amount of attention recently. But it has a few failings, too:
- It’s expensive – someone quipped that the Apple-inspired design comes with Apple-inspired prices
- It’s a single point of temperature measurement, and what most houses need is multiple thermostats, or at least sensors
- It isn’t available in the UK and wouldn’t work with most UK heating systems anyway,
So, it’s not for me. But I am keen to upgrade my heating controls: we have pretty substantial fuel bills even for our small and fairly well-insulated house.
So I’m after recommendations. Here’s my ideal system:
- You could set the temperature you want in each room, and control the times of day at which you want it. Or, even better, it would learn the pattern for each room. (And not get too confused by daylight savings time changes)
- We have radiators in each room, so it would need to manage the radiator valves. (i.e. replace the TRVs)
- The temperature sensors would not necessarily be on the radiator valves, but could be elsewhere in the room.
- The timing of the boiler ignition would be based on the combined needs of the house, and not on the temperature of a particular thermostat in the hall, or of the time programmed into a separate heating controller.
- Ideally, it could be programmed through a wife-friendly app or web interface.
Anyone know of anything that satisfies a significant number of these? I don’t expect to get them all. But I also don’t want to spend a lot of money and time on a system which does some of them, only to discover that another would have been a better choice.
Oh, and I’d rather not have to do any major plumbing…
Any suggestions welcome!
May I?
December 7th, 2011
I’m not quite sure if I’m allowed to have this. But we could have a fun chasing game if you wanted to take it away from me….
It’s lovely once you’re in…
December 6th, 2011
A rainy night at Gog Magog Hills farm shop – one of my favourite local haunts.
In a box in the loft I found my old Olympus OM30, which I purchased a little over a quarter of a century ago: an OK, but never great, camera. With it, however, were a couple of Olympus OM-series Zuiko lenses, which were pretty good for the price. And I was delighted to find that you can get adapters to connect them to a micro-4/3 body like my Panasonic Lumix GH2. You can buy the adapter from Olympus for £143 or from Fotodiox for £29. I chose the latter.
My first few experiments with the combination are here.
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