Amir Chaudhry

26 April 2012

The Illusion of Choice

Click on the image for a bigger version.

Not sure where this came from but it’s interesting (e.g I had no idea that Nestle did pet food nor that they had a stake in L’Oreal).

13 April 2012

Pics from TEDx Granta

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About a month ago I was at TEDx Granta. The theme was Alive & Kicking and it was a good event with some really interesting speakers, including:

• Eben Upton, on the Raspberry Pi Foundation (pic 2)
• Merlin Crossingham, on Wallace & Gromit (pics 5&6)
• Tim Minshall, on how engineers make the future (pic 9)

Videos will be on the website at some point for those who want to catchup.

There’s also another TED event taking place in June. TEDx Oxbridge, organised by students from Oxford and Cambridge, will be on the theme of Unconventional Wisdom. Not sure who the speakers are yet.

12 April 2012

More likely to die Dancing than Skydiving

From the infographic below.

• “Odds of dying while skydiving in the US: 1 in 101,083”
• “Dance parties: 1 in 100,000 chance of dying”

Wonder what the BCPA would make of this, since they recklessly combine both Skydiving and parties on a regular basis (how extreme).

Seriously though, this nicely depicts that many things have worse odds than skydiving (although comparisons like this should be taken with a pinch of salt). However, base jumping (which is not the same thing as skydiving) seems to be the most dangerous by far (1 in 60).

via BMD

11 April 2012

Joining the Computer Lab Systems Group

This was the post I meant to write all the way back in January.

I’ve joined the Systems Research Group in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Much of the work here has a strong practical angle and people like to build useful things. Several of the profs here have been involved in creating some prominent companies (one recent example is XenSource, which powers much of the public cloud - bought by Citrix).

My work in the lab is related to Personal Containers, which aims to give users access and control over their lifelong digital footprint. It’s part of a wider research program funded by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, which tackles topics ranging from energy efficiency to “Death 2.0” (that might sound odd but what does happens to your online identity/ies when you die? What should happen? How?).

One of the first things I worked on was a paper with several other folks in the lab, which is currently being presented at a conference. It’s about infrastructure to infer the carbon footprint of employees’ daily commute by analysing high resolution geolocation data from their smartphones. Obviously, this must be done in a privacy-sensitive manner, which is what the paper discusses. Once it’s published in the conference proceedings I’ll add a link to it here.

I’ve also been writing a bit on the Personal Conatainer’s blog about privacy and personal data. The posts there will be reposted here too, over the next few weeks.

Other than that, here are some random pics from the lab. The second pic will make more sense if you’ve seen the xkcd comic it’s based on.

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7 April 2012

I moved my site to GitHub Pages

Yet again, it’s been several months since my last post (it’s almost a habit now). This isn’t intended to be another catchup post, though.

The reason for this post is that I’ve moved my site (amirchaudhry.com) to GitHub Pages.

Since I’m using my own domain, this is unlikely to affect anyone but I’ve copied this post into both the new GitHub site and old Posterous site just in case. If you’re reading this via my Posterous site (presumably through the share/follow features there), then it’ll be the last post to go up there.

There are still a bunch of things that are bit broken in the new place.

• No tweet/sharing buttons*
• Tags don’t sort properly
• Search doesn’t work well
• RSS/Atom feed is probably a mess
• Syntax highlighting isn’t working**

Moving from Posterous to GitHub Pages

The process of moving to GitHub was a useful experience. Here are the steps I ended up taking before I pointed the domain to the new site. Overall, I’m really glad that my posts aren’t tied up in someone else’s platform anymore.

Getting set up with GitHub Pages

I used Jekyll Bootstrap and the default bootstrap theme. It was ridiculously quick and easy to get a basic site up and start playing around. The first thing I did was try to re-create structure of my old site and then worry about how it looked. I’d never dealt with CSS before so this was always going to take a while. For example, it took me ages to figure out why items kept shifting between pages. Turns out I needed the following line in my style file:

html { overflow-y: scroll; }

Although dealing with the CSS took a while, Bootstrap made it really easy to copy/paste/edit the bits I wanted to change. The nav section was a pain to sort out. It took a few weeks to get to this point but you’re looking at a bootstrap site, which looks nothing like bootstrap (win!). It’s likely that I’ll keep tweaking things but I’m not expecting to do anything major.

Migrating the posts

There wasn’t an easy way to migrate directly from Posterous to GitHub. There are scripts available but either through bad-luck or ineptitude, I couldn’t get them to work. A guy called Chad recently created Export My Posts, which pulled out all my content in html format (phew!). I really didn’t want to deal with learning an API or parsing an xml file, so I’m glad he put this together. It works extremely well.

Next step was to run all the html posts through pandoc to convert them to markdown. I wrote a fairly trivial shell script to do this.

#!/bin/bash
echo -e "Files to convert to md? "
read -a allfiles
#args=("$@")
for file in ${allfiles[*]}; do
    printf "   %s\n" $file
    pandoc -o ./convert/$file.md $file
done

Then came the slow process of checking each file, removing the left-over html, adding the appropriate headers, dealing with image galleries etc. Part of this could have been automated but I don’t have that many posts so I went through them manually.

Once all that was done, I simply had to switch the domain over and everything was fine.

Lessons learned

I need to keep a local copy of content. Of course, this is now solved but even before-hand I would write and save things locally before sending them up. The problem was that I’d always have to tweak something or edit a typo and those changes happened on the site (never on my local copy).

Having existing things I can dig into and copy from (i.e. bootstrap) really speeds up my learning. I don’t think I could have gotten this far this quickly without such resources. If you look at the code itself it’s probably a mess, but it’s my mess.

Scripting things will help. Quickly creating image galleries is the next thing I need to figure out. The process is obvious to me now (since I did parts of it by hand) but I have to automate it using ImageMagick.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with myself. I’ve gone from knowing nothing about CSS, static sites, and bootstrap to being vaguely (in)competent. Rock on!

*Though I'll probably use something like AddThis. ... Edit: Ok, so at the time of writing, I didn't have the buttons but by the time of publishing I'd figured it out :)

**Yup, managed to fix that too :)