Brett Hutley's Blog

For the last month I've been doing a contract at Canary Wharf for HSBC. In an effort to minimise the amount of stuff I carry, I've just been taking my iPad into work with me. I've really missed having my home emacs environment available. Last night I was thinking about this and I decided to get a bluetooth keyboard I could leave at the office. I can ssh from my iPad to one of my Amazon cloud instances, and have an emacs / development environment set up there. Consequently I bought a Cerulian Technology Mini Wireless Keyboard. It was really easy to connect to my iPad, but the keyboard is quite cramped to type on. The tab key especially is miniscule, so not great for Python coding. It's still the first few hours of use, but I'll keep using this and see how well it works over the long term.

Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.

Continue reading “Hacking the EZ430 Chronos Watch on the Mac”

Here is a list of the top 100 TV series on IMDB as of today. I have ordered them based on year produced, and then sorted them within each year based on 60% IMDB score and 40% the number of people who voted for each title. I am personally more interested in the newer stuff that is being produced that people are liking, so this was my query to data-mine the results.

Continue reading “Top TV Series on IMDB as of 2011”

Tim Ferris (of the The 4-Hour Work Week fame), has got a post out on "Hyper-decanting" wine to "age" it very quickly.

Continue reading “Immersion Blending Wine”

I've just been reading this Forbes article called "The Rise of Developeronomics". The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging your own capital. This article builds on an earlier article by David Kirpatick called "Now Every Company is a Software Company".

Continue reading “Developers as Capital”

An easy way to generate a unique, memorable but secure password for each website or service you visit is to apply the following recipe:

Continue reading “Unique, Secure, Memorable Passwords”

I've been listening to Slate's Negotiation Podcasts, which I think are excellent. There are currently 7 episodes (although more are on their way), each about 10-15 minutes in length. Below are my notes summarising what I've learned:

Continue reading “Negotiation”

Python's IMAPv4 client library imaplib is a really light-weight wrapper over the IMAP4 protocol. As such, it isn't that intuitive to use. The best reference I've found on it is a cheat-sheet over here.

Continue reading “IMAP4 and Python”

I have just been importing some music into iTunes from an external drive. Sometimes iTunes doesn't recognise songs as belonging to the same album, even if they have the same Album name. (Bad iTunes!)

Continue reading “Getting iTunes to recognise tracks as belonging to one Album”

I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I'd post my first impressions.

Continue reading “Bio-Monitoring and the Jawbone UP”