No Content, No Fuss: Category cambridge

The Best of Photo Booth

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:34:00 +0100

Photobooth is a totally under-appreciated piece of software that comes with every new Mac! To show my appreciation (and answer Kieran's call for more pictures), here are some random captures from the last few months. As you can see, my fondness for a good thumbs-up has been spreading through the world. If you aren't on here, remind me to capture you next time you are at my place!

Dr. Madhavapeddy I presume?

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:43:40 +0100

After an invigorating 120 minutes of questioning, bright lights shining in my face, and general all-round cross-examination, my two examiners Ian Wakeman and Tim Griffin decided to pass me with minor corrections for my PhD! On top of that, it miraculously got nominated for a BCS Distinguished Dissertation award, which does motivate me to really polish it up before submitting the final version. At the Volta Lounge, we are planning to graduate together next summer, so there's no rush...

I haven't quite gotten used to it yet; while booking tickets to San Francisco for Thursday I bottled out to the sales lady and put my title down as "Mr." instead of "Dr."!

Migrating blog to Typo

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:25:24 +0100

I've migrated away from my custom-written blog (farewell mlblog!) to the very nice Typo based on Rails. This is mainly because I don't have the time to hack together all of the XML-RPC functions required to support the MovableType API in OCaml, and the live-search feature now present in the sidebar is very cool!

To summarise the last six months, I submitted my PhD, broke my knee, went to the OpenBSD hackathon, fixed my knee, released some OCaml code (still very low-key as it needs a lot of polish) and am happily working at XenSource in Cambridge now! PhD viva is next Friday...!

Scotty and Eleanor get hitched

avsm — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 14:05:04 +0000

I finally got around to uploading a few months worth of pictures to my gallery, and of course the first thing to highlight was the Robinson Wedding of the Century: Scotty and Eleanor! The wedding was awesome as it was held in Cambridge in the cozy Robinson Chapel (which is our College Chapel), and performed by the wonderful Maggie Dawn (who actually blogged about the event as well). Here is a short selection of pictures... I failed to capture any of the actual wedding itself, as I ended up ushering and almost missed it, woopsie.

It all began in a stag night which ended in a police station...	The wounds were replaced by smiles by the wedding day!	The Battle of the Babies heats up with Imogen...
... vs the obnoxiously cute Flynn Ludlam	Flynn wins Round 1 in the Separated at Birth contest vs Ed	... and he also drinks Kieran under the table!

Cambridge quickies

avsm — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:38:10 +0100

Well I've been back in Cambridge for a week now, catching up on stuff that's been languishing in the last month of travelling. So here are some blog quickies!

Shouts out to the newest blogger, the least German-like German person I know! Whooooop yeah yeah...
Released a new version of OpenFX, with some really cool new features from Dr. Stuart Ferguson!
Sorry about the backlog of OpenBSD-related things; I think I've caught up on all my mails, and imported and updated lots of bits and bobs and ports. Please re-mail me if I've ignored anything you have sent me recently.
Released a test version of review2atom, the result of my ocamlduce hackery (and many thanks to Alan Frisch for answering my incessant questions!).
Submitted DarwinPorts for calendar (dports/devel/caml-calendar) and ocamlduce (dports/lang/ocamlduce).
I'm going to buy a juicer; turnip smoothie is en route!

Blog exclusive... shocking secrets

avsm — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:57:22 +0100

The time has come to reveal a dark secret, hidden for many years, subject to taunting from my esteemed colleagues (you know who you are!). Yes, its true... I dont know how to swim!. Never got around to it... sink like a rock ... nose too big ... the excuses really piled up.

However, after several viewings of Titanic on various plane journies and cheap movie nights, it was time to end this impasse. And, luckily enough, my buddy Colin in Hong Kong has a pool at his place in Tsing Yi. A mere two hours of trying later (and some expert tuition), I can do a backstroke and avoid drowning and crying like a baby! And even better, I'm spending a week in a hotel in Japan, with a pool! Is this heaven?

PS: Your turn to learn now djs. Oops, did I just reveal two dark personal secrets in this blog exclusive?

"Cricket is just baseball on valium"

avsm — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:40:18 +0100

Well ok, it wasn't the fastest game ever, but the graduate team assembled today to play the now-traditional summer cricket match against the staff of Robinson College. It had a moderately nail-biting finish, with the students clinching victory with one over to spare! Unfortunately, that put me on the losing side, as I was subbed to the staff since they were one short. But I reckon I can claim the moral victory!

A formidable squad assembles...

...and a glorious day to avoid writing thesis begins

This is a picture of us playing croquet a few days ago, in case you were bored of cricket.

Return of the Thesisometer

avsm — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:30:59 +0100

Summer is upon us, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and ... the thesisometer has returned, courtesy of Andy Warfield! It's going to be a long summer ...

We do the monkey-eeee

avsm — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:36:26 +0100

Climbing has taken a turn for the intense, with sessions down at the Kelsey Kerridge climbing wall as well as on the wooden clappers deep in the bowels of the William Gates Building.

Spiderman, Spiderman...	...does whatever a...	...spider can!
Err well, almost...	Alex does the L-hang...	also known as the "aieee!"-hang
Kieran reveals his inner goat	Andy maximises chin count	I demonstrate my black belt in keeping it real

NT-Hell installed at last

avsm — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:01:35 +0100

It only took 7 days, 10 phonecalls, and 16 hours of waiting around for engineers to show up to get my NTL cable modem installed at the new flat. The hassle always seems to be getting hold of the installation guys; once they actually arrived, the process took about 15 minutes! I see why this website was set up though...

While moving all the computer kit around, I took the opportunity to upgrade my Soekris NET4521 to the latest snapshot of OpenBSD. I use the flashdist scripts modified to include a few extra things such as ntpd and symon, as well as bring it up to date with the latest snapshots. You can grab the custom kernel config NET45x1 and the distribution set.