Tamlyn

Here’s some more music.

From the W3C Web SQL specification document (emphasis mine):

This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path.

What?

Send me a physical Christmas card and I’ll think kindly of you and feel bad for not sending you one myself. Send me a digital Christmas card and I’ll think badly of you and feel kind for not hassling you with my own badly designed, half-assed attempt at spreading seasonal bollocks.

Here are some tracks plucked from my Spotify “Loved” playlist. As usual, no theme, just things I like. Perhaps you will like too.

After half a lifetime of dreaming about it, I’ve finally started building a robot. It’s based on a remote controlled tank, an Android mobile phone and a IOIO board which connects the two via USB.

I’m enjoying reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. It’s a good introduction to the basic concepts of economics disguised as an exposé on the hidden motives of the world around you.

I’ve just moved home and so needed to update the address on my driving license. “Do it online – do it quicker,” says the DVLA website. Well all right, I reply. How naive of me.

A fairly haphazard selection of some of the interesting tracks that I have “bookmarked” and put aside over the past few years.

You know there’s something seriously wrong when your payslip is three pages long and comes with a two page explanatory leaflet. Payslips are often pretty cryptic but the one I received today was so bad it took me over half an hour to work it out. All I really care about is how much have I earned, how much am I getting and, most importantly, where did the rest go?

The only way I could decipher this mess was to draw a kind of bar chart and fill in the numbers. Once I finished I realised that I had inadvertently created a hugely more readable representation of the information contained in the payslip. So here’s a copy of the original payslip and my effort at an improved version.

I needed to convert some comma-separated data into JSON for a JavaScript project I’m working on. Surprisingly I couldn’t find anything online to do it so I knocked up this script. Hope someone finds it useful.