Maths, Tech, Martial Arts and more
-
My Puzzle for the Day
In November 2018 the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme was visiting Ulster University for an outside broadcast. I was asked to write the Puzzle for the Day for the broadcast. Here is my puzzle and some discussion about how it can be solved. The puzzle and a very brief solution is on the BBC page,…
-
Review: The Very Short Introduction
Infinity, A Very Short Introduction, by Ian Stewart This review was originally written for the London Mathematical Society November 2018 Newsletter. The book can be found here. The “Very Short Introduction” series by Oxford University Press attempt to take a moderately deep dive into various subjects in a slimline volume. Professor Stuart addresses the apparent…
-
Implementing configurable work-flow patterns in Python Django
In my previous article, I discussed some of changes I’ve made to my WAM software to handle assessment and work-flow. I thought I’d have a look at this from the technical side for those interested in doing something similar, this is obviously extensible to general workflow management, where you might want to tweak the workflow…
-
Assessment handling and Assessment Workflow in WAM
Sometime ago I began writing a Workload Allocation Modeller aimed at Higher Education, and I’ve written some previous blog articles about this. As is often the way, the scope of the project broadened and I found myself writing in support for handling assessments and the QA processes around them. At some point this necessitates a…
-
Migrating Django Migrations to Django 2.x
Django is a Python framework for making web applications, and its impressive in its completeness, flexibility and power for speedy prototyping. It’s also an impressive project for forward planning, it has a kind of built in “lint” functionality that warns about deprecated code that will be disallowed in future versions. As a result when Django…
-
Semi Open Book Exams
A few years ago, I switched one of my first year courses to use what I call a semi-open-book approach. Open-book exams of course allow students to bring whatever materials they wish into them, but they have the disadvantage that students will often bring in materials that they have not studied in detail, or even…
-
The Most Dangerous Idea in History
In the modern world we often throw around the word meme to mean some comic image, video or idea that has become associated with a concept, but the word has a different origin. “an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.” This…
-
Pretty Printing C++ Archives from Emails
I’m just putting this here because I nearly managed to lose it. This is a part of a pretty unvarnished BASH script for a very specific purpose, taking an email file containing a ZIP of submitted C++ code from students. This script produces pretty printed PDFs of the source files named after each author to…
-
Installing Android Nougat on a Stock Galaxy Tab 10.1
My daughter uses an Android Samsung tablet (coded GT-P7510) which ended official support on Android 4.0.4. Unfortunately I didn’t pay any attention to this issue until the apps she most wanted to use, namely Netflix and YouTube stopped working on it as the Android version was too low. I found a ROM to upgrade to…
-
The Deceptiveness of Coincidence
A friend of mine recently posted about a chain of events – people sharing birthdays – that was so unlikely that a lottery ticket purchase was called for. Most people might make similar comments as the oddity of these events struck them. There followed some discussion about these problems and it made me think of…
aikido Alan Ruddock android Apache Assessment astronomy black holes combinatorics cooking debian django firmware Free Software GNU/Linux Gondolin grading hardware he Higher Education iaido infinity iPhone LaTeX linux martial arts mathematics OPUS philosophy php Placement programming python random musings religion review shodan steel STEM sword ufo WAM Work Based Learning workflow workload Workload Modelling
Got any book recommendations?