Oxford Blog

Classic Car Show - Blenheim Palace

danny — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:22:59 +0000

Last weekend Camilla and I went to a classic car show at Blenheim Palace.

This was more Camilla's thing than mine — I've been known to joke that cars have size and colour but no hair — but the cars were rather cute.

a Fiat Arbath	a classic caravan
classic cars	classic beetles

We also had a quick look at the Churchill exhibition and the palace rooms. There wasn't enough time to do this properly, or to look at the gardens or anything else, but we got the free "annual pass" upgrade of our tickets (at £18 per person, extortionate), so we will go back sometime to do that. (The grounds are huge, and there's a butterfly house and other attractions as well.)

lake at Blenheim Palace

main courtyard at Blenheim Palace

And I will keep an eye out for a good book on Marlborough's campaigns or the period.

Guiting Power walk: Cotswolds

danny — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:26:05 +0000

To take advantage of our newly acquired car, we headed off for a day in the Cotswolds.

Our goal was to do a walk at Guiting Power (picked pretty much at random from a book Fifty Walks in the Cotswolds). But we had a bit of confusion with the roundabouts and intersections on the ring road, and then we stopped in Witney. Here we bought a better road atlas, had brunch in the Huffkins Bakery Cafe, and browsed the Harfords homewares store. (Camilla was quite taken by Witney. Which is ok, so long as she doesn't start voting Tory!)

a Witney street

Witney Museum

We eventually got to Guiting Power and started our walk after 2pm. The ten kilometre loop we did goes northeast, then south to Naunton, where we admired an old dovecot and had drinks in the Black Horse, then back west along the Windrush way to Guiting Power, passing an attractive little church.

the track through Windrush Farm

Naunton dovecot

Walking through wheat fields on the last leg, we disturbed birds which scuttled away as we got too close. Eventually the entire flock of birds flew off. For some reason we thought they might have been corn crakes, but that's clearly not right and I think they may just have been chickens. [Looking at the book, definitely pheasants.]

pheasants (not corn crakes)

our new car

We came home via Chipping Norton and Woodstock, where we had dinner in the Star Inn (£8 for a roast and £9 for a crab and prawn linguine, which were both excellent).

the Anglo-Saxon chain of being

danny — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:26:36 +0000

The British media really only cover Australia when there are major political events, disasters, or "man bites kangaroo" stories.

Australians can get a feel for how this works by considering the treatment of New Zealand in the Australian media. And of course the United States does the same to Britain.

Going the other way, of course, Australia looms large in New Zealand, Britain looms large in Australia, and the United States dominates the English-speaking world across most media.

Economically, Britain and Australia aren't so far apart in this chain - the nominal GDP ratios are US/UK 6.7, UK/Aus 2.1, and Aus/NZ 8.5 - but the cultural edge seems similar.

Wellcome Collection + The Habit of Art

danny — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:16:05 +0000

On Saturday our friends Val and Paul took us to see Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, at the National Theatre in London.

We had some time before the performance, so we looked at the Wellcome Collection. This has a permanent display "Medicine Man" showcasing part of Henry Wellcome's collection, which has everything from images of death to chastity belts. Another permanent gallery "Medicine Now" showcases some art and science about current areas of medical research - obesity, malaria, genomics. And the current temporary exhibition is "Skin". It's not a huge museum - nothing like the British Museum - but it's definitely worth a visit if you're interested in medicine. A small bookshop and a cafe are attached.

We visited the John Lewis department store on Oxford St, as Camilla was keen to see what they had. Then we caught the tube to Embankment, walked across the bridge and along Southbank to the National Theatre, and had dinner in the BFI Riverfront (nice food, but more expensive than it looks, as the menu prices don't include the service charge or VAT). This being a Saturday evening in late July, there were hordes of people around.

Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art is set in Oxford, where a small theatre company is putting on a play about Auden, Britten and their biographer Carpenter, set in the last years of Auden's life, when he was in Christchurch. It is a sharp, snappy play, clever and funny. And it is informative too — a chapter in The Rest is Noise had given me a basic knowledge of Britten's life, but I knew almost nothing about Auden and had only encountered Carpenter through his biography of Tolkien.

Birmingham

danny — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:18:43 +0000

We only had little bits of time to see Birmingham, fitted in around the Europython 2010 conference we were attending. It's not the most attractive city, from what we saw. The shops seem segregated into large shopping malls (such as the Mailbox and the Bull Ring) and cars dominate in a way they certainly don't in Oxford. And it was gloomy, with occasional drizzle, for pretty much the whole four days we were there.

There are some nice old buildings, however, in amidst the 60s and 70s concrete blocks - the ones in red brick are particularly striking.

Birmingham town hall

Birmingham red brick

Birmingham (and the Midlands) also has a fascinating history - "dark satanic mills" and all that - and I want to come back for a proper visit sometime.

Thomas Atwood

Fully Employment + Free Trade

Birmingham Museum

The Birmingham Museum has some nice material - I really only looked at the part of the Staffordshire Hoard on display and the ceramic and tile and glassware "industrial" gallery.

We fitted in a trip to Ladypool Road for Balti curry, which is a local speciality.

No one believed me when I suggested "Balti" must have derived from Baltistan - an area of northern Pakistan - but Wikipedia gives that as the most likely etymology, with an alternative derivation from the name of the cooking pot Balti curry is served in (ultimately derived from the Portuguese!).

Picking berries at Medley Manor Farm

danny — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:59:21 +0000

eating fresh jam the next morning

Our friend Selma from Australia arrived last Saturday morning. She only had a day and a half here, so we whisked her off immediately, before jet lag could set in. We cycled up the Thames to Medley Manor Farm, where we picked blackberries and raspberries and strawberries and broad beans, and then had lunch in the Perch Inn.

Then we cycled to Jericho for coffee, after which Camilla and Selma went on while I tried to find a gamelan klenengan.

We had way too many berries to eat, especially since we were heading to a conference in Birmingham on Sunday evening, so I took some to my sister and Camilla and I worked into the small hours of the morning making jam out of the rest.

I foolishly forgot to bring my camera on this excursion, so the only photo I have is of us scoffing fresh jam the next morning.

Europython 2010

danny — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:34:10 +0000

Europython 2010 was conveniently in Birmingham — an hour forty by bus — and Camilla was going with two of her colleagues, so I tagged along. As a sysadmin I've never done any large-scale programming, but Python has been my programming language of choice for fifteen years.

The talks were a mixed bunch, and picking which talk to go to from the four on in each timeslot wasn't always easy, but there was some good stuff going.

Raymond Hettinger gave two talks on "Idiomatic Python", basically describing some not so well-known features of the language and introducing his Collections module. He also gave a talk on Monocle, which is an asynchronous framework using generators, built on top of Twisted. This really looks like magic - you can basically take old-fashioned synchronous code, stick "yield" statements before all the blocking calls, and get asynchronous behaviour! (David Mertz got a mention here, too.)

There was a talk about building a system for traders in Ghana to upload VAT transactions live. This wasn't of much technical interest (though there were interesting bits and pieces such as the limitations of the Django ORM) but the general background, dealing with the Ghanaian government, etc. was fascinating. Various other talks discussed web-based projects, and how they chose different tools - Django, MoinMoin, etc. If I can work out how to throw all my WordPress installs away and never have to look at another line of PHP I will be very happy.

Mark Dickinson talking on the float repr

A talk on the SHOGUN machine learning framework was mostly a general overview of ML, which was nicely presented but didn't have anything new to me in it; SHOGUN itself seems like a really nice package, however. A talk on the new float repr was an overview of Python's handling of floating point numbers. Other memorable talks looked at OpenGL, JessyINK (creating SVG presentations in Inkscape and viewing them in Firefox), programming Microsoft Office apps directly from Python, python and the IMAP protocol (I hadn't realised that Basser's Piers Lauder had written the Python IMAP library), and the new regex and re2 modules (respectively a replacement and an alternative to re).

Guido's keynote, answering questions provided on the web in advance, was good fun, as were the 5 minute lightning talks.

I also got to see a bit of Birmingham — at least the city centre and the museum — and hang out with interesting people. And I won a portable solar charger in a Google raffle.

Upgrading my camera

danny — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:09:13 +0000

For five and a half years now I've been using an Olympus E-1, which as digital cameras go is now something of an antique, since it was released seven years ago.

I bought the E-1 with a 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 lens — a fast standard zoom (28-108 equivalent) with decent macro performance (0.52x equivalent) — and the combination has been with me all over the place. I've taken it to New Zealand, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia, and most recently Turkey, among other destinations. I've taken 26,000 photos or so with it (not that many given the shutter is rated to 150,000 actuations) and it's performed admirably.

The one huge problem with it — and I knew this was going to be the big problem when I bought it! — is that it is a big, heavy camera, not really suited for someone who travels light. With a spare battery, my basic camera bag weighs in at 1.65kg, on top of which there's the battery charger and usually a light telephoto lens. (I realise this is not heavy by professional standards; you don't need to tell me how much heavier a Canon 1Ds is!)

What with the netbook as well, my luggage now can be two thirds electronics. And I sometimes go out without the camera, because it's so bulky, and miss photography opportunities as a result.

It would also be nice to have some of the features of more modern cameras: video capability, better high ISO performance, colour histograms, faster review times, a larger LCD screen, more than 4x zoom, and so forth.

The Problem

The problem is that, even after seven years of seemingly frantic camera development, there is no DSLR smaller and lighter than the E-1 which matches its features, in particular the weather-sealing and 100% viewfinder.

So I'm contemplating giving up on a replacement and instead supplementing the E-1 with a much smaller and lighter camera, maybe an E-P2.

Our first guests

danny — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:56:58 +0000

Gabi was our first visitor, but she stayed with my sister. So Matthew and Colene were our first house guests, staying for two days as part of a trip around the UK and Europe.

punting is serious work!

Jenny showed us around Chirstchurch, so we got to see her rooms and the Jabberwocky tree as well as the Hall and the Cathedral. Then we had lunch at the Vaults and Garden, visited Blackwells, and spent two hours punting, along with Karina (another friend in Oxford).

On the second day Colene and Karina went shopping while Matthew and I visited the museums: the Natural History Museum, the Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean, and the History of Science Museum.

We've got a busy summer for visitors: Gabi, Matthew and Colene, Selma, Yan, Vera and Peter, Jenny and Matthew, Savita, and Kristina. I was thinking the only real downside of being in Oxford is leaving so many of my friends behind in Sydney, but bringing them all over here to visit will fix that!

a bicycle

danny — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:22:53 +0000

I bought myself a bicycle to replace the one that was stolen, and have been cycling around for a couple of weeks now.

My bicycle is an old English three-speed, refurbished by the Oxford Cycle Workshop (which is conveniently just around the corner from us). This isn't going to win any races and is far from shiny - probably an advantage given the incidence of bike theft! - but it's a great bike for getting around town on and should serve fine for the occasional longer trip up the Thames cycleway or something like that.

From Sheldon Brown:

"Don't sneer at old 3-speeds. They are serious bikes, built for serious use. They are meant for utilitarian cyclists, and they are still extremely appropriate for riders who don't usually go more than a few miles at a time. They are particularly at home in stop-and-go traffic, because they can be shifted even while stopped. Their English heritage: full fenders, oil lubrication, and totally enclosed gear system makes them relatively impervious to wet conditions. They may be heavy, but that is not because they were built to be cheap, but because they were built to endure extremely rough usage and neglect. Properly cared for, they will outlast us all."

There's more about three-speeds here.

As far as cycling goes, Oxford is a dream. But more about that later.