Gson performance analysis
October 15th, 2011
I’m currently looking at the performance issues of an internal Java webapp being developing at the University. It’s a large piece of software (over 374 Java files) which has ‘naturally’ evolved over the years meaning that many requirements have changed since it was originally conceived leaving the software with a fair amount of feature bloat. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: java, performance, unittesting | 3 Comments »
Upgrading the Scientific Method
January 29th, 2011
Our lives have become intwined with the maelstrom of digital connections happening all around us. Having given us the digital age, kicked off the web and brought about our modern world of rolling news, twitter trends and Facebook ‘likes’, computer scientists are starting to offer something back to traditional Science; the tools and methodologies it needs to conduct Science in the 21st Century. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: academia, linkeddata, research, science, semantic web | No Comments »
LinkedData hackday event
January 15th, 2011
I’ve just finished attending a DevCSI+Research Revealed linked data hackday event. This 2 day event hosted by ILRT, was a chance for like-minded individuals interested in Linked Data to meet up, chat, listen to presentations, lightening talks and get a chance to do some hacking together.
We had around 40 attendees from a range of backgrounds; including local freelance developers, software houses, public and private sector companies, members of HE institutions & PhD students.
Over the two days there was a wealth of new ideas, techniques and tools presented, including…
For the hacking part of the event, I teamed up with Libby Miller, Damian Steer and Sam Adams to look at characterising large datasets. In my view this is an underrated aspect of Linked Data which can help increase adoption – how to gain an understanding and feel for the data lying behind an Endpoint when all you can do is fire off unfriendly SPARQL/REST queries. We were investigating techniques for feature extraction/statistical analysis of RDF graphs, and looking at tools to provide visualisations of the datasets. Initially we experienced a few frustrating hours as we came to realise that although we know little of graph theory, it was clear that even to experts this is a non-trivial set of problems.
We struggled on and by the end of day 2, Damian and I successfully implemented a graph reduction algorithm which could be used to identify isolated sub-graphs from within a network of triples.
Spurred on by this work, after the event I coded up a RDF Class-Property diagram viewer using Grails and the Dracula Graph Library, based on Chris Gutteridge‘ SPARQL Vampire Diagram generator.
Filed under: bristol, conferences, java, linkeddata, semantic web | No Comments »
SKOS Cheat sheet
May 20th, 2010
Due to lack of a better alternative, I’ve created a cheat sheet for Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) terms. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: semantic web | No Comments »
DrupalCamp Bristol 2010
March 29th, 2010
On Saturday (27th March) I attended a DrupalCamp Bristol event, the first gathering of Druapl-ers in the South West.
Over 45 people attended the day, which included a lot of people from the hosts, SiftGroup, and the rest seemed mainly freelancers. Also in attendance was Matt Hamilton who was on the lookout for tips on the organisation of the event in light of the upcoming Plone conference later in the year.
The day consisted of about 4, 40 minute talks and plenty of time in between for informal chats. People could also post up requests for impromptu talks, and Matt gave us all an introduction to Plone for Drupal developers.
I found the day generally interesting, and enjoyed the out-of-talk discussions.
Although the talks themselves were not massively useful, I have come away with the desire to look into:
* Xdebug (a php profiler)
* Drupal 7′s integrated support for caching (APC, Memcached, reverse proxies – generally the stance is to play well with tools designed for this task)
* Pressflow (a distribution of Drupal with integrated performance, scalability, availability, and testing enhancements)
* install profiles & features – the ability to record multiple module settings and reapply them in bulk
* Admin - a decent? admin interface
All in all I though the day was well worth attending, just a shame I had to leave before the security talk!
Filed under: bristol, drupal | No Comments »
Android app out now
January 15th, 2010
I’ve just released my first Android mobile phone application 
“This app shows you nearby petrol stations and lets you share fuel prices for petrol stations that you know of, and to see the prices entered by others.
Browse the map to find stations, and click any station flag to view and update prices.
For more information, check out the WhatGas web site:
http://www.whatgas.com”
Download from the Android Market today, or visit my website for more information.
Filed under: android, java | 1 Comment »
(Re)Programming
February 14th, 2009
I have recently started a new project at work on which I’m both the only architect & developer. This project is an extension of an existing one but rewritten from the ground up. I’m taking this opportunity to look back at my past work and select things that have worked for me, as well as drop those that didn’t. I also have the chance to check out the latest technologies on offer to the Java web programmer of today. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: ajax, hibernate, javascript, jsunit, spring, unittesting | No Comments »
XML 2007 Conference report
December 8th, 2007
I’ve just attended the XML 2007 conference in Boston [held in the winter to filter out all but the most determined attendees]. It is actually a much older conference then I’d imagined having been in existence in various guises since the late 80’s and today was attended by a modest 300 people. I think this decline in numbers is indicative of the established position that XML as a technology as become. The use of XML as a document representation language and also as a data format was mirrored in the central strands of the sessions. Topics in the XML and the Web strand (the one I paid most attention to) concentrated around current trends such as Microformats, Mashups, REST, Office Open XML, JSON and AJAX. Although many of these subjects are relatively new, the maturity of the underlying XML infrastructure upon which they rely facilitate speedier adoption and development.
My main attention was on XFORMS – the technology I have been using in the EELS project. We had an entire evening of XFORMS talks (much coffee and festive eggnog was consumed in preparation) and amongst the vast majority of ‘introduction to xforms’-type presentations were some tips on how XFORMS is ideally suited to work with RESTful services, harnessing the power of XML databases for form storage and the position that XFORMS sits within the emerging standards based web development world. Rather then going into further details, I advise interested parties to read the session moderator, John Boyer’s, blog entry.
Overall the quality of the presentations at XML’07 was very good, and most confirmed existing assumptions about current directions that the aforementioned above technologies were taking. I was particularly impressed to see representatives from US government departments attending the conference. We were shown a flavor of the direction Microsoft is heading in for supporting the development of the next generation of web applications (Silverlight & LINQ), and Sidewinder; a container framework for bringing standards-based web apps (inc. XFORMS) to a user’s desktop outside of the traditional web browser.
Filed under: conferences | No Comments »
Testing Methods – a web perspective
October 19th, 2007
Here is another code-club presentation focusing on testing methods including JSUnit, Selenium and dependency testing.
Filed under: javascript, jsunit, unittesting | No Comments »
EC-TEL’07 Conference report
September 26th, 2007
(Sissi, Crete, Sept 17th 2007)
The 2007 European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning is only celebrating it’s second birthday yet it already had 116 submissions and an acceptance rate lower then 25%. The conference, which is primarily a gathering of PhD students and researchers from around Europe, brings together adaptive hypermedia, data mining, semantic web and social software researchers interested in ‘enhancing’ traditional learning methods. Themes included Web 2.0 & social software, informal learning and workplace & industrial learning. The location, a sun-baked Creteian holiday resort, was quoted by several attendees as being too good (looking out at the clear turquoise sea made it hard to concentrate on the presentations).
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: conferences | 1 Comment »