This is the second article in a series about some classic computer science: Regular expressionsFinite state machinesComparing regular expressions and finite state machines Finite state machines are a way of checking that a series of inputs is valid, potentially doing some actions while you’re doing this checking. They’re not something I use all that often, … Continue reading Finite state machines
Category: Data processing
How permanent is your data?
This article was inspired by a video from the British Museum, where a conservator discusses a 500-year-old khipu. A khipu is a document, used for keeping records or accounts, made of knotted strings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvjiMjZf-4 I recommend you watch the video – I found it really interesting and well-presented. I hadn’t come across khipus before, and … Continue reading How permanent is your data?
Using tools in interesting ways (tool hacking)
This article is my response to the Ministry of Testing’s blogging challenge: How we hacked a tool to make it work for us. First, I’ll go into tools in general a bit, and then give two examples of how I have used tools in slightly non-standard ways. I've written a bit about tools already, but … Continue reading Using tools in interesting ways (tool hacking)
Looking for copyright music in live streams
My friend Ted has recently started exercising in earnest, to get fighting fit for when he can go back into schools, museums etc. to blow children's minds about creative writing. While he exercises, he plays music from CDs to motivate him and he live streams it to Facebook for accountability. Sometimes the live stream is … Continue reading Looking for copyright music in live streams
The compounding value of information
Information is one of those things where sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is, you get extra value from combining bits of information, on top of the value from the separate bits of information on their own. I’ll illustrate this with an example to do with spies, but then … Continue reading The compounding value of information
User experience (UX) and data quality
Someone I know was moaning recently about a lot of tedious electronic form filling they had to do for work. It was something that happened once a year, but it was much more lengthy and tedious this year than before. It struck me that this was a sharply focused example of when user experience (UX) … Continue reading User experience (UX) and data quality
GB roads with gaps
I was driving recently, and realised that I was near a road that appeared to have a large gap. By that I mean: road A joins road B and stops, but some distance further along B there’s a bit more road A. It’s as if A has been chopped into two by B, and the … Continue reading GB roads with gaps
Mental models for data processing
I was having a conversation today with someone about ETL pipelines, and I realised that the word pipeline brought along only some of the associations that would be helpful in data processing. In this article I will go through three different terms, and the associations they each bring. I think that they’re all useful in … Continue reading Mental models for data processing
Analysing the names of artists in the UK music charts using R
This is a silly little bit of data crunching and very limited visualisation, based on the names of artists who have been in the UK music charts. I fancied using R for a change and also trying out notebooks (I’ll explain both a bit below), and this seemed to be about the right size and … Continue reading Analysing the names of artists in the UK music charts using R
Capital cities and US place names
This blog post came about because I remembered that there’s a place in Texas called Paris. That got me to wonder: How many countries’ capitals share a name with somewhere in the USA? It seemed to be about the right size of project to tackle, and one I could do without any coding. Like with … Continue reading Capital cities and US place names
Random Tech Thoughts 