Posts

A collection of posts about my life, ideas, writing, travel, cooking, hobbies, even occassional tech stuff thrown in.

Travel

Focuses

General Posts

Updating the blog from Wordpress to Hugo + Netlify

For many years I’ve hosted this blog on Linode, running it on WordPress. This has gone pretty well for the most part, but it has a couple of downsides. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s a bit annoying to maintain - having to maintain a VM, patching it occassionally, and then making sure that WordPress gets backed up and updated is a little frustrating for what is really a pretty simple blog. The second is cost, while linode is super cheap - it’s still another bill that needs to be paid.

Travel - 2019 Move to London

My wife and I are adventuring off from New Zealand’s fine shores to live in London. All posts about this and the adventures we have had live here.

Flight from Wellington to Christchurch

Saturday, 25th May 2019

The azure haze of the ocean and the land beyond echos and reflects the brilliant blue of the sky. Far below, white caps indicate a dynamism that is hidden in my modern bubble. I’m waiting for a ‘Pop!’ that never seems to come.

The problems of my life are purely mental, a self imposed near-existential dread of tasks not yet done, of things required of me, of citizenship within my cobbled together existence. Interspersed with this is the recognition of happiness; the luckiness of a life with sufficient health and without deprivation. The joy of a partner, of shared goals and of common experience.

Recipes

Recipes that people have requested at one time or another.

Upgraded to HTTPS

Hey folks, Something around here looks just a little different…

It’s been far too long coming, but now it’s here and ready for your browsing pleasure. I’ve also updated my other random assortment of sites…

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to update the content in the above and here in the near future. Apart from having to manually relink a bunch of images in the blog, it’s been fairly painless. If you spot anything awry, let me know!

The naming fallacy and BEM

I’m going to coin a new term. A named thing to add to the age old debate about naming things. You’ve heard Phil Karlton’s much used and misused adage. That one. Here yet again: “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” May I present for your consideration:

The ’naming fallacy’: the fallacy that your newfangled solution solves the naming problem.

So, before we talk about anything. I’ll lay out my cards. I’m a programmer. I’ve been attempting to name program-y things for about ten years.

Webstock 2015

Webstock, as I’m sure has been mentioned by many, is the annual “Inspiration Con” in Wellington, New Zealand. This is the second year I’ve been along and it is possibly the most inspirational, thought provoking, edifying entertainment of my year. Maybe high praise, but Webstock delivers.

The Webstock stage

I’m not going to go through a list of the speakers or even really talk about what Webstock is. You can go read the website if you want to know more. I’m going to talk about my take away thoughts, the themes that reared through the conference, and what I’m going to do as a result.

Long Time, No Talk

I realise it has been several years since I last wrote anything in this blog, but I’m going to write a bit more. Again full of randomness, and again not very consistently but there you go. I thought I would give folks a little bit of an update as to where I am and what I’ve been up to.

First off, around the middle of last year I moved up to Wellington. I’m now a denizen of the windy city and I’m enjoying the cafes, the culture, and the city centre that actually exists. Not to mention the milder winters, less stifling summers, and coastline everywhere. I’ve given up owning a car and a bike as this city has excellent public transport and I walk pretty much everywhere anyway.

Quantified Self

Here is my first attempt at quantifying some of the data I’ve collected over the last year and a half. This chart plots my steps taken per week over the last 18 months and my weight changes over the last year. I had a vague goal of walking more than 70k steps each week so any value over that is highlighted.

How It’s Made

This chart is an SVG created using D3. The data is collected from apps running on my mobile phone, specificially Noom Walk and Noom Coach.

Travel - USA 2012 Trip

Here are all the blog posts from my 2012 trip to the USA.

Forgotten?

You might have noticed it has been ages since my last post, unfortunately I have been rather busy. I’m now working full time with the good folk at Telogis. This is my first proper job out of uni, so rather exciting from my perspective. It is an excellent learning experience, and a great challenge - as my boss cheesily points out: “We don’t do easy”.

Anyhow, if you manage a fleet of vehicles or happen to be generally interested in GIS or vehicle tracking, check us out at: www.telogis.com However, I haven’t forgotten this blog and will hopefully post more in the future.

Brunch

Reviews of brunch experiences.

Flatting - A Payment Model

I’ve been flatting in the same flat for six years now, some flatmates come and go and others stay the same. During this time, we have been trying to find a good model for figuring out how much to charge each flatmate.

We started with a basic model - everyone pays the same. This was all well and good as all of the rooms were a fairly similar size. Then we started to have issues with couples sharing rooms and what happens when you want to rent out that small room? Is a system where what people pay is simply based on intuition good enough?

Appropriate Units - Revised

About a week ago, I was mulling over the concept of appropriate units, that is which unit of a system should one use to represent a measurement. If you want to read about it, have a look at this post.

At the end of that post I detail a possible solution, but I wasn’t sold on my solution and wanted a bit of feedback from a wider audience. I devised this questionnaire to provide an interesting and abstracted way of getting the data. Writing the form was interesting, and while I think most people got what I was getting at, there were a number of influencing factors that I should have taken into account. It has been way to long since I last did anything of the type. People were influenced by the choice of unit names and listed colours. I’m not particularly concerned by the unit names as this was fairly unavoidable if I didn’t want to use real units. I also tried to be consistent within a question to avoid favouritism due to it being a interesting word. My rationale for not using real units was that I wanted to avoid the associations between using a cup or using a quart.

Overview

Recently I have been programming a unit conversion system to automatically convert between units of different systems of measurement. So for example the standard metric system of volume is based on the litre (L) and multiples of it as determined by standard SI prefixes, for example a millilitre (mL). Values in this system can be converted to other systems such as an Imperial system comprising of fluid ounces (fl oz), quarts (qt), pints, (pt), and gallons (gal). Simple conversions between such systems are fairly simplistic, we follow these steps:

Is potluck on?

For the past five years we have hosted a fairly regular potluck at our flat nearly every Friday night. It is not always on and every week I receive a series of emails asking about it.

In the past I have tried facebook events and mass emails, but they tend to push the event into peoples face and take too long to set up for someone as lazy as myself.

Christchurch Southern Motorway

The Christchurch Southern Motorway is under construction. On seeing the following link posted by a friend, I created a rough map to show the route as the site is rather confusing!

Goals

It’s a new year! I have never been one for resolutions so I won’t be making any. I will however have a set of goals for the year:

Do lots of daytrips out and about, preferably with an element of exercise.
Look at my personal motivation and gain a deeper understanding of what makes me tick.
Attempt to improve my relationships with others in general, responding to the old adage (which I have always held as true) that you get out what you put in. I will try and have more, smaller, events with just a few people at a time.
Generally try and be a thinking member of society.
And some other bits and pieces - like be excellent to the environment and other people.

Goals are completely different from resolutions, right?

Updated Blog!

Hey Everyone,

I have have finally gotten around to getting my own server and migrating my blog across! I hope you like the new theme and hopefully I will update it a little more often than I have been recently.

Upcoming posts will probably relate to some new development work I have been doing. Anyhow, as we approach the last days of the year, a slightly tardy Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!!!!

Trip to Wanganui & Wellington

15th - 18th of September, 2010

After an incredibly cheap flight to Wellington, I was met with a sign at the baggage claim. I think this is the first time in five years that I’ve had a sign just for me. After a ride into the city centre I picked up my rental car (a first for me) and headed north from Wellington to Wanganui (It was Wanganui when I lived there, so I will stick to that spelling).

Travel - 2010 Europe & USA Trip

Here are all the posts from my 2010 trip in a nicely ordered format, sorted by country. I have also included some photos at the start! Note that all posts will open up in a new window.

Summary

Photos

Turkey

Bulgaria

Romania

Hungary

Austria

Czech Republic

Germany, Switzerland & Liechtenstein

France

England

USA

Details

Honours Project

I haven’t written on here for far too long, so I just thought I would give a brief update on what I’ve been doing! I have been working on developing a visualisation framework for the Eclipse IDE to allow developers to overlay any type of metrics information on top of their source code. It is exciting stuff and taking far far too long!

Writings

Attempts at short fiction or explorations of an idea

UCanDance Politics Thread...

Hey people… Here is a thread, go wild. If you havent posted on the site before, it may take a little while for your post to come up :P Note: This is the continuation of a long thread on the UCD private list…

Update 2019-05-19: Comments for this have long been lost

Dirty?

Is your screen dirty? I recommend you clean it! CyberClean….

Pearls of Wisdom

At university, one has the uncommon luck to run into the most interesting of people.

I refer specifically to an un-named ancient lecturer of MATH 115, a course whose material is unbelievably dry. During a lecture on graph theory this morning, he said:

“This type of weather is ideal to see bare skin and clevage bursting out all over the place.”

It appears that this is not his only comment on the flesh. During one lecture, when an attractive lady walked in and somebody ventured a wolf whistle. He said to the whole class… “I agree!” He tends to burst into song at random points throughout his lecturers, apparently, he also made some joke about dyslexia in one of his lectures which got him in trouble with the university board.

Mind Journey - Experience

Jan 2006

Experience… A 10 Minute Mind Journey By MJH

Emotions you can’t control, Sights that literally blow your mind, Smells that range from the alluring, to the ultimate mouth-watering, to the retched, Tastes that leaving you breathing fire for ten minutes or give you an orgasm of flavour, Sounds that leave you deaf for a day, or sound as tempting as a siren’s song, Touching of textures softer than silk, rougher than rock and more alive than the human heart, Memories that are so strong that you shake and have to physically turn away to think of something else.

“If you are going to believe something that cannot be proven or disproven, it might as well be as interesting as possible…” - Me

I am quite proud of this quote, I believe that it has its origins in the Life of Pi and the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Welcome!

Hello everyone! Welcome to Hubristic Diversion a place where I intend to post random pieces of writing I have written and other random things that I deem interesting! I hope you enjoy it!