The San Francisco Marathon

I've been running for a few years now, doing as many runs as I can a year. Granted my training routine isn't very vigorous, but just doing the run is great fun. After attending SIGGRAPH this year, I passed through San Francisco on my drive up the coast. As any avid runner would, if there a race you can do you do. So I ran the San Francisco Second Half Marathon!

I wish I could say this went well, but this is a challenging route, but was so good to run. I hope in future I can come back and do the marathon in full, one of the unique things about this marathon it isn't just two laps of the half. Therefore by doing the marathon you get great views of the golden gate bridge and through the centre of the city.

Sam Jordan -- Flickr

When I was younger I never got into reading novels sadly. I have tried throughout my adult life to try to get into them, but sadly it is always a challenge to stick with them. Often I find the demands of my work a massive distraction result in me not wanting to sit and read more. I dabbled into Audiobooks that I recommend massively, but loosing my commute broke this. So I'm going to try listen while cycling to work!

Having spent a while now (6months) trying to finish NPCs by Drew Hayes a great fun book. Sadly the inprogress nature of this preculudes me from being able to move onto the second in the book series. Therefore my book to try next is Critical Failures by Rober Bevan. The audiobook at 8hrs should be an easy 'read' in a week, lets see if I crash!

Kevin Dooley -- Flickr

A mini-celebration of reflection as I hit my 29th year floating around the sun. Although I may not of achieved everything I have set out todo in this decade I have a lot of achievements both career / academically and life through running etc.

So happy 29th to me!

British Library -- Flickr

Earlier this year Tim Weyrich directed me onto a dataset published by the British Library and since then my research has focused heavily around this. Within Computer Vision it is unusual to get a large dataset not skewed to achieve a specific research goal. Sometimes datasets can be repurposed, but this is requires extensive effort to get the data in its rawest form.

The British Library dataset is a quite literally a "dump" of all the unknown to OCR elements from the book scanning performed by Microsoft. Therefore is not just a collection of line art imagery, but also of elaborate charachters or section embroidery.

I intend to post more on working with this dataset as time goes on, but for now there is a github which contains the directory of images: Directory of Images (Github)

And what is the main repository on Flickr:Flickr Repository

After many (and many) years of using dynamic CMS, I have decided to take the plunge and move to an old school methodology -- static websites. Well when I say "static", I mean offline generated site, I'm not crazy after all. I don't want to spend the next years of my life changing tiny global settings on my website, but more I just don't see the need to actually have a heavy database driven site running all the time, when to be honest I don't often update the site.

So why did I stop updating, well that answer comes in two parts. Firstly I experienced some problems with the CMS I was using, naughty Mojo Portal! But this just limited my ability to post. The second and main reason is that I lacked time and I'm not saying I have more time now, but I just didn't want to spend the small amount of time I have allocated to my website on repairing the website.

So the the solution Jeykll! A perl based offline static site generator. I must admit the choice of this wasn't exactly done on an extensive search and making a grounded decision, but instead I used github and it seemed a logical extension. That is not to say I did no search, I glanced, but there didn't seem a big differentiator other than language. So Perl and Jekyll it is, why not learn a language at the same time after all, so even if this all fails I've learned something generalisable.