Fontastica: a spring update (on 5th March, 2013)
A few months ago I posted about my final year brainchild, Fontastica. Work has been continuous albeit slow as deadlines for other modules got in the way between times. More importantly, I made the stupid mistake of leaving my pen drive in a computer at university the day before my Christmas deadline. I got home, [...]
Fontastica (on 8th November, 2012)
About two weeks before the start of term, I was lying in bed fretting over what my final year project could be. I’d half-decided a few months earlier that I wanted to build a gallery-based CMS, something as easy-to-use as WordPress but that focuses on images and building galleries, so that professional designers – with [...]
Adventures in Embedded OpenCL Part 1 (on 2nd November, 2012)
So, for my final year project I’m playing around with OpenCL EP 1.1 on a Freescale Sabre-Lite i.MX6 platform. I’m going to try and do some OpenCL accelerated video encoding on it. To begin with, I did a CPU-only (with SIMD assembly) run through with the encoder, on my i7 2600k-based host machine and my [...]
A year of work (on 22nd August, 2012)
There are a lot of people in the Twitterverse who are disdainful of university as a tool to get into the web industry. Not me, for a number of reasons (to be discussed some other time – honestly, you don’t want to see the number of draft blog posts I have on this subject already). [...]
Why still the hate? (on 31st July, 2012)
A few months ago I posted about how and why my browser is the best browser there is out there. I still fervently believe this is true, despite the trouble I’ve had with Flash player recently (but then again, who doesn’t have trouble with it?) and despite Firebug spontaneously dying. I don’t like the new [...]
Why I resist the future (on 25th June, 2012)
It’s very simple: I am a kinesthete. I’m not entirely sure if that’s the right term for it, but that’s what Richard calls me, and it seems to ring true. I love to touch things. I wasn’t generally the sort of child who was told “look with your eyes, not with your hands”, but I [...]
Summer Refresh (on 21st June, 2012)
Well, I did it, I’ve done it, look at me go: I’ve updated Herbal Jazz’s layout for the first time substantially in a year. It’s a big change and I quite like it – and I hope you all do too! There are a few big things that this redesign brings. Most things are pretty [...]
Dear 16-year-old me (on 30th May, 2012)
It’s five years since I was sixteen. Nearly six. That’s not a long time, really, but I guess that’s a long time to me. Six years! That’s almost a quarter of my life. It’s coming up to ten years since I met my best friend, it’s been eleven since I moved to Lincolnshire. Since I [...]
Redesign & Reformation (on 25th May, 2012)
Over the last few months I’ve been rethinking the design of the site. I quite often find myself in the unfortunate position where I start a project and peter out oafter a certain amount of time, leaving the project unfinished (prime example: click the “portfolio” link. Go on, I dare you). That’s why, when I [...]
A (slightly) less hacky Raspberry Pi Serial Port solution. (on 21st May, 2012)
In a previous post (here) I might have mentioned in passing that the method in use wasn’t particularly suitable for longer term use. Which was entirely true, and is exactly why I’m now back to bore your socks off once more! To get that off to a good start, the same disclaimer as before applies, [...]
Static Analysis (on 17th May, 2012)
I decided to throw some old code through FxCop for giggles. So, my code is bad right?
Getting Serial Output from the UART on the Raspberry Pi (Hacky!) (on 16th May, 2012)
Try this first! Link Hi, I thought I’d give a short demo of how to get serial output from a Raspberry Pi, as I just did for mine. This is useful for boot failures before you start getting graphical output as usually the UART is initialised before the OS even starts booting (this is true [...]
Drupal: Hiding a block when a user’s logged out (on 2nd May, 2012)
One of our clients presented an interesting problem today: they wanted a block to be hidden from view for users who were logged out when the content was unpublished. To start with, I wondered “why the heck do you need to do that, it’s unpublished so they can’t see the node anyway”, only to actually [...]
3-2-1 BROWSER WARS!!! (on 26th April, 2012)
Yeah okay I’m not really sure what I was going for with that title but whatever I like it okay? Yesterday Opera announced it will begin supporting -webkit- prefixes. Excellent! Actually, according to most of the web, not so excellent. Personally I’m sort of on the fence about the whole thing. Let me start by [...]
My browser is better than yours (on 11th April, 2012)
Yesterday, I got into a bit of a tizz on Twitter. It all started with one seemingly innocent tweet from Luke Jones and spiralled out of control from there: If you think Firefox is better than Chrome or Safari, there’s something wrong with you. — Luke Jones (@lukejonesme) April 10, 2012 I shan’t bother with [...]