Weeknote 2020-32
Header image: “Blackberry Caipirinha”, made with fresh picked blackberries from the woods by my house
The week has seemed a bit slow. Not sure why. I think maybe the heat (it has ben very warm here in the UK) or possibly because I've been spending quite a lot of late nights working on Choirless.
But looking back I have managed a number of things:
1) I took part in a panel discussion on students getting started in open source software. This I really enjoyed. I used to lecture at the University of Bristol periodically on this very topic, so was great to talk about it again after what seems like ages.
The impressive thing was the event was organised by students. The lead organiser is only 16 years old, and was meant to be doing her school exams this year if not for Covid.
A recording of the discussion is here:
2) I did a talk on a weekly show called Thursdays Matter about Generative Adversarial networks:
3) I did my regular weekly live stream on using Tensorflow.js to do machine learning predictions in the browser. The idea was to get the “smile detector” neural network I've trained previously running locally and taking images from my webcam. I didn't quite get that far, but did get the basic object recognition going. I've not published the video on this yet, so need to do that next week.
4) I've been working on the scalability of Choirless' rendering engine. This has been a lot of later night work, but been very rewarding. The biggest test so far is rendering 308 videos of bagpipes in a mere minutes:
I also delved into MQTT as a means to have the serverless functions publish timing stats, which I could then pull into a python notebook to chart:
A full write-up of this scalability work is on Dev:
https://dev.to/hammertoe/further-scaling-the-choirless-render-pipeline-514a
5) Alas I did not get enough time to finish up working on the idea I had with a colleague for an entry to the PayID hackathon. We were working on something to allow Github users to be paid in XRP whenever they made a commit, but didn't have time to wrap it up for the hackathon. Which is a shame, as I think it could have done quite well. A video of the original work we did and a writeup of it is on Dev:
https://dev.to/hammertoe/payid-hackathon-live-coding-monetizing-github-commits-585f
6) I did a submission to the “pancake challenge” on Cinnamon. Alas it was a 'fail' video, as I cooked bacon and eggs first and then didn't clean the pan properly before cooking the pancakes, so they stuck to the pan and got destroyed in coming out. Still tasted good though:
So, looking back at all that, maybe I've done more than I gave myself credit for this week.
I'm off camping with my 9 year old daughter for 3 nights this week. Will be heading of straight after my live stream. She is so excited to be going, which is great, as she's had a bit of a roller coaster emotionally the past few weeks. She has been heavily involved in a group online involved in musical theatre, but as with any group of kids that age, it has its dramas.
Recently I've been binge watching “Narcos”, a drama series about Pablo Escobar and the Colombian drug cartels. Then from there onto “Narcos Mexico” about the Mexican drugs trade. They have been interesting as they are based on real life events and people, but obviously with an amount of dramatisation. So the same characters pop up in each series. And from there I am now on to “El Chapo”. Which again has many of the same characters, but played by different actors. My brain is having a hard time getting around that the Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in El Chapo is the same as the Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in Narcos: Mexico... despite being played by a totally different actor with a very different look to them.
Next week, after the camping, I'm due to be meeting up with some of my colleagues for a (socially distanced) picnic at Hursley House (IBM's main office in the UK). We've not met in person now for three months, so will be great to see them... although we've been working great remotely. As for what we've all been up to, see the video below.
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