I spent last weekend in Witney in Oxfordshire at Lesley’s sister’s wedding, and on the journey back to Scotland we stopped off to go for an excellent curry in Manchester’s famous ‘Curry Mile‘. We also went to the Peak District and went for a walk on Kinder Scout. This hill was the site of the… Read more »
Posts By: Eddie
Great Scottish Run
This morning I ran in the Great Scottish Run in Glasgow, doing the 10k race. My time was about 65 minutes – Kenenisa Bekele ran 10k in 26 minutes in 2005, so I have some way to go. I’ve never run in a race like this before and I was very surprised at the number… Read more »
h2g2 and how to use a controlled vocabulary to classify the universe
I recently read ‘Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams‘ by M.J.Simpson, which to be honest was pretty dull, but it did get me thinking about the thing Adams is most famous for, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘.
“England, thy beauties are tame and domestic…”
I recently watched the second episode of the BBC series ‘Mountain (with Griff Rhys Jones)‘ and found it pretty disappointing. It seemed to spend more time talking about Coleridge, Wordsworth and Kendal mint cake than about mountains. I also checked out the book that accompanies the series and my disappointment increased further. Of the 250… Read more »
Two aircraft wreckage sites on Beinn a’Bhuird
Last Monday I climbed Beinn a’Bhuird in the Cairngorms. I camped in Glen Quoich on the Sunday evening beforehand to break up the long 33km walk and give myself an early start the next day. The path and easy gradient from Glen Quoich up the mountain makes for straightforward walking and I was on the… Read more »
Ciste Mhearaidh and even more about climate change and walking in the mountains (zzzzz…)
I thought I’d follow up my last blog posting, ‘Yet more about climate change and the media (yawn)‘ with some details of my recent personal experiences of ice and snow in the mountains. Last Saturday I walked up to the summit of Cairn Gorm via Coire na Ciste and Ciste Mhearaidh. Ciste Mhearaidh is a… Read more »
Yet more about climate change and the media (yawn)
It is often assumed in many media reports that: All the mountain glaciers on earth are melting and receding rapidly They will all vanish in a few years This is an unprecedented change in the Earth’s (and hence mankind’s) environment This is entirely due to the effects of modern industrial civilisation, particularly increased air and… Read more »
The great Java/Perl debate
An enduring aspect of the various academic IT-related jobs I have had over the years has been the ongoing and seemingly endless debate about the merits of the Perl and Java programming languages, with strong adherents on both sides. Perl in many ways is seen by some people (not just software engineers) as a poor… Read more »
Controlled vocabularies and why you should be interested in them
I’ve mentioned metadata in a few of my previous postings, and something else that is related to metadata is the concept of a ‘controlled vocabulary‘. This is a term that suffers from many misunderstandings so I’m going to try and define what it is and where it sits in the grand scheme of things, using… Read more »
OSGeo and DCLite4G
Regarding my posting of a few month’s back, ‘The curse of metadata’, which was quite negative about the current state of web-related metadata initiatives in general, I thought perhaps I should provide a more positive counterweight so here goes.
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive