Hi, I'm Mat

August 28, 2011
by admin
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thrift.

Looking at apache Thrift at the moment.

Here are the main things i’ve looked at so far.

It’s a bit of a strange concept but mainly it’s a software framework that allows you to specify something like a message prototype – with thrift you can then create bindings in many languages that will allow you to pass data in this format around from system to system maintaining data types etc.

So you can have a message created in Java that is then sent to PHP then that sends lots of messages to some C programs etc..

I think that’s what it is anyway from everything i’ve read.
I have yet to put any of this into practise but will update this page when I do.

Here are the main things i’ve read..

Apache Thrift Wiki

Thrift: The missing guide

Facebook Engineering Post

Great Thrift Tutorial (edit)

August 13, 2011
by admin
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It’s a riot!

After a week of rioting on and off around the country, it seems like the sole response to this has been to punish anyone and everyone that police can find who had anything to do with the disorder seen on the streets of the UK.

I agree that people should be punished who break the law and it’s pretty clear that kicking in the front of a shop and either looting or just setting it alight IS against the law, but surely councils kicking people out of their council houses isn’t gonna help the root causes of all of this.

Another thing that annoyed me was a bit of footage of a girl in Birmingham city centre saying that the police needed to give her more respect and then she’d respect them. I simply don’t understand that. A policeman is a mix of a person and the representation of a idea. The person is the part that gives them the ability to deal with all sorts of situations from telling someone a close relative has died to helping a rape victim. The other part of the deal is the representation of the states agreement to protect the population and keep crime under control. THIS is what you respect in a police officer, not the person in front of you.. that doesn’t matter. I know this might be a bit of a dream, i’m haven’t exactly had a lot of dealings with the wrong side of the law – the nearest I got was having some alcopops taken off me when I was 16.

I can’t claim to know every cause of the unrest, but i’m gonna assume a large part of it is people not feeling engaged in society, or not feeling society has anything to offer them or wants to offer them anything. They can’t get a job and whenever the cuts designed to stem the deficit of government debt are covered in the news it seems that some form of benefit payment has been cut or simply just stopped.

The aftermath of the riots will have also had an effect. The images of the broom army, i’m sure to some, will have looked like a gathering of the middle classes denouncing the actions of the lower classes – something that isn’t gonna help with engagement of young people in society.  I have a job that  pays well and is fun. I can imagine that not having that would not help with a feeling of belonging to a society that offers you a way of life you appreciate.

There also seems to be a problem of how to punish the people convicted of crimes during the riots and looting. You can lock people up, you can fine people, and you can give them a criminal record but it seems this doesn’t quite help in this case. I can’t really work out how to solve this. Avoiding putting people into a downward spiral is really important and one of the main reasons I really don’t think evicting people is acceptable or taking peoples benefits away. It’s just not going to help.

There’s another side to this though. The people who just took the opportunity to get free stuff are just taking the piss. They need to grow up and think about who they are – teachers, social workers etc – there’s just no good reason for looting. It’s just mass theft.

This post of a bit of a brain dump, so I might add to it over the next couple of days – and apologies if it doesn’t read well.

oh, and if you haven’t seen it.. http://photoshoplooter.tumblr.com/

June 27, 2011
by admin
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eConv.. eMail needs to change

i think it’s finally time for email to move over and let something newer take its place.

email draws its name from the thing it aimed to replace – plain old snail mail. it did this well. it speeded up delivery time. it delivered your data with a fairly high reliability. and it did this well for a long time.

but now is the time for a change i think. email clogs up the internet by sending the same data again and again with conversations growing and growing. this is where i reckon you can make a difference. if each server in a conversation just tracks the new messages and add’s to it’s own store, data is only ever stored once on each server.

this is a bit like facebooks new messaging system. it tracks real time conversation but then also allows you send messages when the other person is offline.

now this brings us nicely around to google wave. something which i think was probably a bit too far ahead of it’s time and did too much in one product to make it a success. if they could have turned gmail into when facebook messages is now they would have had a far better response in the beginning and then could have grown the feature set to include all the cool stuff that it was capable of.

this type of system would also need to be backwards compatible – not necessarily sending the whole email back to a simple email server though.

so ‘econv’ is that future. i reckon anyway. a smoother email experience with a more real time feel that expands on emails feature set but only when it needs to and without infringing on the current system.

simple.

June 20, 2011
by admin
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Hangovers must die.

wine glass

so, I was reading this today..

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/hangover-cures/

i want to know what works the best so i’m hopefully gonna experiment with stuff and see what works.

not quite sure how i’m gonna control all the variables yet but i think it’s possible.

Some first thoughts.

1. The simplest thing to control is the amount of alcahol. i.e. you can drink a whole bottle, or the same amount of drinks etc

2. Food eaten in the day before. Composition, timings etc.

3. Multiple test subjects needed ( applications on a postcard please )

Will do some more posts in due course.

 

 

June 16, 2011
by admin
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Hacking Life.

 

I’ve always had the feeling that what people call common knowledge isn’t the be all and end all of the story.

An example of this has a similar theme to my last post about fat. People in the west generally have strange ideas about food and what it does to you.  If you need to lose weight most people immediately start thinking about how they can eat less where as there are far quicker ways to lost body fat –  which is really what losing weight is about – than just to stop eating. ie. Why not trick your body to start using the fat it has stored as an energy source rather then give it no choice by starving yourself. This is completely possible yet no one seems to believe it.

Another example is exercise and fitness. Most runners train by running more and more. Whether they are training for their first 5k or 10k, or contemplating their 10th or even 100th marathon. Where as there is a fair amount of evidence that you can train equally as well for such events not by running further and further but by teaching your body to operate more efficiently without becoming anaerobic in far shorter distances.

I’m actually gonna try this. I have a marathon ‘booked’ in november. I will be doing precisely 12 weeks training for this and will not be running more than 10km at once during that time. Yes i’m fairly fit, but i’ve been injured for the past 2 months – my arm, not my legs – so will be starting from a fairly normal place.

I haven’t yet pinned down my exact training schedule but i’m gonna try and keep my blog up to date with how i’m doing.

That’s it for now – but next time you hear someone say ‘this is the best way to do it’ have a little think about it and make sure it is..

 

June 12, 2011
by Mat Evans
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Food, Fat and how people have completely the wrong idea

I’ve been noticing more and more that there’s quite a strong belief that eating fat makes you fat.

It doesn’t. 

That statement on its own doesn’t quite tell the whole story. If you ate so much fat that you were consuming vastly more calories than you should normally of course this will make you fat, but avoiding eating fat because you want to lose weight is just silly. On some days I eat 50% of my calories as fat. yup. 

am i fat? no. am I unfit? no, i have a resting heart rate in the low 40′s and a maximum heart rate of over 200.

The main value of this post will be the following links. Give them some time and you will learn more about the body, exercise and food than you could ever know.

Firstly, head over to http://www.marksdailyapple.com - this is the blog of Mark Sisson, a retired endurance athlete who knows more about food and the body than I could ever wish to know. It will give you a very good grounding of how to lose weight if you want to, how to get fit and stay fit, and how to stay generally healthy.

Secondly, there are a fair few articles at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog - this is the blog of Tim Ferriss. Tim is a life hacker. He experiments with life and writes all about it. Some very interesting and intrigueing stuff there. He also has a great book out at the moment, The Four Hour Body. A fascinating read.

Lastly, Want to get fit? I mean really fit? Then wonder over to crossfit.com. Have a look at the FAQ and the Workout of the Day intros. Then find yourself a crossfit club.

That’s it for now. I’m gonna try and post more on this, it’s something i’m very interested in at the moment.

 

June 2, 2011
by Mat Evans
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it’s been a while..

As it’s been a while I thought i’d get down on paper what i’ve been doing. 

1) been recovering from a small injury i managed to sustain whilst ‘rushing’ out of my house to work one day. it involved slipping on the stairs, a picture frame and two tendons and an artery being cut in my right arm. oops. anyway, it’s on the mend now

2) also been developing a little app that lets you send and share files over twitter. i’ll blog more about this when it’s in a bit of a better state, but’s it’s nearly done. keeping it nice and simple in the beginning

3) entered the marathon des sables 2013 last week. for those not familiar with the race it’s 6 marathons in 7 days through the sahara. fun huh? i shall of course be raising money for something, although unsure as to what yet

4) had a lot of ideas recently too. more details to follow

5) fallen in love with lower case text.

 

there we go, that will do for now.

till next time

 

May 12, 2011
by Mat Evans
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Facebook and the web

I really like, maybe even love Facebook. It keeps me in touch with friends who I don’t see much, it lets me see what everyone is doing and lets me know generally know what’s going on in my ‘social network’.

Facebook have just made live a new feature that allows you to tag pages in photos. Amazing. They seem to be on to a good thing. They’re slowly ending up with content that’s fully indexed whatever it may be. Their little universe has a huge amount of information, like the web, and it’s all tied to people, places and products, unlike the web.. yet.

It’s in someway the beginnings of the symantic web – a machine would have no problem working out the relationships between all this information.  The limits of facebook at the moment are that it’s only about the people who are on it and does not yet allow those people to record their knowledge, only really social information.

If you could start adding this information Facebook could conceivably become a far better way of using the internet as a whole.

Scary?