3rd RHoK from the South

rhoksoton211First we RHoKed it, then we RHoKed it again and now I’m happy to announce I will running the 3rd global RHoK in Southampton as well. Again with help from Alejandro Saucedo and HackaSoton.

During the weekend of 1-2 June 2013, The University of Southampton will be one of the satellite cities as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness Event!

Click here for the detailed programme

Twitter hashtag: #rhoksoton

Eventbrite - Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) Southampton


* Updates:


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Raspberry Pi GPIO Workshop

Update: a writeup of the event by Lorraine is here.

A shot post to say that I am co-organizing a Raspberry Pi workshop with The IET Solent Branch at the University of Southampton on 25 April. For personal reasons I cannot make it myself that day but do go along if you want to learn about how to use the GPIO pins on your Pi board!

Raspberry Pi - 25 April Poster

Btw, if you can’t make it but live in the area, do checkout somakeit.org.uk. Recently launched and we now have a space!

–Dirk

Enlightened Geek Listening

geeklisteningFor some reason I never did any podcast listening until about 10 months ago. At that point I decided to give it a go and quickly assembled an initial list of subscriptions by googling around to see what similar minded peers were listening to. Its amazing (and frustrating) how much interesting stuff is out there.

My current list has evolved considerably since then and the purpose of this post is to give an overview of the shows I’m currently subscribed to and why. Hopefully it may inspire others to listen to some of them and share their own.

The different subscriptions cover my interests in technology & software, programming, (aerospace) engineering, and socio-economic/political topics. As well as a broader interest in science related topics and the scientific method.

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Rewired State Parliament hack weekend 2012

Its 8:44 am and after 5 hours of sleep on my trusty Thermarest I feel quite refreshed, which is more than I can say about the people around me. Some have capitulated and lay scattered around the brightly lit room under their coats in front of their MacBook Air’s. Others are still in exactly the same position I left them 5 hours ago but the intensity has gone and eyes have glazed over. At least one person confirmed the geek stereotype and didn’t manage to hold his beer.

Update: Apparently Parlycloud won a special mention during the judging, thanks!

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Codenoise, A London Clojure Dojo report

A couple of months ago I blogged about my first venture into clojure. This was driven by the desire to learn something completely different to what I was already familiar with.

Real life got in the way and for a while my dabbling in clojure was put on hold though I continued to lurk on the london-clojurians list. It then so happned there was a Dojo on Monday (yesterday) which I could (finally) make. Travelling between Southampton and London is never cheap through but I tend to see it as an investment.

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License to RHoK, Dec 1-2, Southampton, UK

After the great success and feedback of the previous global RHoK event in Southampton I decided to organize the next one as well. This time around kindly helped out by Alejandro Saucedo from HackaSoton.

During the weekend of 1-2 December 2012, The University of Southampton will be one of the satellite cities as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness Event!

Like in June it looks like we will be the only UK event so let that be an extra motivation!

Click here for the detailed programme

Twitter hashtag: #rhoksoton

Eventbrite - RHoK Global December 2012: Southampton, UK


* Updates:


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Failing small: StackOverflow Machine Learning Competition

Last August every programmers’ faviorite site, StackExchange, announced a machine learning contest on Kaggle. The task was defined as:

…to find an algorithm that predicts whether (and for what reason) a question will be closed. The idea is simple: we’ve prepared a dataset with all the questions on Stack Overflow, including everything we knew about them right before they were posted, and whether they finally ended up closed or not.  You grab the data, build your brilliant classifier, run it against some leaderboard data and submit your results.  Rinse and repeat until the contest ends, when we’ll grab the most promising classifiers and run them against fresh data to choose winners.

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Diving into Data

Since about half a year my podcast subscriptions includes RCE-Cast, an interesting show run by very knowledgable hosts about HPC related topics. One of their more recent episodes was on the Datadive project by Datakind.

From the website:

DataKind brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations through a comprehensive, collaborative approach that leads to shared insights, greater understanding, and positive action through data in the service of humanity.

I liked the idea and, while I have plenty of scuba diving experience, data diving was not something I was very familiar with. The problems I have worked on so far have pretty much always been big CPU vs big data. Thus I followed their Twitter feed and signed up to the London event (first in the UK/Europe?) when I heard about it.

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The Research Software Engineer

Some months ago I attended the 2012 Collaborations workshop in Oxford, something which I blogged about in my post The Researcher Programmer, a New Species?.

This then triggered some discussion on the LinkedIn group for scientific software engineering, and that eventually led to a collaborative paper, presented at this weeks Digital Research Conference, also in Oxford.

I didn’t find a link to any kind of proceedings and in the interest of the discussion thought I would reproduce the paper here.

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Coursera-dl: A Coursera download script

I have blogged about coursera.org in the past and as part of signing up to a number of courses I felt the need to easily download the videos, quizzes, notes, etc. locally for later use offline.

I quickly found a project on github (and there are a few) but wasn’t quite happy with the code. I cleaned it up to a relatively sensible state and it now does what I wanted it to do. The main additional features I wanted were: easily download multiple courses, support for quizzes/homeworks, and support for links to extra material (e.g, 3rd party sites, papers, etc).

Just do a “pip install coursera-dl” and then run as follows:

coursera-dl -u myusername -p mypassword -d /my/courses/ algo-2012-001 ml-2012-002

Code is in python and can be found on Github.

Update: if you have a feature request or want to report a bug please use the github issue system

–Dirk