Older blog entries for salmoni (starting at number 565)

Strewth! One of my photographs was accepted at the Pentax Photo Gallery. That's surprising because I understand that an awful lot of very good pictures are declined.

And of course, I had 5 others declined too! ;-)

Anyway, this is it: a shot from Trondheim in Norway.

It's hot here in the Philippines - about 34 degrees all told. Everyone is out on the terrace chatting while I'm slaving over a hot computer trying to write an administrative database for a new (FOSS) program. I'll be able to release full details about it soon but it will take a bit of time to get it functional. Okay, that's not the purpose of FOSS, but I'm trying to get the design and architecture right first time.

I had fun on the weekend writing an event-handler from scratch which I managed to do in just a few lines of Python. Progress is going well and I hope to get something that works released by the end of May.

Still, it's a relatively peaceful though busy time. I'm working almost constantly on this software, but I have few other real pressures. It's a pleasure to be able to work full-time on a FOSS project and do it the way I want to do it. I'm happy because this whole time reminds me why I love programming so much - the constant challenges and beating them to take more steps toward a final goal of actually having built something worthwhile.

I'm taking on a lot of roles with this work: interaction design, programmer, tester, all-round monkey etc. I like the different colours and flavours that this work brings me - and if I ever get tired, relaxation here is good, honest and easy. I'm a lucky man indeed.

21 Mar 2008 (updated 21 Mar 2008 at 03:43 UTC) »

Looks like I've spent some time away from here! But I have been extremely busy.

So what's happened since my last entry? Non-FOSS, my wife came and lived with me in the UK for a few months, but we've had enough and are now both living in the Philippines together! I have my residence visa approved and should be picking it up soon (next week). Jell is pregnant too - the due date is the end of July. We're not sure if it's a girl or a boy yet, but should be having the scan soon to find out. My job contract finished which made things easier for parting so I'm no longer and academic. Life is good!

In FOSS stuff, I am revamping SalStat - or rather, I'm dumping it altogether and with a partner in New Zealand, we're launching a much better program. It will be open source and we want to make a business around it. The whole program is quite ambitious but quite possible. As always, we're using Python to code it. We're gunning for SPSS and SAS in a serious way. Investment ideas/leads are welcomed.

And how come I'm a master now? I still think of myself as a journeyer and probably will for ever ;-)

I'm back from PyCon UK which was probably the best conference I have ever been to. It was large enough so that there was always someone new to talk to (and new things to hear about), but not too large (unlike the med ed conference in Trondheim with ~1,800 delegates). People were friendly, it was well organised, interesting and varied, and I had a great time listening to things, having ideas and chatting away about my own stuff.

Isn't putting a business plan together really boring? I know this type of thing is usually done and it can help with the thought process of defining exactly what (and what not) a business should focus on; but it's a dry topic even then.

Somehow I think that passing around lots of hand-written notes to potential investors will not be too successful!

31 Aug 2007 (updated 31 Aug 2007 at 11:35 UTC) »

I'm getting back into Python! I have registered a place at PyCon UK and look forward to meeting Pythonistas there.

My reason for getting back in is because I'm going to set up a business dealing with open source software! I don't want to say too much at this stage but it should be great fun. The OS bit might only be partly - there will be dual licensing - but given my past, it's not hard to work out what field I will be concentrating upon.

flickr users are strange. I put up some pictures of a visit to Trondheim last week (a medical education conference), and my most viewed picture is a boring shot of some houses (first picture). My favourite photos though were the second and third (they look much better larger) and have been mostly ignored despite the dramatic sky. Still, I guess I have different taste to everyone else! :-P

The conference was good although KLM said that my suitcase was delayed until the next flight in. Huh! Lots of people did the same flight as me and didn't have that problem. They said that they would drop it over to my house later that day (yesterday) but I'm still waiting. Maybe it's been lost now. Shame because it has lots of clothes, my suit, my camera and favourite lens, and lots of work from the conference that I won't be able to retrieve again. Grrwwww!


Well, I'm married now! Jell will make an honest man of me I'm sure! All my parents and one brother came to attend the wedding with me which was fantastic, and I think they had a great time experiencing the Philippines for the first time ever.

Here is to the future. Cheers!

For some odd reason, I've been playing a bit of chess lately and enjoy it much more than I used to. I think my pattern matching skills have got better since I used to play it.

One day to go until I leave the country for the wedding. It's all so exciting!

Hey hub - I didn't know you were a member of RFF. I'm there myself but not for long. Am currently using Fed's 2 (Fed-50 lens) and 4(I-61 lens - superb!), Konica C35, and recently got my dirty mitts on a Fujica 35 EE which is a laugh. Waiting for the test roll to come out on that one, but the Russian twins work well. The Fed 4 in particular (rather the I-61) is surprisingly good. I'm getting A3 prints from Superia 200. Got some Reala (100) for my wedding to get the best picture.

And I have TeX installed on my new machine now: MikTeX precisely. It compiled my book on stats after downloading a needed module.

For music, I'm using Songbird which is an iTunes clone but much faster and under the GPL.

That's good because this open source stats project needs contributions and I suggested the code to my book - which is in TeX (lots of equations and code listings - the shallow learning curve is worthwhile!). There are 9 forms of quantiles in there for some reason - I think even SAS only does 5.

The problem is that I don't know which publishers I should aim for with this book - or even if self-publishing is the only way to go.

I've also been having some thoughts about extracting documentation from forums. With a popular piece of software, there is often a dedicated forum for it. But often, questions are worded wrongly (in ways that the people with the answers don't understand), repeatedly, and irrelevantly. A good piece of software would take the questions, work out which are along the same lines, work out responses to those questions, and compile them into a document with irrelevant information removed: like an automatic faq creator using forums. No firm ideas as of yet, but it would be a useful thing for open source to capture the community to provide documentation.

I have less than 4 days to go before I leave the UK! Then, 8 days later, I will be married to Jell. I'm quite nervous about it but also very excited. In fact, I think my nerves are more about flying there than getting married!


Lake Taal in the Philippines at sunset

I've been chatting to a man in New Zealand who is starting a new open source statistics program which sounds interesting. More details to follow. I suggested that the code I worked out for "PythonStats" (the book) could be useful for this purpose.

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