Pete Hindle

The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat. Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a [...]

Yesterday was Towel Day, which is an unofficial holiday to mark the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams. I had no idea when I started writing these blog posts that there was such a thing, and it’s not why I chose to title them after the novels in Adams’ Hitchhiker series. But it is [...]

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho. The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear [...]

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts. Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a [...]

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this: It doesn’t work. However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint). On the other hand, sometimes the [...]

Again, this blog post is part of my basic techniques module, so you might not find this thrilling… casual readers might want to skip this blog post and come back later. As part of my basic techniques module I wanted to work on something quite simple. I’ve broken it down into lots of smaller chunks, [...]

As part of my coursework, I’m creating a text analysis tool. The coursework also states that blog posts are part of the working progress. Therefore, if you’re not on my course or working with Processing in some form, I doubt the post would be interesting to you. What is the best way of storing a [...]

After my presentation for DMS8002 (the Basic Techniques module that I’m doing on my course) it was suggested to me that using my coursework as a platform to generate visualisations actually means that – to some extent – the artwork I’m creating is a reflection upon the work I’m doing for my major module. This [...]

Here’s my thing. basic-techniques-500_1

This is a small amusement (it’s not a game, it’s too stupid) where you click the mouse to make something happen. This stems from Jamie asking us how we could make the exercise of drawing a five-pointed pentagram ‘more evil’. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that (in the West) the [...]