Brett Hutley's Blog

I've just started using Evernote to make a note of things I find interesting on the web and to capture ideas or random thoughts. So far I love it!
What I wanted was an easy way to extract the notes and save them to my filesystem, where they become much more useful. Specifically I want to save the notes as text files to a place in my Dropbox repository, so they get synced across all my devices, and are backed up.

Continue reading “Evernote to Dropbox”

There's a great article here on estimating correlations and means when you have missing data in your datasets. It uses the Expectation Maximisation algorithm to calculate the missing values, and what is interesting is how much the implied correlation changes after applying EM.

We finished our four week archery course with 20/20 Archery this weekend. We had a great instructor, and we both enjoyed the lessons.

I just brought Maplin's USB Digital Microsoft with 400x magnification, which is advertised as having Windows-only drivers. System Profiler identified the chipset as being from Vimicro Corporation. I went to the Driver Download section of their website and downloaded (and installed) the DRV_ZC0301PLus_070305 driver. I then opened up Photo Booth, and was able to select the Vimicro camera as the video source. What I should have done was just try and access the Microscope using Photo Booth before I installed the driver, as I half suspect that there was no actual need to install that driver. [caption id="attachment_294" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Close-up of a new razor blade"][/caption] Please try to use the microscope with Photo Booth first before downloading the driver, and let me know in the comments if that works.

Here is a great presentation given by Jason Yan and David Cramer of Disqus fame about how their site was architected in order to scale to handle 75 million comments.

I sit at my keyboard tapping, many formats o'er lapping, searching for a template for a letter to Lanore.

Lanore, my Facebook friend long-standing, but my distance she's demanding, a restraining order landing, with the full force of the law.

So I'm at the keyboard thinking, with my broken heart a-sinking, trying to find the words to reconnect with lost Lenore.

Continue reading “"Nevermore" quoth the Paperclip”

Another flash story, this one written in about 30 minutes. Any resemblence to real life characters is purely coincidental (no shotgun blasts to the face for me, thank you very much).

"Red Leader, you are cleared for attack". How did I find myself here; a marine biologist attacking an American space station armed with a squid?

Continue reading “Squid Wars”

Life was so much simpler when it was just the two of us. We'd explore such avenues of thought together, you and I. Walking arm in arm through the boulevards of well-established fact before ducking down a muddy alley and romping in the puddles of the arcane. I came to trust you, to lean on you, to depend on you. And you never let me down. Whatever I needed, you could always lay your hands on it. You gave me everything.

Continue reading “You, me and her”

(This is a flash story - a story written in 15 minutes on a train to Wales)

Want to know how I ended up in Hell? It was Billy's stag night and so far a total disaster. Because of Billy's best friend Bobby, we were sitting at a raw food restaurant in London - a raw food restaurant that had run out of most vegetables. I had a plate of "spaghetti" in front of me. Spaghetti made from shaved zucchini. Cold spaghetti. Spaghetti covered in tomato sauce consisting entirely of squashed cold tomato. "Don't worry" whispered Billy, somehow picking up on my abject misery. "Wait until the girls arrive".

Continue reading “How I ended up in Hell”

Try to get to sleep after watching this!

Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty from Darragh O'Connell on Vimeo.