Arbitrary Bonus News Post
Unfortunately, a full bonus post to replace the one I missed a couple of Mondays ago is going to be waiting on me actually getting something akin to a good night's sleep - there's only so many days you can have 4-6 hours1 before you wonder when psychosis is going to set in2. In the mean time, bits and bobs of news.
Firstly, anyone who read the footnotes of this Monday's post might recall that I'd been sending off emails about finding out exactly what rights to my coursework I signed away three years ago. The Imperial Registry are still yet to reply to my email (except a lovely conformation telling me they'd received it, and would deal with it as soon as possible). On the other hand, the email I sent at 2am on Sunday morning to the National Archive garner a response within a matter of a few hours.
Not that that email was actually really related to what I was doing. I spent quite a bit of time that evening trying to find a nice readable copy of the Data Protection Act 1998 to link to, and in the process ran across the new3 UK Legislation Archive, which (amazingly, in my opinion) has a developer section, include a sort of public API. The documentation isn't the clearest - it took a couple of little leaps of logic to figure out how to actually form the URIs, but there are still some neat things you can do with it.
For now, however, I'll stick with just one: an RSS feed of all legislation changes.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/all/data.feed
I'm yet to be able to test how quickly they get data out, but as it is being run a part of the civil service it should be...
For anyone who doesn't find the UK legislative system as fascinating as I do, there are some other things I may be nattering on about in the coming weeks. As always, I've been programming, and a couple of projects are nearing completion, including a rather crazily written IRC chat-bot for some people over in Oxford (which might actually just be sitting in their IRC channel idle if I've forgotten to go and kill the process from when I was testing it; should probably go and check that at some point...), a simplex tableau solver written entirely in JavaScript (a concept which is enough to make the men in white coats edge just that little bit closer)
As an aside, I'd just like to give special congratulation to JavaScript's floating point handling, which manages to be widely self-inconsistent. As a rule of thumb, performing a division operation on two sets of values which have been initialised to the same pair of values should result in, if not the same result, then a pair of results which only differ by a small tolerance. Not about 3% of the overall value
Anyway, that's all for now. See you on Monday.
- 1 ↑ Unless of course that's what your body is geared towards. Personally, my body seems to greatly prefer long periods of sleep. Apart from when it and my brain decide to run themselves ragged for a while. Strangely, my ability to type accurate English appears to be better in this state. Either that or my spell checker is just insulted by my inability to spell and is actually in the corner crying...
- 2 ↑ Whether psychosis has any meaning in an existence where there seems to be logic basis for proving an objective-shared universe is a thought for another day.
- 3 ↑ To my knowledge, anyway. I can't actually find a commissioning date anywhere, and I'm not awake enough to mess around with way-back machine to figure out when it came on-line.