Egypt Trip

I has been a crazy few weeks, after being in the UK only 2 days after the Egypt trip I went to Las Vegas with Forward and I am just getting my head back together now. You know you are a huge geek when you take as much space for books as clothes. The »

Off To Egypt

I am off to Egypt for 2 weeks, a one week Nile cruise with Voyages Joules Verne starting at Luxor and working down to the Aswan High Dam via The Valley Of The Kings and ending in the Moevenpick Hotel in El Gouna. No Cairo, Pyramids or the Cairo Museum »

Using R on Hadoop with Rhipe

I spent a while this week getting Rhipe, a java package that integrates the R environment with Hadoop, to work. Forward are pretty heavy users of Hadoop and it’s supporting ecosystem so R will be another way for the devs to interrogate the huge (and rapidly »

Finding Primes In SICP

I was reading SICP over lunch and found this lovely footnote on probabilistic methods for deciding if a number is prime. (it is #47) Numbers that fool the Fermat test are called Carmichael numbers, and little is known about them other than that they »

Day 300 Update

Well, it is day 300 of my 101 goals in 1001 days. So as per meta-goal 101 “Do 100 day updates” here is a quick report on my progress. Completed 66 - Via Feratta in Italy 85 - Visit Pergamon Museum 1 - Teetotalitarianism for 3 months 2 - Cheeseless for »

Borges on Poetry

I really enjoy the work of Jorge Luis Borges. If you have not heard of him, check out In Our Time - Borges. I found some audio of some wonderful lectures on poetry he gave at Harvard in the late 60s. The interesting thing about them is that he composes »