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Goodbye SPIP; Hello drupal
Wed, 06/01/2010 - 11:38

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.

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Getting started and physical assembly
Wed, 06/01/2010 - 01:42

The goal of this project was to construct a low-cost expandable robot platform that Aurorans members can build on without a lot of hardware. Danny and I reckoned that most technology enthusiasts would have a laptop and using a laptop gives the advantage of a familiar environment for for use and development of the software for the robot. Besides the laptop and some standard rechargeable batteries the components required for version 1 are:

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Welcome
Mon, 04/01/2010 - 20:54

Welcome to my personal web site.

I've just finished migrating all the content from SPIP to drupal 6 and things (such as the page design) are still rough around the edges. I have set up redirects for some of the more popular pages. If you've followed a link here and were expecting to see something else it probably means I did not set up a redirect for the page you were looking for - in that case please use the search box on the top left.

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Chairbot
Mon, 04/01/2010 - 10:54

I'm a member of the Aurorans group ( meetup.com page, ning site). Danny Staple and myself were tasked with putting together a robot that would be simple enough to assemble by interested newbies to robotics (although I hardly qualify as an expert myself). Danny & I agreed on some basic hardware and set to work. Danny's version, the Eee bot, is documented here. This page documents my version of the robot, Chairbot.

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Hexapod
Mon, 04/01/2010 - 10:51
This page describes my attempts to build and program a hexapod (6-legged) robot. For more information, see the updates below.
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Projects
Mon, 04/01/2010 - 08:37

Active Projects

Old Projects

One of my favourite projects of recent years was the work I did together with Lawrence Ball on the Lifehouse Method web site for Pete Townshend

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About Dave
Tue, 29/12/2009 - 14:58

Dave Snowdon was formerly a research scientist at Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France where he created innovative systems for information sharing and worked with peer to peer and context-driven mobile systems. After Xerox, he co-founded Snowtiger Design, a small web/software consultancy, where he put a decade worth of personal experience in professional software development to work for his clients. While at Snowtiger he wrote the software and web user interface for Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse Method - a system to generate unique pieces of music for each individual user.

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Review: District 9
Sun, 27/09/2009 - 00:55

I hadn’t heard anything about District 9 apart from it involved aliens on Earth before watching it but I’m pleased that I succumbed to the impulse to watch the film.

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Today's tip-of-the-day, live from the "No sh*t sherlock" department
Tue, 22/09/2009 - 00:04

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:

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Packaging
Mon, 31/08/2009 - 01:31

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).

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