Mikayla Hutchinson's home on the web
I waited till today to ascend in Guild Wars. I managed it with my W/Me main character in well under 10 seconds, equipping a couple of useless mesmer anti-spell skills at the start of the skill bar, followed by Frenzy and Healing Signet. The doppelganger AI used these first, making itself very vulnerable to my high-damage warrior skills at the other end of the bar.
More …I just saw a post by Chris Howie on glueless javascript calls into Gecko#, and over a couple of my revision breaks I modified JSCall# to use this technique. The new completely managed code version is now in SVN, and I’ll make a proper 0.0.3 release when I’ve written some docs.
More …I’ve just handed in the final version of my MSci thesis! It’s the culmination of my fourth-year Physics project on Interpretation of 3D Astronomical Data, in which I was studying a spectral datacube of the NGC 1068 Active Galactic Nucleus, trying to discover the structure and properties of this astronomical object from the redshift and distribution of the spectral emission lines.
More …A fascinating video by Sugata Mitra at LIFT07, in which he presents his “hole in the wall project”. He’s been putting computers in the streets of Indian towns where the children have never seen a computer, and don’t even speak any English. It’s very interesting how the children have collectively discovered how to use the computers (in English), and how their group dynamics develop and affect the learning process.
A couple of years ago I upgraded my computer, and passed the old one on to someone else. I’d had it for over 5 years — a reliable old Pentium III 733EB plugged into a Soyo 6VCA Slot1 motherboard via a slocket (Slot->Socket converter), with 64MB of PC133 SDRAM and a 20GB Maxtor HDD.
More …I’ve just updated the site’s version of the Drupal CMS to version 5.1. Lots of shininess, but I haven’t yet ported the theme and some of the modules.
According to the RPG Class Test, I’m a spellsword. Unsurprisingly, this is the character type that I always like to play. However, this isn’t because I’m playing me, but because I consider it to the the most sensible mixture of skills for a good self-sufficient adventurer.
More …I’ve recently added Dresden Codak to the list of webcomics that I read regularly. It’s a wonderfully bizarre and twisted mixture of science, philosophy and religion geekery; Egyptian gods having trouble with Schrödinger’s cat, an RPG based upon philosophical arguments, working in a dream world, and and a guide to “traversing the luminiferous aether” are a few of the highlights.
More …Following up on my earlier post on installing IRAF on Ubuntu Edgy, here’s a walkthrough for installing PyRAF, a Python shell for IRAF. As part of this we’ll have to install STSDAS and TABLES, two popular IRAF packages from STSCI.
More …A major part of my final year project depends on using IRAF, the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility from NOAO. Although it’s installed on the university’s UNIX Service, the servers it’s on are not particularly fast and have quite a few users, so the interactive bits like DS9 are barely usable over SSH X11 forwarding. Anyway, I thought I’d install it on my own machine to make things easier.
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