JoshuaScotton.com

Here are the slides from the talk I gave today at the WPCCS’09 event. I used LaTex (Beamer) to create the presentation so the .tex file is available as well:

Slides

Source

I climbed Glyder Fach and then Glyder Fawr yesterday with my Dad and some of my brothers. We drove down to Wales the previous evening and arrived at 1am on Wednesday, grabbed a couple hours of sleep and then started the climb at 4:30am.

We finished at 10am and then went to Bangor for lunch.

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There’s a lot of people out there posting their SpeedTest.Net results so here’s mine, courtesy of the Warwick University Campus Network!

The power’s just come on after a 4th power cut in the Computer Science building in as many days. There were two on Friday while I was in the building and one just after I left. We’re not sure what the cause is or how many happened over the weekend but my suspicion is that the department is trying to get us geeks to take breaks from sitting in front of our computers 24/7!

This one lasted about 10 minutes and Jonny got stuck in the lift for the duration!

The picture is of my first shot from the 13th hole at Brailsford on the 23rd. Unfortunately my birdie putt stopped short so I could only manage par, however as that’s a rare occurrance at the moment I’m pretty happy with it!

I submitted an abstract for our annual departmental Postgraduate Colloquium event titled “Viewing and Delivering Adaptive Educational Hypermedia” last week. It’s about the program I’m currently writing at Warwick and is currently going through the review process. Providing the abstract is accepted the talk would be given on 3rd July.

Here’s the abstract in full:

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia offers a more intelligent and customised approach to the field of e-learning then the traditional linear methods. In an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course a student’s learning experiences can be personalised using a user model which could include such information as the student’s knowledge level or learning style.
Adaptive strategies are sets of adaptive rules and once the learning material to be used in a course has been created, adaptive strategies can be applied to allow the personalisation of the course to students. This talk will describe the initial development of a software platform which imports learning content and adaptive strategies and then can display the resulting Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course to students. The software platform, called an adaptation engine, will be able to implement different types of adaptive strategies and test their suitability.

The incredible Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge search engine has gone live today to the public. It has answers to pretty much anything you can think of, and although it may not be able to explain the meaning of life or what you ate this morning it can still tell you that the temperature in Antartica when Kennedy died was -38F. Make sure you visit as it is amazing!

Elsewhere on the internet I came across (via everyjoe.com) a webpage with a few really impressive images comparing the earth to the sun, the sun to some bigger star and then the bigger star to the REALLY bigger stars. Makes you feel small but it definitely worth a look. The world we live in is truely amazing!

Of course you can get some interesting facts on these things from Wolfram Alpha here…

You can get the latest issue of the free Blender magazine, BlenderArt #21, from their website here. This issue’s topic is “Look What I Can Do!”

I’ve written a couple of instrumental pieces this year and here are the results. I wrote ‘Spring’ in March and was playing around over the weekend and came up with a piece I’m calling ‘Eternal Hope’.

Let me know what you think…

As usual both tracks are available from my last.fm page:

• Spring
• Eternal Hope

Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

I’ve finally got around to uploading my latest recordings.

Please let me know if you like them!

As usual the recordings are just me on the piano + a tiny it of editing and are entirely my own arrangement without referring to sheet music.

You can download them using the links below and you can also listen to them and/or download them from my last.fm page:

• As The Deer
• It’s Your Blood
• Little Star
• Farwell Spanish Ladies
• The Lord’s My Shepherd Medley
• When I Survey
• Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
• Yesterday
• What a Friend Medley