Open Source Software
The Economist is running an interesting article on Open Source Software in business
("
Open-source business - Open, but not as usual
") which is quite thought-provoking. Much of the content was pretty-much standard fare (although reported accurately AFAICT which is a bonus) including:
- the necessity for projects such as
Wikipedia
to be self-policing without disenfranchising potential contributors;
- the observation that many successful projects -- although at first glance they may appear to be quite anarchic -- actually have a rigid internal hierarchy and strong leaders (e.g. Linux)
- worries about the lack of innovation in the open-source world (where much current effort is expended making software which operates like someone else's existing commercial software)
However the most interesting bit was the mention of Ronald Coase, the economist who, in 1937, wrote the famous paper "
The Nature of the Firm
". (Advance warning: I am not an Economist, so I apologise if I get this wrong and it offends you!)
He asked the question, "why are firms the size they are?". Before I read his paper I had never asked myself this simple question (shame on me!)
When a company has a particular job to do, it can either use the "internal market" (i.e. get a fellow employee to do it) or outsource it to another firm (or contractor). Since the external market is bigger than the internal one, there ought to be more competition and a better price should be available. Taken to the extreme (for maximum efficiency), every company should have a single employee and outsource every job (other than the ones done by the single employee). Of course, we observe something quite different.
What seems to happen is that a balance is struck between handling jobs internally and outsourcing, depending on the overheads. Outsourcing a job can be quite time-consuming and expensive because one must: locate a firm to do the work, negotiate a legal contract, wait for the job to be done and, if necessary, try to encourage the other party to stick to their end of the bargain. By contrast, an employee has already got a pretty watertight contract with their employer (complete with penalties in the event of job non-completion) and hence the overheads are lower.
When working on an Open Source project, the terms are explicit and relatively simple to understand. Most interesting projects are under a small number of well-known licenses (
GNU GPL
,
BSD
, etc) and there is often a convention on what happens to the copyright (e.g. the
FSF
may demand it if you contribute to
emacs
or you may be encouraged to keep it yourself as a way of preventing any future hostile takeover and license change). So a contributor doesn't need to engage a lawyer before starting work. Additionally, communication (via the web, email, etc) is cheap, fast and plentiful. So the overheads associated with outsourcing a job in the Open Source world are very small, so Open Source companies may be smaller and potentially the whole market more efficient.
That link had never occurred to me before.
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Working through the photo backlog (with the help of flickr)
The problem with having a nice digital camera is that you can produce vast quantities of raw images and video and not have the time to do anything with them. So I'm going to have to run through the backlog brielfly.
Some photos of James and Fiona's wedding last month (or thereabouts):
On our way back from there, we decided to visit the town of Bath.
I'd not seen the Roman baths before... very impressive! Unlike "Verulamium" the (amusingly named) Roman town which was cannibalised to construct the cathedral at St. Albans, the baths at Bath managed to get hidden under some other miscellaneous rubble and are now remarkably intact (modulo the roof etc which fell down).
The ancient tunnels which take the water from the hot spring into the various chambers still do their job pretty well and (IIRC) people used to take baths here as late as the 1930s. The spring water tasted slightly peculiar though and although people thought it had regenerative properties (and some physicians prescribed up to 5 litres a day!) I think I'll stick with old-fashioned tapwater.
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New Piano
Rich and Kate bought themselves a new (maple-coloured!) piano and gave us their old one -- very generous of them! Since we managed the other week to find a good home for the extra futon (which itself was given away by Eleanor's brother and sister-in-law) there was plenty of space for the new piano:
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2005: The year we made contact
If aliens turned up and tried to make contact, what would it be like? It seems unlikely to me that such an encounter would be as obvious as you often see in the movies or on TV. I'm sure that it would be much more subtle, so subtle that we might even miss the whole thing.
Well, fear not, people of Earth! They have successfully made contact... by dropping a squash made to look like the planet Jupiter in Kieran's garden (what amazing technology these aliens have... I wonder if their spaceship is shaped like a giant turnip?). Now the question is, what were they trying to say? Is there a hidden message?? We might never know!
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The squash
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Planet Jupiter
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Jupiter picture is
from NASA and is in the public domain
Another picture of the squash with a bit of context:
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Man-eating spider
This enormous (well by UK standards) spider has moved into a shiney new web just outside Eleanor's front door.
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More rendering stuff
After much hacking I now have a reasonably nice text rendering engine
(based on freetype, camlimages etc) built on top of a rudimentary SVG-like vector graphics system. It's a bit slow and inefficient but all I want it to do is display text and simple diagrams. Oh and it can easily generate SVG :) (Now all I have to do is wait until most web-browsers can actually cope with it...)
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Fraser Research trip to the beach
This afternoon we drove down to
Point Pleasant on the NJ shore. The weather was perfect for such a trip; very sunny yet cool with a nice sea breeze.
We had a nice meal here, in a restaurant next to the marina:
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Camlimages, freetype and kerning
I decided to revamp the font rendering code used by my OpenGL apps. The font support (originally written by Anil) predates (I think) the time when
camlimages
had bindings for the
freetype
library. Now that the bindings exist it makes sense to me to take advantage of them. Anyway, I threw together a simple bit of code to extract font outlines (a mix of linear, quadratic and cubic curves) and perform adaptive subdivision
to convert the quadratic and cubic curves to straight-line segments. This was a fairly straight-forward implementation of
de Casteljau's algorithm
with a slightly hacky "flatness criterion" for the time-being (some notes on this topic can be found
here).
Once the basics were working I noticed that the camlimages/freetype binding seems to lack an API to extract kerning information
(definition of kerning from wikipedia). So I added that and it seems to work! Check out these two pictures:
The topmost picture is without kerning enabled and the bottommost one has kerning enabled. Check out the relative distance between the "A" and the "V". Now to work on
ligatures...
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Jon and Emma's wedding
While I was in the UK last week Eleanor and I went to
Jon
and
Emma's wedding. It was in a hotel called
The Elvetham (described by its homepage as "one of Hampshire's most unique venues" - Steve Cougan would be proud), near where Jon's family live. As weddings go, it was pretty good. Naturally there was plenty of food (especially chocolate) and drink but for me the best thing was getting a chance to catch up with people I'd not seen in a while.
Obligatory photos:
We also got to meet Jill, Richard's girlfriend:
Here's a nice picture of Eleanor with me looking.. less silly than in most of the other photos:
Some more obligatory photos: (Any wedding with lots of cheese is fine by me)
I quite liked the "Guest Signature Mount" which we were forced encouraged to sign.
Interestingly the hotel included it's own chapel which looked like a building straight out of "Quake".. converted appropriately into a games room.
That's enough foor this entry. Next time I'll upload some short videos and yet more photos of the wedding aftermath...
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First proper run with the Forerunner
I went for my first proper run this morning, bright and early (the only time
it makes sense to run really 'cos it's do damn hot and humid here). These
maps show the route I took (not an especially good one but I am used to it):
I hacked together some scripts to analyse the data a bit. Here are some plots:
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Heart rate vs time
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Velocity vs heart rate
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Velocity vs time
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New GPS receiver
I bought myself a
Garmin Forerunner 301
- a wrist-mounted GPS receiver with heart-rate monitor. So far I'm pretty impressed with the GPS function and the UI - not bad for such a small screen. The device can be recharged over USB which is a bonus considering I'll probably use it both in the US and the UK. One slight down-side is that it comes with training software for Windows which is not much use to me as all the machines I normally use are either OS X, BSD or Linux. However I might write my own custom software if it becomes necessary.
To transfer the data from the device to my Mac I'm using the latest versions of
gpsbabel
which can communicate with a large number of different GPS receivers and knows how to read and write numerous file formats (apparently the mapping world is plagued by lots of similar-in-purpose but yet trivially different file format standards). Unfortunately the particular model of receiver I just bought isn't completely supported yet by gpsbabel. Thankfully gpsbabel seems relatively easy to hack and I've made a few simple changes to help it understand the new format of "track point" data (it seems that recorded runs are called "tracks") (specifically the data type D/303 which is not covered by the
Garmin specification). I'm not sure what the Garmin does with the heart rate data -- hopefully I'll get a better idea when I go for a run tomorrow. If I'm lucky it'll just be part of the track data... although I can imagine reasons why it might be stored somewhere else (e.g. consider that while GPS coverage may be patchy in a city one would expect a continuous stream of HR events... so perhaps they are indeed stored separately).
To test the receiver I went for a walk from the house to Small World coffee. Here's a plot of the route via
google maps:
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the street map
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and the satellite version
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Interestingly I seem to be walking parallel to Park Place -- I assume this is just systematic error in the GPS system. At the corner of Nassau and Witherspoon I actually turned right and walked under a whole lot of metal scaffolding. I presume the last point is some kind of reflection/ random error.
Speaking of google maps, it seems that everyone is busy finding uses for it these days. Here are some useful referencess:
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Silly time-lapse video
I thought it might be fun to capture an image every 2s from my iSight over the course of the day and stitch the results into a movie.
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Uh-oh apparently Immy can't read yet
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Garden piccies
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A sad day for the LCE
Kieran packs up his stuff from the LCE... before his corrections were even approved (I think). He's a confident chap!
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Obsession with food
I've been told that that my blog makes it look like I have a good obsession; a suggestion I strongly deny! However it just so happens that I have some food-related pictures on my camera which I'd forgotten to blog. Starting with some example Small World Coffee breakfasts:
and moving on to a fantastic curry which Eleanor and I cooked a few weeks ago (notice the spicy mango chutney which Eleanor's friend provided):
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The home office shed
The BBC had a recent article in their
magazine
called
"Shed heaven"
which described how more people are installing luxury sheds as
"garden offices".
What a fantastic idea!
There are lots of interesting sites on the web including:
Obviously insulation and heating are serious problems to the would-be shed entrepreneur. Kieran pointed me at two suppliers of compact insulation material which might be useful, or at least a starting point for further research:
At the more luxurious end of the market, rather than a shed you can opt for
a
log cabin instead.
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Sarah and Dan's wedding
Sarah and Dan got married a few weeks ago but I've been too busy to sort out
my photo collection until now. I didn't get very many good photos so here
is a short selection of the best of the bunch:
I did shoot quite a lot of videos (in fact I managed to fill up 1GB of SD) which took absolutely ages to transcode into more web-friendly versions. The files below might require you to upgrade to the latest version of
Quicktime (version 7) (free, non-pro version should be fine)
because they use apple's new H.264 video compressor.
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More camera experiments (and dinner)
Frank and Sonali invited me to dinner at an Indian restaurant near Princeton. Naturally I couldn't resist taking another video snippet.. well who could resist playing with such a funky (and tiny!) camera? Besides the food was generally of quite an interesting shape and only moving pictures could be used to describe it adequately (particularly Frank's cylindrical dosa-- it's like the food was rendered with OpenGL or something)
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The new camera even takes videos
I discovered this fact by accident when I pressed the wrong button on the camera this morning. So here is a test video, with the audio removed by
ffmpeg
and the video transcoded to DIVX by
mplayer.
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The new camera works!
I've no idea how to use it properly but here's what happened when I turned it on and pressed the obvious "shoot" button:
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New camera!
I finally got a new digital camera delivered from
B&H photo
in New York.
While I'm waiting for the battery to charge I took some pictures of it with my old camera(phone). It's so small! (Watch is in the frame for some scale, couldn't find a ruler)
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Catching up with the blog
Unfortunately it's been a while since I updated my blog and I'm sure lots of exciting things have been happening but I've forgotten what they are... never mind! If you want to read about interesting things, I'd suggest you go read about
Coffee Art
over in
Anil's blog.
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Walking near Oxford
A few weekends ago, Eleanor and I had a quite pleasant walk in the countryside near Oxford with Eleanor's parents.
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Smoke
Why doesn't anyone sell decorated smoke detectors? Jon had to improvise his own with a giant dragonfly...
Or is Jon becoming obsessed with everything to do with
smoke?
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The life of a cat
Cats are stealthy creatures:
They also like a good fight...
... but they always make up in the end:
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Random cat pictures
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Very clean cats.
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A reincarnated parrot?
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Happy Days in Sunny Newcastle
Eleanor and I popped to Belfast to spend the weekend with my family. My parents took us on a tour of the coast, visiting "sunny newcastle" (hm), newry and warrenpoint amongst other places. These pictures were taken in newcastle:
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Massive oversupply of milk; Rich and Rob away; coincidence?
I've never seen the Intel fridge so full:
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Mmm, apple crumble
Let it be noted that Eleanor makes excellent apple crumble.
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The Christmas Cheese!
Malcolm sent my parents some cheese... in fact it was the most enormous cheese I'd ever seen. I'm a huge fan of cheese but even I was taken aback by the sheer scale of the thing.
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Christmas in Belfast
I went home to visit my parents over Christmas and took a couple of pics while I was there. Luckily we had a white Christmas. Even more luckily it didn't cause me any travel difficulties or delays on the way there or back.
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It snowed, right on time
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Mum, Dad and the tree
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Lots of festive food
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Mmmm pasta
I was so impressed with the bowl of pasta, tuna and cheese I made for myself I decided to immortalise it in my blog. Darn, I feel hungry just looking at it. Maybe I should find myself something more productive to do!
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The best dinner in the world
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Sleepy Cat, Sleepy Cat, What are they feeding you?
Paraphrasing Phoebe from friends
("Smelly Cat lyrics")
Sleepy Cat, Sleepy Cat,
What are they feeding you?
Sleepy Cat, Sleepy Cat
It's not your fault
They won't take you to the vet
You're obviously not their favorite pet
Sleepy Cat, Sleepy Cat,
It's not your fault
...
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Zzzz
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Housebling!
housebling is such a good, descriptive term. Check out the housebling in Eleanor's road:
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Fear me, for I am the evil santa!
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The Stay Puft Marshallow Man returns!
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Not bad, C plus for effort
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Enough said.
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Having a Ball
Eleanor and I went to a party in the University Arms hotel a couple of weeks ago. A friend of hers took this rather nice picture:
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A rather cold snap
Unfortunately since I haven't updated my blog properly recently I've forgotten when these photos were taken. All I remember is that it suddenly became really cold for a couple of days and then got a lot warmer again. Hardly newsworthy for a mid-december post but never mind.
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Mr. Ali B (now Dr) looking cold
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Kieran and Jane's Wedding
I haven't updated my blog for ages and now have a stack of photos to publish. Here are some taken at Kieran and Jane's recent wedding at the Cambridge Registry Office, beginning with some of the happy couple:
Here's a picture of Eleanor who managed to catch the bouquet, much to the annoyance of many other (hopefull) guests!
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You bring the ideas, I have the vision
Some guy has stuck posters around the building soliciting team members to join him in entering the
50k business plan competition.
Here's the deal: you bring the inventions and the ideas, he supplies "vision" and "direction". What kind of vision is he going to supply exactly? "Let's sell your (INSERT IDEA HERE) for money!" perhaps. Surely it would be better to bring something else to the table like an MBA perhaps? He may well have useful skills but evidently marketing isn't one of them.
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The advert in the CL...
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... and the small print
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Kieran wanted this picture
to prove that he's good with kids. However I don't think Imogen is awake enough to argue:
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