Electronics geek, phone phreak, whiteboard enthusiast, broadcasting nerd, amateur photographer, general troublemaker
Timing is something
When you’re broadcasting, keeping to the clock is incredibly important. Coordinating programming between multiple studios, live feeds from external sources (syndicated live content, like news), and making sure your audience know what programming to expect are all important reasons for keeping the time straight. NTP is a protocol designed to synchronise time over a network, [...]
How many ways can I say …
My friend Kitty asked me a simple question the other evening: What is the total number of unique messages you can fit into 140 characters (i.e. a tweet) This seems like potentially quite a simple question. So, lets say you have a set of valid characters called , and a maximum message length of (in [...]
XML-RPC Benchmarking
Hokay, so, for my report, I needed to do some benchmarking of how well my XML-RPC server could perform. So I threw together a quick little script with Twisted which allows me to make manylots of requests at once. It makes two files: times.csv (which contains the length of time each request takes) and errors.csv [...]
Multicasting with Twisted Python
Part of my MEng project work is to write some server code which allows alerts to be raised and broadcast to computers in a call center (something along the line of an alarm monitoring response centre – bunch of people in a room which respond to personal alarms in peoples homes). This is but a [...]
Helpdesk Sleuthing
I had an interesting query today on Helpdesk at an institution which will remain anonymous (but will be blatantly obvious to the people who know me). A student came to the helpdesk and was faced with a perplexing problem. Their lecturer had given them a website which they were required to use as part of [...]