After Life – The Strange Science of Decay

 Posted on December 13, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

Interesting to see the programme After Life : The Strange Science of Decay on BBC Four the other day. The BBC built a sealed domestic environment at Edinburgh Zoo and placed many everyday objects (food, dead animals, pests) into the environment and left it all to rot/decay for a couple of months. Some key points of the documentary include: The Sexton Beetles that burried a dead rat within a couple of hours to use as food/housing for their offspring. [Read More]

Powerlifting Championships

 Posted on November 6, 2011  (Last modified on January 10, 2020)  |  richm

On Saturday I visited the YNEPF (Yorkshire and North East Powerlifting Federation) Benchpress Championships that were held at Durham ARC. This was my first time at one of these events and I must say that I was impressed by both the athletes and the organisation of the event. Jim Dulling the principle organiser asked me to take some photos of the event. I’ll sort these out in the next couple of days and post them here. [Read More]

In the Bullring

 Posted on August 11, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

Wow. We made a visit to Birmingham this week. We took the kids to Cadbury World and then went to the Bullring Shopping Centre Birmingham to let the girls do a bit of shopping. (Un)fortunately the shopping trip was curtailed after about 20 minutes when the staff announced over the tannoys that the centre was closing immediately with no reason given. At the time we had heard nothing about the riots going on in London and certainly didn’t expect anything like that to be going on in Birmingham. [Read More]

Android SimpleDateFormat format timezones in a twist

 Posted on August 4, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

Yesterday we found a problem regarding formatting dates including Time Zones on Android 2.1 and 2.2 devices. In a few cases our unit tests were failing due to the dates being output with the wrong timezone identifer. Specifically it turns out that two identical calls to format a date will return different output if a date including a timezone is parsed using the java.text.SimpleDateFormat instance inbetween the two calls. The following JUnit. [Read More]

The Hargreaves Review

 Posted on August 3, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  richm

Over breakfast this morning the BBC Breakfast News show had a piece about the UK Governments response to the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. The presenters had two guests in the studio one representing the record industry and another representing the movie makers. Vince Cable made a brief cameo appearance for the Government via video link. The whole piece on the news seemed to be very biased and most of the talk was about how copying a CD/DVD onto your MP3 player was taking money out of the media moguls pockets. [Read More]

Long time no write

 Posted on August 3, 2011  (Last modified on January 10, 2020)  |  richm

So I have been very busy over the past couple of months and have not had time to write any new postings. I have a number of postings pending that I need to find time to tidy up and will try to do so in the next week or so. Most particularly I have given the new Ubuntu Unity interface a try on Natty and found a number of issues that disrupt my usual workflow. [Read More]

Getting to grips with Jelly and Stapler

 Posted on June 22, 2011  (Last modified on January 14, 2020)  |  admin

I use the Jenkins Continuous Integration server to help control and organise my various bits of code. Much of the work I do is in one or two man teams and and some question the use of a CI server for that but I actually find that it adds an extra pair of eyes and sanity checks that could easily be missed if you just rely on your own build environment to build/release things. [Read More]