Mark Fannon

The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

The Firewall Allignment Chart

Mark is stood in front of a small tram vehicle in the centre of Coventry, holding a large cardboard photo frame in front.

I keep on forgetting I have this. Here's me looking quite happy after trying the Coventry VLR last week.

One week left in Nottingham. Crazy how fast time flies by....

sorry legend, but bad take :(

Interestingly, swapping out my rather bad procedural way of generating accessible room assignments for an integer programming formulation of the problem has resulted in significantly better use of rooms, and no illegal placements!

Dissertation update: aaaa, but less aaaaaa than before

Eyeballing - We've had 8 years of business investment 15-20% lower than it was set to be. Eight years of missing £30bn a year. We might now have an economy with £250-300bn more economically useful stuff. GDP 2-3% higher. More revenues. And all the other effects!
2/

So, to recap: the suggestion is: the UK creative industries grant open access to all their historic and future work and IP, without payment, to the brains behind a nascent industry that just tanked $1tn in a couple of hours. Sure. Seems great.

....at school. Not earning money from it, but honing your skills while also doing a public good :)

(Not sure what that ramble was, but I hope some amount of sense is extractable from it!)

....isn't really explored. Sure, it's not enterprise-like Java code that uses every design pattern uncle bob ever wrote about. But it's still vital software maintenance and often requires the more nerdy stuff that students may often question. I guess it should be what volunteering was like.....

....not only is it the stewardly thing to encourage, but it provides a great set of skills. I feel a potent issue in CS academia is the whole employability argument - i.e that universities should primarily exist to produce software engineers. But there's a whole world out there in OSS which...

....so it remains important that C is still taught. While it would be unwise to treat academia as the perfect pipeline for producing more OSS maintainers (for similar reason to the "teach every kid to code" issue), I think universities should absolutely try to push students towards OSS maintenance..

Will young developers take on key open source software? The founders of important open source software are getting older, who will take over?

Interesting mention of how C is still very much the language of (at least the legacy) open source community in this article. Obviously not everything is getting rewritten in rust anytime soon (though the push for memory-safe languages is important).....

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Didn't get as much actual work done today as I'd have hoped. I did, however, make a studio clock light up. So it's not all bad news :-)

You probably get this a lot, but Nightswimming is a gorgeous song. I never listen to it and not get touched by its beauty. You should all be proud.

That being said, I'm certain that both friends and instrument shop employees have long grown tired of it being my go-to piano thing to play :)

Thanks to the magic of Rust, my exam timetable constructive heuristic now runs in less than a second. It's able to take a bunch of exams and produce a viable schedule for them, avoiding any clashes.

Obviously a lot more to do (it's my dissertation project) but very exciting....

If OR Tools has 100 haters I am one of them, if OR Tools has 1 hater then that is me, if OR Tools has 0 haters then I am dead

An insight into the world of the final year dissertation.....

I said I wouldn't....but here I am. trying this platform out. Let's see if I use this for any longer than I did threads ;)