What I Read in 2014

Inspired by a brilliant post by Kyra Maya Phillips of identical vein, I thought I’d discuss the books I read in 2014. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but for a long time it was a solitary pursuit, something I conducted as a purely internal mental exercise. This started to change this year and I’m enjoying the fleeting conversations I get to share on the rare occasion I find a friend (or perfect stranger) who’s read the same book as me.

Syntax Highlighted Cat

I was setting up my work mac the other day and finally got round to implementing an alias for syntax highlighting the cat bash command. It’s very quick and simple.

Getting Octave & GNUPlot to work on OSX Mavericks

I recently embarked on Coursera’s incredibly good machine learning course for which I needed to install Octave and GNUPlot on my MacBook Pro running OSX Mavericks (alas, my student MatLab license is soon to expire). This has been single handedly the most difficult install job I’ve ever gone through. I’m documenting what I did here more for myself. If you find it useful, great.

Philosophy Notes

I used Murally to take notes for the philosophy module I took in my third year of uni. All the notes I took from the second half of the course on free will, human nature and ethics are below. I missed the free will lecture (but have since filled that in).

Build The News

I spent this weekend at BL-NK at Build The News, a hackathon laid on by The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun which my team and I won. Loads of teams entered and they were some pretty cool submissions, too much to do justice by covering here. This post is an account of our team’s journey over the last two days. If you want to see what everyone else has been up to, a good place to start is the event’s hashtag, #BuildTheNews.

Context – An Extension For Chrome

I’ve been looking for an excuse to learn how to make Chrome extensions ever since I read this great article about how a little knowledge in this field can take you a long way. So to the bewilderment of my family, when inspiration struck late on Christmas day 2013 I got straight to work building Context, my first attempt at a Chrome extension.

Tl;DR? Here’s the link to install Context into Chrome. Go to any Wikipedia article to see it in action.

My Time at Bletchley Park

This post was written first and foremost for the many people I worked with and learnt from while volunteering at Bletchley Park between 2010 and 2012 . I owe them a tremendous debt and only wish that I could visit them and the Park more often than I can. It is these people that make it a jewel in Britain’s crown and a place I am proud to have a small but memorable association with.