Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

New Job

So, I've ended up in the so-called “real world” with a shiny new job. Well, almost an old job now, as I started about a month ago (a partial explanation for my recent absence from the blogosphere). Also, I've moved. Well, I've moved out of the old flat. Apparently, my use of f.lux to colour-balance my monitors down to ~4000K has stained the room a lovely orange. Either that, or the photos are slightly off colour — take your pic(k). I'm going to miss this space.

Memorylessness and Entropy

Any one who has delved into probability or stochastic will have come across the idea of a Markovian system: one where each new state or value is dependent on the one that immediately precedes it. However, this is generally only ever examined in the contexts where it is known that the property holds, or that accepting the property is a valid approximation.

The LaTeX Atrocities: Dealing with Numbers

LaTeX has quite possibly the strangest learning curve I have ever encountered in my time with languages of all kinds. This is, of course, because it is not really intended to be a language which you extend, but merely use. This is reflected in all the documentation which you can find with ease on the internet: it leads you through the different common type setting tasks, and perhaps briefly mentions the possibility of defining your own commands right at the end. What seems to be consistently lacking is any input on what is considered good practice for your own commands.

Google Currents

Google have launched another one of their shiny services — Currents — which, at first glance seems little more that a producer side RSS aggregator, optimised for Phone and tablets. In fact, as far as I can tell, it is little more than that. But, I suspect that Google are planning to go somewhere slightly more with this.

WordPress Jetpack: Don't Count Admin Views

One of the annoyances that I have had with WordPress is that fact that the Stats module will count my page views which, when I'm trying to make something look how I want it to look, can exceed 100 in a day. This has pretty much entirely destroyed the meaning of my stats since moving from Blogger.

More Footnotes! New Footnotes!

As part of my overhaul work on this blog, I have now built my own footnotes plug-in, for greater flexibility, with all new functionality, and considerable less code and bandwidth usage.

The design of the footnote has changed, and they are considerably more flexible.Any readers who use WordPress and want to use them can find the documentation and current version over at GitHub , along with a lot of my other work.

EU e-Commerce Directive — Background

The e-Commerce Directive was adopted to the European Union in 2000, and covered some very useful ground in terms of definitions in order to form a unified internal market for electronic commerce. It does rather show its age in terms of internet politics, as it essentially looks at the trading and contract regulations. One of the things it does not do is deal with copyright infringement at any length: in fact, it only gets mentioned twice, firstly in the preamble to mention that having a unified policy on copyright throughout the union would be very helpful in implementing these laws, and then in the Annex to note that such infringement is not covered by article 3, removing the obligation to “ensure that the information society services provided by a service provider established on its territory comply with the national provisions [copyright law] applicable in the Member State in question”.

New Skin!

I'm once again having another go at starting the blogging thing again. I spent yesterday slowing working through the theme file and trying to clean it up so that it doesn't take so much time and space to load. I'm not certain I've entirely achieved that but...I tried!

So, before the actual posting begins (I've actually started writing some this time, so it may happen!) the changes need to be tested. My internet connection is pretty much unusable currently, so I've only being doing rough and ready testing only using one browser version. I suspect, however, that some of my readers will be a little bored and would like the opportunity to pick apart my work.

Deploy The Blogging Kittens!

Hi Everybody! I haven't disappeared entirely, but things are really rather hectic between exams and project work. Add to that politics not being as annoying as normal, and you have a Ben away from a Blog!

However, in a few weeks, I'll be back doing my job-job and moaning about dealing with ICT support departments, programming languages. I might also write up some of the interesting things I've learnt in class this year (I advise that people convince me not to do this. Or at least someone else picks the topics).

The Null Candidate

Writing, as I am, whilst listening to the results slowly coming in to the local elections in Britain this week, I am once again reminded of what appears to me to be the underlying problem with British politics today — elector apathy caused by having three economically centrist parties that few still trust. As our economy continues to contract, centrism isn't going to have the dashing feel of the politicians doing lots of new things to help; instead, they are seen to be just taking cheap shots at each other from the dispatch boxes