Academic Family Tree, LaTeX and Tikz
A few years ago, I found out some information on my academic genealogy, going through my supervisor, Brian McMaster, back through others to G.H. Hardy, Newton and Galileo and a little further before the records run dry. Of course it is nice that mathematics is an old and well established discipline with great records. And […]
Fear is the Path to the Dark Side
When I was in primary school we had some swimming lessons, and at one point someone asked us to swim a length to decide which "stream" we would be in. At this stage I enjoyed swimming and was reasonably OK as a swimmer. I was so determined to get in the better stream that I […]
Necessary And Sufficient
This article contains links to materials and extra resources to my Inaugural Professorial Lecture, with the same name, delivered on 17th February 2016 at Ulster University. Twitter If you have any comments or questions, use the Twitter hashtag #nesssuff and I'll pick them up later and try to address them. My Twitter ID is […]
Fred Carroll (1945 - 2015)
A picture of my father, Fred Carroll, a zoologist by education, an archaeologist by career, who died this week. I unfortunately only met him once as an adult but was very glad for that, and that we corresponded subsequently. I sent him a number of pictures of Aimee and Matilda which delighted him. He was […]
Grading in the Martial Arts
Last week Donal and I got involved in answering some questions about grading from folks in our aikido club. I thought I would put some of my thoughts here. Other people's thoughts will vary and I'd welcome other perspectives in the comments. These are perspectives on grading in Japanese martial arts, but particularly aikido. They […]
Boot problems with systemd? Check /etc/fstab
My (actually this) Debian server failed to boot after a power failure last week, it turns out the graphics card failed too, probably because of the cold and the thermal shock, but replacing the card did not allow the computer to boot. With systemd, if something happens in the boot process, despite some obviously specific […]
Manually completing a botched django migration
I wrote a lot of code for my Workload Allocation system on Friday, and had been developing it on the machine with django's built in lightweight web server, and a (default) sqlite database backend. In production I decided to use a MySQL backend in case sqlite was, well, too lite. One of the things that […]
Workload Allocation Monitoring (WAM) Prototype
I decided to start writing a workload allocation monitoring system for Higher Education. I found one written as part of a JISC project at Cambridge, but despite my experience with PHP I found it difficult to set-up, a bit crude (sorry) and hard to maintain. It was clearly very flexible, and I wanted something flexible, […]
Django, CAS authentication and Apache
I am certainly no stranger to Web Development, but I decide to really look at the Python web framework django in some detail last week to write a small web application for Workload Modelling for Academic Staff. Yes, this is a geeky, programming post. In doing so I ran into some trouble trying to get […]
OPUS and ASET, ten years on
Ten years ago today, I and a few colleagues from Ulster University presented some of our work on on-line Placement Management at the ASET conference in York. At that time our system was simply called the Placement Management System or PMS, and yes of course this led to more than a few comments. At that […]