Programming

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Live projects

• A UserMeter – using an old fashioned Ammeter to monitor our server load
• The UK 2050 Calculator – a visualisation of a complex excel model that allows you to explore the many ways the UK energy system could be changed.
• excel_to_code - compiles Excel spreadsheets into pure C or pure Ruby code, so that they can server as the backend to visualisations, or be driven programatically.
• Sankey - A javascript library for drawing Sankey diagrams.
• rubypeg - A ruby library for constructing parsing expression grammars
• how-much-is - A single page web application for doing unit conversions and simultaneously giving a sense of whether the number is big or not

Dead or passed on

• talks.cam – A talk listing service for the University of Cambridge
• NMK – Some of the back-end code behind this networking site
• Patchworks – A cocoa interface to the darcs version control system.
• Pages-Bibtex – A tool for the Apple iWork Pages wordprocessor to automatically include citations.
• A Ruby client for the Raven authentication protocol
• A web based event booking system ( http://mcr.clare.cam.ac.uk/events/ )
• A web based resource (e.g. rooms, boats) booking system
• A wiki (that is hosting this) designed for PhD note taking ( http://www.soks.org )

Random scripts & notes

• Excel to Latex table convertor -- Thanks to Alan Munn ,this now exists CTAN
• A textile to html convertor
• An acronym finder
• A boring file for darcs and rails
• A rake task to set the file permissions and ownership in a rails project
• Accessing ActionController from ActionMailer using Integration::Session
• Applescript to send message to 30boxes
• Early experiences with Active Resource
• Helped with some fixes for a tool to translate OmniOutliner notes into Latex.

My history as a programmer

My mum taught me to program when I was aged 8 or so, in BBC Basic on (you guessed it) a beeb, I then graduated onto programming in Assembler and some Pascal on the BBC and on my arc. During my university years I worked for a few start-ups doing some coding in Java including a web-server that customised content to the person viewing it in the days when that was pretty novel and high tech, and some work on electronic health records. I didn’t do any programming while I was working as a Strategy Consultant, but re-learnt when I went back to University for my PhD. My default language is ruby.

Updated 3 January 2014