Dave Snowdon

I bought this postcard about ten years ago in Karlsruhe, Germany and it just resurfaced while i was sorting out my stuff after moving house. The back suggests that it's titled "Dompteur" by Michael Sowa but I don't know any more about it than that. However, I think in many ways it sums up perfectly the experience of writing computer software.

After some discussion on Aldebaran Robotics Developer program's forum a few of the UK developers decided to meetup in London. We were lucky enough to be joined by Jerome Monceaux, the architect of the NAO platform and Akim, the developer program community manager who came over from Paris to spend the day with us.

After introducing ourselves, the first order of business was a little surgery on Tim's NAO to replace some stripped screws on the battery compartment.

Have finally got my Linux box back on-line today after a couple of months of decorating and then moving house. We now have at least one CAT5 cable to every room in the house except the kitchen. This afternoon I spent some time wiring up a patch bay in a utility cupboard and checking everything out with a cable tester.

Being the unashamed geek that I am I think it's quite cool to have wired ethernet to every room and now my Linux box (which has no wireless interface) is taking advantage of it.

I ocasionally read Chinasmack, a website that aims to give some insight into the internet stories that are currently hot in china. One of the recent stories featured a Thai TV advert urging people not to forget those around them when using mobile devices. It's a bit schmaltzy but the point is still valid.

I started using GNU Emacs when writing my PhD thesis in LaTeX and ironically that was probably the time, at least up until recently when I knew most about emacs and was capable of writing bits of elisp to customise my environment. After finishing my PhD I still used emacs but not exclusively and gradually forgot everything except the basic set of text editing commands.

For a while now I've wanted to write more about software development. However, I still want to write about various personal projects and other random stuff that would dilute the posts on software development. After some dithering I've decided to create a new blog, The Code Road, to focus on software development and use davesnowdon.com for personal projects and other random stuff that I feel like writing about.

Goodbye Mum

After months of procrastination, over the Christmas break I finally got around to converting my site from running SPIP to running drupal. SPIP is easy to use and configure and quite good at what it's aimed at - on-line magazines. However, I never really got on with with it and got the site set up the way I wanted.

I like VMware. I run Linux on my home machine and VMware makes it pretty painless to run a Windows XP VM (not to mention other flavours of Windows and Linux) so I can test sites on different browsers and run MS Word when Open Office is not sufficient.

Each time I start VMware workstation a tip-of-the-day dialog appears. I rarely pay it a lot of attention but haven’t turned it of because I figure that one day it might tell me something useful. However, that day is not today.

Take a look at this:

It’s perhaps not the most interesting subject, but it seems to me that packaging has (mostly) got smarter over the last decade or so. I don’t mean that technology is built into the packaging itself but that it seems to have been designed more intelligently. For example, boxes that might once have been glued or stapled together now unfold out of a single piece of cardboard and require glue on one seam at most (maybe I buy too much stuff from Amazon).