This one is just the results in a giant table. Oh, and links to the results in Excel 2007 and Open Office formats, both of which have some processing to make them slightly more usable (and a couple of graphs that I was messing with).
Read More...Well, I've finally given up hope on more results for my sleep survey. I'm still not quite certain whether 74 is above or below what it was expected, especially considering the number of people I spammed with emails.
Discussion of the results is going to be split across 2 or more posts, as there are some nice natural groupings of thoughts, and I'm still rather busy this month.
Read More...No new post, just a request: Fill out my very short (is slightly tricky) survey about sleep cycles. I need the precious, precious data you can supply in order to take over the world have some level of statistical rigor.
Below is another example of why I shouldn't write blog posts when I can't sleep.
Having been a stage hand, and done some night hiking, darkness has never done much to frighten me. Silence, on the other hand, does pray heavily on my mind. It's strange how I find the void both a state of enlightenment, and also abject despair.
Read More...Tricky problem of the day for me: finding what's missing in an SQL Table. Here's the setup: The table items contains two string columns, one which contains the name of the series which the book belongs to (e.g. "Fellowship of the Ring" is part of "Lord of the Rings") and another string field which hold the position number (e.g. 1 in the previous example). Quite why these are not a foreign key to a series table, or why they're not even indexed based on an integer eludes me, and I something I intend to ask the original designers at knife point. Or possibly over afternoon tea. There are a number of other fields, which contain data that is only supplementary to the data we need to obtain.
Read More...This article is based around a problem that was given to me at the pub this evening: can I build a device which delays an analogue signal by an accurate, controlled, and variable time (specifically 0-1000ms, 1ms accuracy).
The answer is I can; this I already new, because I know such devices exist. At that point, it's merely a matter of finding the schematics, and working it out from there. However, pub and internet don't mix too well, and I'd already started doodling electronics, so I started trying to work out the solution.
Read More...N.B.: This is an unedited copy-paste job of a philosophy essay I wrote in a hurry earlier this year. If I get some more free time, I may actually re-wrtie to be properly readable. In the mean time, thoughts on the matter would be most welcome.
Read More...A project I'm currently working on, called ICFS (Internal Catalogue Filing System), has really stretched and expanded my knowledge of coding in Java. This is the second best thing that a project can do for you1, and I'm glad for all the things I've learnt. When I've got it in some form of usable form, it'll be going open source, which should be interesting as a number of friends will be affected by its deployment to our college Science Fiction and Fantasy library2. There have lots of interesting issues in getting the project to even make sense, let alone work3.
Read More...The students over in Imperial's Department of Computing recently discovered some of the more fun style setting available in the layout/rendering engine WebKit, which is used in both Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. Those of you who don't really care how web pages actually work, and would just like to learn some cool tricks to make web pages do strange things and therefore be able to confuse your friends may wish to skip to much further down this post, as I'm going to be putting in quite a bit of detail for those who want to try messing with this stuff themselves.
Read More...I'm currently1 sitting in a DMCC (Discrete Mathematics and Computational Complexity) lecture, which is generally quite interesting as we have quite a good lecturer. For those of your initiated in the joys of complexity, we're currently looking at finding big-O set for linearly recursive systems, which is often tricky. It's all based on the asymptotic case, which has lead to the phrase "for large enough values of n" being said...every few minutes. ish.
Read More...