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2013 in review
2013 is the year when everything changed.
The biggest event was the birth of our daughter Lily. She was born prematurely in Shanghai while we were on a short stopover on our way home from Europe in July. Due to the generosity of thousands of people in New Zealand and around the world, we were able to fly her home by private jet in September. The ( Read more... ) -
2012 in review
2012 has been fairly quiet. Maybe it just seems that way because I haven't actually written anything new in this blog since last year's annual summary.
- Spent an entire year working from home (telecommuting). I miss the social aspect of the workplace, but the zero commute sure is nice.
- Since I'm no longer cycling to work, I started running ( Read more... )
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new photo galleries
I've been busy processing photo galleries from the last year (or two) and putting them online for your perusal.
( Read more... )
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2011 in review
2011 was the year that was pretty much defined by the earthquakes in Christchurch. Everything else seems insignificant, but it turns out I did other things too.
- Christchurch was devastated by the earthquakes of 22 February. Unlike the big one last year, this one was almost directly under the city and destroyed lives, property, and livelihoods. ( Read more... )
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noaa weather radio tools
After many years (since 2003!) I have finally put the source code to my NOAA Weather Radio tools online at ghewgill/nwr on Github. Over the years I had quite a few people email me asking for the source code. I finally am able to reply to them all with a link to the code. -
minilink performance improvement
My minilink/lnk.nu link shortener has been getting increasingly popular lately. There was a sharp jump up in activity in mid-October, which has now put the request rate at around 20k requests per day. There have been spikes up to 40k per day, too ( Read more... ) -
stack overflow questions in ebook format
In my quest to create useful reference ebooks for the Kindle, I've created ebooks of the top rated programming questions on Stack Overflow for the top 20 tags.
Stack Overflow ebooks
These files are created from the monthly Stack Overflow Creative Commons data dump. I've got a combination of Python, Java, and XSLT scripts that process the raw XML ( Read more... ) -
2010 in review
2010 was a pretty interesting year.
- Went to Hawaii for three weeks with Amy. Didn't get to see flowing lava, but did get to swim with turtles! (Pictures coming when I get around to it, just got the underwater film roll developed a couple of weeks ago.)
- Got a cat, "Toothless". I had never had a pet before, and he's now a constant source of smiles ( Read more... )
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chinese-english dictionary for kindle
Further to my previous entry on Chinese text in the Kindle, I've put some more work into the Chinese-English dictionary I mentioned.
I used the CC-CEDICT dictionary as the basis for my dictionary. I also used the radical stroke count database from the Unihan Database. The result is a traditional radical-stroke order dictionary that seems ( Read more... ) -
rss2mobi: google reader to mobipocket creator
I've been using my Kindle to read RSS feeds through Google Reader. Using the Kindle's built-in web browser, Google Reader works surprisingly well (as long as you enable keyboard shortcut commands). However, there are some annoyances:
- The text is pretty small due to the layout of the Reader web page. It's possible to zoom in, but then you need to ( Read more... )