Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘computer’

Cambridge sights

Posted in out and about, tagged , , , , on 27/10/2013| Leave a Comment »

I’ve recently had a number of headhunter types waving opportunities under my nose and asking if I’d consider relocating. Whilst it’s nice to feel wanted, it’s even nicer to remind myself of some of the reasons why I’m very happy to stay where I am. So: what is there to see in Cambridge?

Coffee and cake
(more…)

Read Full Post »

What to do in the face of an apocalypse

Posted in staying in, tagged , , , , on 16/08/2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day I saw a rather alarming report produced by MoneyWeek magazine, entitled The End of Britain, predicting an imminent financial apocalypse. The claim was simple: over the past few decades the level of debt in the UK (private, corporate and government) had ballooned; that the only reason that this appeared sustainable was that interest rates were unusually low at the moment; and that as soon as they rose it would be curtains for Britain.
(more…)

Read Full Post »

How I got into programming

Posted in juvenilia, staying in, tagged , , , , on 28/07/2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day someone asked me how I got into programming. This was an interview question. In retrospect it’s a surprise that no-one has asked me this before. The next time I have cause to interview a programmer, I’ll be sure to ask them the same thing.

My first degree involved a certain amount of programming, but it didn’t occur to me until quite late that I might have a knack for it. Other people on the course had computers of their own, and had been programming for years. I didn’t, and hadn’t.

Well, that’s not quite true. I’d had some encounters when younger, which I can illustrate with some photos I took yesterday at the newly opened Cambridge home of the Centre for Computing History.
(more…)

Read Full Post »

The Turing machine as an image of thought

Posted in juvenilia, theory, tagged , , , , , on 22/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

A long time ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied a module about Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of mind. It covered Searle’s Chinese Room argument, the Turing test, traditional AI vs connectionism. That sort of thing.

I think the main consequence of this was a realisation that I preferred intellectual history to that kind of philosophy. The impression I got was that debates trying to sort out the relation between “the body” and “the mind” didn’t appear either to have achieved their aim or to have said much of interest along the way. Better to relate a course of events and a line of thought. But that’s by the by.

One of the ideas mentioned in this course was that “the mind” was a Turing machine. I thought I had a pretty good argument for saying it wasn’t, but I never had the opportunity to state it. Now, let me see: how did it go again?
(more…)

Read Full Post »

Upgrading Ubuntu

Posted in staying in, tagged , , , , , on 08/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

I’ve recently started doing a bit of work for a non-profit IT organization. Submitting a bug-fix turned out to involve some yak shaving that I really can’t be bothered to describe, which gave rise to this:

ubuntu_upgrade

I knew there was a reason I’d been avoiding upgrading my Ubuntu installation. (I mean, apart from the obvious one.)

For what it’s worth, I think the upper button probably said something like “Show details”, since clicking caused a text pane (also containing a large number of squares) to appear. The lower button presumably said “OK”.

Once upgraded I ran into other trouble of various kinds. Fortunately, this was a virtual machine, so I could just rollback to a previous state. Also, there’s more than one way to shave a yak.

Read Full Post »