One thing that has become noticeable in the current COVID-19 pandemic is a plethora of web-based visualisations about the impact of the virus. Most of these are line graphs showing exponential or vaguely bell-shaped curves and peaks typical of mathematical models of the spread of diseases. Many of these visualisations show the spatial, or… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Software engineering
GIS MSc – part two
The three-year part-time remote learning UNIGIS UK MSc course I recently finished had two very different components – the first two years consisted of teaching modules of learning materials and assessed assignments (see my earlier blog posting about this here), and the third year involved the planning, development and writing of a dissertation, which is… Read more »
GIS MSc – part one
I haven’t written anything in my blog for the last three years, and that is partly due to the fact that during that time I have been directing a lot of my energies to a postgraduate course, a Master of Science (MSc) degree in Geographic Information Science or Systems (GIS). I have now finished the… Read more »
Bigger and better websites – the early years of bitter struggle (cf. Robert Crumb)
For many years I have developed websites the old-fashioned way. I have used the MicroEMACS text editor and Unix/Linux command line tools to create HTML/Javascript and Perl/PHP CGI files entirely from scratch, and installed and configured MySQL databases and Apache webservers the same way.
Spend some money if you want a serious website
Back in May I wrote about living on the open-source planet. This approach to web-based software development is often associated with the LAMP (I prefer the P to stand for Perl) ‘stack’ of technologies.
What makes a ‘webmaster’?
In my job at the moment, I’m considering what it means to have responsibility for a website – what does this entail? A term that is often used in this respect is ‘webmaster’, but what does this mean? It’s a pretty vague term, but it’s used an awful lot – it’s often seen as text… 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 »
‘Free’ software, the open-source planet and Plone
One of the more indisputable advantages of the Internet as it exists today is the abundance of software on it that is ‘free‘. It is free in the sense that it is available to download and use without a financial fee. Some software, as well as being free, is also ‘open-source‘ meaning that the source… Read more »
Making websites accessible is very inaccessible
One of the issues a software engineer who develops HTTP interfaces (i.e. websites) as part of their code has to consider is ‘accessibility’. This catch-all term covers many things but essentially means that a website must be implemented in such a way that no-one is excluded from using it. It’s often thought of as purely… Read more »
My schizoid workplace
In the organisation where I am employed there is a dual, almost schizophrenic, nature to the work that I (and the other software engineers in my team) do there. Our funding comes from several sources, but a large portion comes from academic research councils. The nature of this funding is that it involves short-term projects… Read more »
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