I'm now on campus three out of five days, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the first two of these seem more normal, it's the start of the week and more of the rest of the team are around, but Thursdays it's a bit emptier. And it's semester break now, so …

One of the frustrating things about web3 is that people who talk about it seem to be lumping together a bunch of things - intrinsic decentralisation, crypto, disillusionment with corporate social media, virtual reality - which don't really have much in common. The term 'web3' is obviously meant to make this iteration …

A bit hesitant to blog about web3 because, like cryptocurrency, it seems to be a topic which drives people to a kind of monomania even if they're opposed to it. But I've poked fun at bitcoin on this website in the past so here goes.

I have been trying to …

I still feel like I don't quite have the hang of blogging regularly again, and do things like leave it until too late in the day, when I'm too tired to write anything useful. I've got a list of posts lined up but need to set aside the time to …

On Friday mornings I run up Talavera Road and along a footbridge under the M2, down the bike track through the Lane Cove National Park to Brown's Waterhole, back up again and then back across Macquarie University, where I studied in the late 80s and early 90s.

This Friday I …

Hopscotch New York: Pantheon Books, 1966

Julio Cortázar (translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa)

I bought a copy of this a few years ago, and I'm not sure what made me start reading it this year. It's a self-consciously labyrinthine and ludic novel, following the anti-hero Oliveira's affairs and …

My current coding project is developing a utility to help medical researchers upload batches of imagery, mostly CT scans, to our instance of a piece of repository software called XNAT. The team who maintain it already have some Python command-line utilities to inspect, upload and download things one at a …

This isn't a very auspicious start to a month of blogging - I decided to join in on #blogjune, which I found out about via Mastodon, and thought it would be a good spur to start writing more here. But I ended up getting home late for the very modern reason …

This week I finished off a quick project to upgrade the University's instance of CQPweb, a web app for doing corpus linguistics - the analysis of language based on large corpora of texts from sources such as journalism, legal proceedings, TV scripts and the like. (One of the first things you …

At the start of September this year I applied for a new job at the University of Sydney. After a Zoom interview and a coding exercise, I found out at the end of the month that I'd got the job, but I didn't get a letter of offer for a …