Posts by Daniele Procida

Looking for a holiday DIY project? Build your own pen-plotter, for under $15

I'm going to try to port the code to MicroPython. Raspberry Pi Picos and other MicroPython boards are more easily obtainable.

I'm told that the low-level PWM control is available on the Pico. The other challenge will be doing without Numpy.

Galileo in spaaace: France's 'equivalence principle' satellite

No experimentation required

"Galileo's suspicion was that all objects (in the same gravitational field) should fall at the same speed, irrespective of their mass, and he was eventually able to conclude that in a vacuum this would indeed be indeed be the case."

It wasn't really a suspicion that required observation to confirm or confute. It was based on reasoning alone, based on what would happen if a lighter (supposedly slower-falling) object were connected to a heavier (supposedly faster-falling) object.

The lighter object would retard the fall of the heavier object, so the speed of the pair would be a bit slower than that of the heavier. Yet by the same principle, the two connected objects would now constitute a single heavier object, so would be faster than both.

It's clearly impossible for both conclusions to be true, so the principle ("heavier objects fall faster") that leads us to them can't possibly be true.

Boybanders ONE DIRECTION launch DoS attack on open-source bods

Re: AT LAST!

No need for anything so extreme - 1 Direction will inevitably fall foul of the invading aliens, dinosaurs, evil masterminds, etc that regularly visit Cardiff en-route to conquering THE WORLD!!!

We have those at every DjangoCon.

Re: Won't somebody please think of the...

We've thought of everything: we have invited One Direction to come to the open day of free talks and tutorials and learn some Python skills, and in return we hope they'll be willing to play a few songs for us during the code sprints.

Re: It's one way to get publicity

I'm searching GitHub for evidence. The Rails community are vehemently denying responsibility (for One Direction).

Just to add to the intrigue, it turns out the Manic Street Preachers are in town the same night; Haskell coders to a man, I'm willing to bet.

It's one way to get publicity

Just to confirm that we've been able to shift the event by two days, and all is well.

If any Django/Python developers would like to spend a week in June in sunny Cardiff (as you will know, there is always fine weather in South Wales in June, because of the Welsh Government) do join us. There's a huge supportive community out there, and programmers from the UK are under-represented in it.

Even if you can't stay for the whole six days, Sunday 31st May is our open day of talks and introductory tutorials, and all events will be free.

We also have an accessibility programme - there'll be speech to text transcription, assistance for those with visual disabilities, a free crèche and more.

There's more information about all this on our website.

Finally, I don't think it's true that One Direction did it because they are fans of Rails, that was just the journalist's joke - they seem much more like PHP developers to me.

To Russia With Love: Snowden's pole-dancer girlfriend is living with him in Moscow

Nice. An article illustrated with a picture of a woman's crotch, and a strap-line reducing a the subject of the article to a mere object of a man's sexual activity.

I wonder why so many women find this industry an unpleasant, uncomfortable one to be in?

Linux systemd dev says open source is 'SICK', kernel community 'awful'

Re: Assholes seem to be part of the deal for success in the tech world

This is simply untrue.

There are plenty of examples of leadership that don't follow this unpleasant pattern, including in the world of open-source software.

The Python and Django communities (representing the software behind such things as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, global telescope networks and so on, so not exactly insignificant) have explicit, unmissable and accepted codes of conduct.

People in those communities tend to be polite, welcoming to newcomers and helpful to beginners. Abuse of the kind described is not tolerated.

It doesn't hold back the software.

GitHub probes worker's claims of hostile, sexist office culture

Re: Awful lot of misogynists here

My 'beef' is that this story is being told from one side. We only have in this article 'the victim's' account.

No we don't. We also have GitHub's reply: https://github.com/blog/1800-update-on-julie-horvath-s-departure.

There's not much room for doubt.

GitHub's official response

I wasn't there either and I don't know what happened. However, anyone whose immediate announcement is "yeah yeah victim culture feminization so-called sexual harassment" is saying more about their own attitudes, and their own likely refusal to see bullying and marginalisation when it's going on under their noses, than about whatever happened.

And given GitHub's official response: https://github.com/blog/1800-update-on-julie-horvath-s-departure it's pretty clear that whatever precisely she did suffer, it probably was horrible, and probably wasn't too different from her description of it.

IT bloke denies trying to shag sheep outside football ground

Re: Do you know which IT firm Lovell works for? Email me and spill the beans. ®

The request for further information seemed rather creepy to me. What do you plan to do, publish it so that his life can be made even more humiliating and miserable?

Boffins create 100,000 DPI image

An image from Playboy magazine

I can't imagine why more women aren't attracted to careers in science and technology. It must be because they can't hack it or they have no sense of humour or something. Or probably they just spoil it for the other scientists by getting all huffy when everyone in the lab is nominating their favourite porn magazine pictures to illustrate the research.

Psst, kid... Wanna learn how to hack?

FIGnition

I think the Raspberry Pi is a great idea, but I think the FiGnition - http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition - is an even better one.

And it really works - my 14-year-old thinks that the most exciting thing is to program the Game of Life, in Forth, on a little black and white screen, on a computer he had to solder and test himself.

German salesmen rewarded with meticulously organised orgy

Thank goodness...

... that there's no historical precedent in which successful German men were rewarded with the systematic and well-organised procurement of women (categorised according to who was permitted to make use of them, and marked on their arms) in Eastern Europe in order to provide them with sexual gratification.

App steers cyclists away from traffic, upward inclines

Finds routes that don't go up hills?

Where's the fun in that then?

Vote Lib Dem, doom humanity to extinction

Daily-Mail-style-ludicrous-hyperbole warning required

This really has to be one of the daftest pieces of political writing the Register has published in a long time.

Lewis Page is coming dangerously close to having a single-issue bee in his bonnet.

I'd suggest that anyone who thinks that space migration or nuclear missiles are amongst the country's most urgent priorities needs to have his head examined, but I wouldn't go anywhere near it until that ridiculous bee has been dealt with.

Wireless wee detectors hit Aussie grundies

Technology: a solution in search of a problem - again

This is likely to follow the trajectory of many other technology-led 'advances' in patient care.

20 years ago PEG (percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy - through a tube into the stomach) feeding was the hospital nutritionists' great new hope.

Now it's recognised that a) iPEG feeding is not indicated in many cases where it previously would have been urged, and b) it can actually diminish the quality of care a patient receives, because the attention of nursing staff can easily become focused on reading signals from the machine providing the feeding, rather than attending to the patient.

But until those lessons were learned, an army of medics and nutritionists wielding PEG equipment were convinced that what many of their patients needed most was to have it plugged into them.

In the less medicalised environment of a care home, which relies enormously upon the sensitivity of care staff to subtle signals from people who often can't express their needs at all, this could become a kind of barrier masquerading as convenience, and could be entirely at odds with the interests of those receiving care.

US gov Photoshops bin Laden wanted pic

My goodness...

... it's Serge Gainsbourg with flat ears.

What your database needs is a good thermometer

Was this an advertisement for Teradata?

Now that commercial television will apparently be allowed product placement in its programming, is The Register going to follow suit?

Interesting, the format of this piece followed exactly that of Radio Four's "Thought for the Day":

1. a description of a tasty real-life problem with a more-or-less novel analysis of it

2. an abrupt switch into product-selling mode without skipping a beat

3. a reassuring single-sentence revisiting the original issue, to help you forget the evangelism without actually escaping it, and to seal the pretence that the whole thing has really been an investigation of a problem and not at attempt to sell you something.

Not very nice.

Apple sued over shrink-wrapped Mafia death threats

Mental health problems are *so* funny

In the 19th century, people used to visit lunatic asylums for entertainment. In the 21st, we can get the same thrills over the web! And it's OK, because seriously ill people in pitiful states of misery and distress are still funny.

Car-prang secretary bites off boss's todger

No bears or wrestling

This almost sounds as though it could have come from a John Irving novel.

Street View nod prompts call for privacy watchdog reform

Which freedoms do you want most?

This all seems to be a bit of a muddle. Alongside the outrage at Google's photographic violations of privacy by, there is an equal and opposite concern that the right to photograph is being eroded.

If it's OK to go down the street with a camera photographing people and things, it has to be OK whoever is doing it. And if it's OK to publish those pictures, then it's OK, no matter who publishes them, or how.

Merely not liking the fact that it's Google doing it, or being taken aback by the scale of their operation, don't make a difference to questions of whether it should be permitted.

Apple preps netbook 10-inch touch screen thingy

I know nothing!

Ah yes. You're quite right about the names, Anonymous Coward. I'd forgotten that. It looks like I have the pleased/dismayed spectrum covered, anyway.

You know nothing!

Apple's 1.44MB floppy disk drive was called "SuperDisk", not "SuperDrive". I don't know whether to be pleased or dismayed that I know that.

Google tells the world how to talk

Fostering?

"fostering everything from Battlebots to Friends onto our TV" - I don't think we need to worry to much about what Google's foisting upon us, if that's what you're going to be doing to "our very language".