Facebook are famous for their hacking culture and employees frequently participate in internal hackathons to try out new ideas and generally build something cool that will impress their peers. Reportedly as many as 70% of hackathon projects ship and notable Facebook features such as Timeline were the product of hackathons. In addition to internal hackathons Facebook frequently teams [...]
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How to fix the Mountain Lion App-Store / System Preferences crash issue
I recently upgraded my iMac to Mountain Lion and like a bunch of people had a fairly annoying issue where certain things just crashed. In fact pretty much the first thing I did was try to add a Twitter account though System Preferences. It was all fine until I hit the button to add the account but [...]
Radial and rectangular sinusoidal damping functions for iOS game dev in Cocos2d
I had to make a function that morphed the contents of an area in a Cocos2d game recently and I came across the problem of blending the effect inside my affected area with the outside. To overcome this and remove the sharp transition that was visible I created a couple of damping functions – one [...]
Asynchronous processes in Android – Extending the AsyncTask class
A common requirement in any data driven Android app is the ability to download data asynchronously. This might be to lookup locations for a Google Maps view or to acquire dynamic app data. In order to do this you need to create a nested inner class that extends the AsyncTask class. To do this is [...]
Usability, Samsara and Jedi mind control or why gamification is evil
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I read – a lot! I also have a habit of reading several unrelated books at once which sometimes gives me different perspectives on things (although it isn’t deliberate). I was recommended to read a usability book called ‘Dont Make Me think’ by Steve Krug and I have to [...]
Enhancing the sensitivity of NMR using dynamic nuclear polarisation and quantum rotor effects
This was my PhD project which took me three years to complete and almost as long to write up! The gist of the project was to take the HyperSense instrument made by Oxford Instruments and improve the hit-rate of the experiments. I found some interesting stuff out in the course of this which became my my thesis. The [...]
- The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded)
- How to build a successful start-up ecosystem (in the UK)
- The future of eCommerce – mCommerce?
- Radial and rectangular sinusoidal damping functions for iOS game dev in Cocos2d
- How to fix the Mountain Lion App-Store / System Preferences crash issue
- Zammer wins the Facebook / Gates Foundation Hack Ed 2.0 Hackathon
- The lean startup, the Hacker’s Way and the evolution of Necrotising Facebookiitis
- A workshop on algorithms for primary schools
- Karmr – social sharing and rewarding of positive actions
- Karmr and startup metrics for fat pirates
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Ben Guise: I recently introduced programming to my first grad...
- Boot up: HTML5 mobile benchmarks, Firefox leads Chrome, pirates v downloaders and more: [...] The day I tried teaching primary school kids...
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weerdboil: Martin, Interesting point you make about big UK...
- The day I tried teaching primary school kids to code (and succeeded) | Martin Saunders | Technology and Educational Innovation: [...] primary school kids to code (and succeeded) ...
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