Chatting with a Large Language Model

I will try my best to be more accurate in the future. Botbot I had a quick chat with one of those new Chat GPT type bots. They are all basically the same, but I’ll anonymize this one to spare it any pretend embarrassment. The formatting here might be a bit off, but I start … Read more

Not dead yet.

This blog isn’t dead. I just haven’t been hiking. I have on the other hand been cycling. Not just a little bit, but a lot. Some long distance cycling too. I bike-packed the North Coast 500, self supported and camping all the way, I’ve ridden coast to coast in a day, and from London to … Read more

Tweets from The Cape Wrath Trail

Beginning Easter weekend this year I hiked The Cape Wrath Trail. I had excellent conditions for it and I completed the walk in about two weeks. [tweet 1119237826787336192 conversation=’0′][tweet 1119242613125787648 conversation=’0′][tweet 1119557089347690497 conversation=’0′][tweet 1119557982034038785 conversation=’0′][tweet 1119569735878942726 conversation=’0′][tweet 1120696399807623168 conversation=’0′][tweet 1120752539320897536 conversation=’0′][tweet 1120794724141498369 conversation=’0′][tweet 1120811286420492289 conversation=’0′][tweet 1121454796932882436 conversation=’0′][tweet 1121444119207993345 conversation=’0′][tweet 1121688987024932864 conversation=’0′][tweet 1123097601253965824 conversation=’0′][tweet 1124024119303995393 conversation=’0′][tweet … Read more

Hiking the Kungsleden 2018

In late August to early September of 2018, I hiked Sweden’s 440km Kungsleden (Kings Trail) in the northbound direction. My buddy Emma came along and hiked a good two thirds of it too. I didn’t blog about it at the time but I did tweet each day as I went. Here are those tweets. [tweet … Read more

My very own twitter client.

Followers on Twitter may have noticed that I’m now posting using a client called alanjames. This is really just Spaz but now registered at Twitter under my own name. Here’s the how and why I’ve done that. For some months now I’ve been using the in development versions of Spaz pulled from the GitHub repository … Read more

Issues with the YouGov poll on LD policies

Sunday’s YouGov voting intention poll for the UK contained a number of questions on policies. Commisioned by the Sun newspaper it seeks to gauge support for Liberal Democrat policies. Now as people (according to recent media reports) have been completely ignorant of the Liberal Democrat party for years and are only now becoming interested in … Read more

Within-group aggregates with another wrinkle.

Recently when optimising an SQL query I needed to return a specific subset of records from a large table. The brilliant Common Queries Tree pointed me in the right direction, but the examples didn’t quite cover my specific case. I needed the records with the maximal value of x and the minimal value of y … Read more

Tethering Jolicloud with a Nokia 6500 Classic

Yesterday I plugged my Nokia 6500 Classic phone into my Jolicloud powered netbook, told the network manager I was on a Vodafone contract and bang, instant 3G internet access. It could hardly be simpler. Once its set up, you can edit the configuration and see where it’s put the APN and other connection info, and … Read more

Spaz, the twitter client.

I use a Twitter client named Spaz. Now if you’re from the UK the name might strike you as being a bit distasteful, perhaps even offensive. Get over it, its just a random sound in most of the world. Actually if you don’t like the name you can change it. Just edit the preferences.json file … Read more