Author Archive

LEGO Mindstorms NXT Alpha Rex building instructions / plan

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

[caption id="attachment_1343" align="alignright" width="242" caption="LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Alpha Rex"][/caption] I bought the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 recently and was a bit disappointed to find that it didn't come with printed instructions to build Alpha Rex - the robot on the box art. I searched for the instructions all over the ...

Religion-free state education in the UK

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

We recently returned to the UK with two young children from a financially cavalier extended 'babymoon' in Malaysia. Part of the impetus to move back again was my reluctance to put my children through the Malaysian state education system which emphasises racist division and religious practice, though possibly not in ...

Look Ma, no files! Portable object persistence

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Originally posted at JavaProgrammingForums.com Where can I store my application data? I see a lot of people starting threads because they're struggling to persist (often) a little bit of data from one run of their Java application to the next. The offered solutions are often some kind of jiggery-pokery involving java.io.File. Not ...

Foreign Exchange data from Central Bank of Russia

Friday, July 29th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1302" align="alignright" width="128" caption="The Central Bank of the Russian Federation"][/caption] I've been re-jigging and polishing up some of the leftover code from spider.my and am now fairly happy with the way Shipping-Quote.net keeps its currency exchange rates up to date. I wanted to add another rates source just to fill ...

IE8 javascript not running from script element in head

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

After staring at other people's solutions to this problem for a day or so, I finally realised what I was doing wrong and thought I'd better share it, just in case you also fail to see for several hours how you caused the problem. I have a page that works ...