Peter Brett's Blog

Starting my PhD!

2009-07-01T21:20:00.001+01:00

As I mentioned in January, I was awarded a PhD studentship at Surrey Space Centre. I graduated from Cambridge last Friday, with I Class honours in my BA and a Distinction in my MEng, moved down to south-west Woking at the weekend, and started at SSC today! I'm having to fight a bit to get a Linux workstation -- other groups in the same building (and serviced by the same IT

Chorizo and tomato pasta

2009-07-01T20:04:00.001+01:00

Another chorizo recipe that I made to use up what was left over from the previous one. Note that I use Spanish chorizo, not Mexican (as most commonly found in the USA). Ingredients (serves 3-4): 150 g dried chorizo sausage, diced finely 1 medium cooking onion, coarsely chopped 1 clove garlic, chopped 100 g mushrooms, sliced 400 g can chopped tomatoes Olive

Baked pork chops with chorizo

2009-06-29T18:42:00.001+01:00

Here's a simple but delicious recipe I adapted from a dish served at Girton's cafeteria sometime in early 2009. Ingredients (serves 2): 2 pork chops 60 g dried chorizo sausage, diced finely 1 medium cooking onion, coarsely chopped 1 clove garlic, chopped Salt and pepper Pre-heat the oven to 180°C (fanless oven 200°C). Sprinkle both sides of the chops with salt,

PhD studentship at SSC

2009-01-24T22:44:00.001Z

I've been accepted for a PhD studentship at Surrey Space Centre, working on applications of satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Even better, I've been awarded a Doctoral Training Grant by the EPSRC, so as long as I pass my MEng I'm going to be going exactly where I've wanted to go for the last couple of years, doing (more or less) exactly what I want to do!

gschem, log files and X selections

2009-01-24T22:39:00.001Z

Just over a week ago, I posted a series of [RFC] posts to the gEDA-user mailing list suggesting six reasonably non-trivial changes to libgeda and gschem. Although the discussions they started off weren't quite as productive as I was hoping, they did attract quite a bit of interest. I haven't been afraid to put my money where my mouth is. Since then, I've implemented two of the

More cooking escapades

2008-09-21T18:17:00.002+01:00

I tried out two recipes yesterday, with lots of success (well, I thought so, anyway). First was nice and simple recipe for lemon drizzle cake from the BBC Good Food website -- I used it as a fallback plan when I failed to obtain a copy of my mother's legendary and delicious recipe. I made it in a 20 cm spring-form tin instead of a loaf tin as the recipe suggests (I don't have a

Emacs word counting and tab completion

2008-06-25T19:05:00.001+01:00

I've been doing a lot of work that's required me to keep an eye on word counts recently, so I've needed a decent word count function in Emacs. The easiest way to implement this was to use the wc command from CNU coreutils. (defun word-count nil "Count words in buffer" (interactive) (let ((start (if mark-active (point) (point-min))) (end (if mark-active (mark) (point-max))))

Christmas

2007-12-25T18:26:00.000Z

Having been horribly ill for what feels like most of December, Christmas is now here! I'm spending Christmas with my parents and all of my siblings, and it seems like I've been running around like a mad things for the last few days getting everything clean, tidy and ready for Christmas. On Christmas Eve my mother and I were at the butchers' shop at half past six in the morning to get the turkey

Error-reporting progress

2007-12-07T23:06:00.001Z

Further to my previous blog post on error-reporting in libgeda, I've made some pretty good progress on implementing the ideas that I described. In particular: The file opening functions (f_open() and f_open_flags) now use GError to return error messages rather than just spewing them to the console. gschem now shows an informative dialog box when it fails to load a file.

Error reporting & handling in libgeda

2007-11-27T23:22:00.001Z

Apparently some people do read my blog: Peter Clifton and I met up for a drink at Borders in town this evening, and he recommended that I write more often. So here's this evening's contribution, on a slight refactor of libgeda error reporting. It's been a while since I last blogged about gEDA development, and since then I've had the good fortune to be able to travel to

Taking time out

2007-07-23T18:12:00.001+01:00

Much of my work on gEDA recently has met with rather mixed responses, many not particularly positive. Most of the things that bug me are fixed, so between the lukewarm reception that seems to meet my changes and the absence of any particular itch to scratch, I'm taking a little time out from gEDA hacking. This will also (hopefully) help with my RSI, which is slightly more

Making embedding more useful

2007-06-30T14:59:00.001+01:00

One of the trickiest problems electronic engineers have is with keeping their symbol libraries up-to-date while not breaking old schematics (e.g. with changing pin positions). Currently, most people use one of two approaches to managing the problem: gEDA has the ability to embed symbol data in the schematic file, making the schematic independent of changing symbol libraries,

Terminal emulators, utmp and setgid

2007-06-30T12:21:00.001+01:00

Something that's been really irritating me recently on major Linux distributions is the increasing proportion of user software being installed setgid. This is usually for security reasons; for instance, to either protect system services from accidental user interference, or to protect the user's personal information from being sniffed by other software they may be running.

Hacking in the unstable branch

2007-06-29T13:40:00.001+01:00

For most of June, gEDA has been in the process of switching from using CVS to git for version control, and quite a lot of developers' time seems to have been spent on getting used to the new system. I really like the new system; it makes reviewing changes and maintaining patchsets so much less of a chore, and my productivity has gone through the roof! I've made really good progress

gEDA is moving to using git

2007-06-02T23:49:00.001+01:00

A few days ago in response to other developer's comments/complaints on moving gEDA to using Guile 1.8, I suggested forking a stable branch of gEDA which would use Guile 1.6 while keeping the main development tree using Guile 1.8. Ales decided this was a good idea, saying: Here's the plan going forward: I do want a stable/unstable branch/release arrangement going forward.

Abject failure to install Fedora 7

2007-06-01T23:13:00.001+01:00

I was very excited about the release of Fedora 7 yesterday, as I've been a loyal Fedora user since Fedora Core 3 was released back in 2004. You'll notice my use of the past tense. This is because I spent most of today trying to get Fedora 7 to install. I'm extremely glad I took a full backup of my files, as my various attempts to get the installer to run without crashing hosed

New library system now in CVS

2007-05-29T22:38:00.001+01:00

After the SEUL server move was successfully completed, Ales released a new snapshot of gaf. With that out of the way I was given the all clear to merge my component library work. I've therefore nuked the "libraries" branch from my public git repository, as it was no longer relevant. There are a number of things I want to get sorted out before the next release (which is likely to be

Chocolate Birthday Cake

2007-05-24T21:53:00.001+01:00

We made a rather delicious birthday cake for one of our friends, and it worked so well I thought I'd post it here (because I'm bound to lose the piece of scrap paper it's scribbled on). For the cake 6 oz butter 6 oz caster sugar 3 eggs 8 oz plain white flour 3.5 tsp baking powder 3 tbsp cocoa powder Preheat oven 180° C. Whisk eggs. Cream butter and sugar together. Sift in flour

Website updates and component library work

2007-05-23T20:17:00.001+01:00

In order to put (much) more information about my gEDA work on my website, there's been a slight reorganization; I've made a new section for "software" in which I've put a whole page on gEDA development. It contains more information on my git repositories and the tools I use. I've also put a list of things I've been working on recently, and a list of things I've got planned. I've

Better blogging with Emacs

2007-05-21T07:30:00.001+01:00

Having got Emacs 22 set up with g-client I rapidly got annoyed with the necessity of continually copying and pasting URLs from a web browser window in order to post to my blog and to page through the posts available, so I quickly hacked together some ELisp to make it easier: ;;; Blogger support (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/g-client") (load-library "g") (setq

Tab-completion in Emacs' c-mode

2007-05-20T09:02:00.000+01:00

For a long time, I've wanted tab-completion in Emacs when programming in C, and haven't had the time to delve into ELisp enough to work out how to do it. However, thanks to the Emacs Wiki I now have it working! I added the following to my .emacs file: ; Better tab completion (defun indent-or-complete () "Complete if point is at end of a word, otherwise indent line." (interactive)

Blogger annoyances and Emacs 22

2007-05-20T06:57:00.001+01:00

When I set up my weblog on Blogger I made the error of enabling an option which caused all newline characters in my postings to be converted to literal HTML newlines (
). This was fine for a long time, until I wanted to write my blog postings in a text editor with HTML support (such as Emacs) and then copy them into my weblog. Emacs has really good support for general text editing

New component library for gEDA

2007-05-19T12:52:00.001+01:00

Rather than revising for my exams, I've been rewriting the gEDA component library system. The motivation was to provide a way to use the output of arbitrary commands as symbols in your schematic, and to have a way for code in gEDA applications to find and use schematic symbols without caring about where they're coming from. My new all-singing all-dancing code is now in a

Farewell, TWU

2007-04-23T17:39:00.000+01:00

Sadly, I've had to move away from TWU, where my site had been hosted for several years, after e-mail services disappeared for a day without warning. The change had been looming for a while, given TWU's movment away from hosting towards consulting; indeed, the fact that I hadn't been even able to get in touch with the admins to pay them for my hosting for more than a year had been a major

Brush Primitives

2006-08-31T11:15:00.000+01:00

Someone contacted me this morning asking about the Brush Primitives texture format. So since the q2bsp wiki was down, I dug out some very old-fashioned paper notes I'd made a few months ago, dusted them off and turned them into a PDF using LyX. Ah, nothing like TeX for typesetting mathematics.In other news, we were planning to launch rockets this morning, but there was some sort of pony camp