Jon Simpson’s Weblog

A paper describing the implementation of a ‘native’ Transterpreter virtual machine port, to create a first-class occam-pi runtime environment on a commonly available small robotics platform, the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. This paper was presented on July 11th, 2007 at Communicating Process Architectures 2007, University of Surrey, England.
Abstract
The LEGO Mindstorms RCX is a widely deployed educational [...]

After upgrading the computer that holds the majority of the files on my network to Windows Vista Ultimate, I had a few problems accessing it from the Mac running Tiger. Turns out some of the network security options and authentication defaults have changed between XP and Vista.
As Mac OS X 10.4.9 does not appear to [...]

As part of the Transterpreter California roadshow, Matt, Christian and myself gave a Google TechTalk on Thursday 29th March. We started out with background and an introduction to the occam-pi language, a coverage of parallel models and then progressed to cover the application work from my CPA 2006 paper, Robot Control using the Subsumption Architecture. [...]

Along with Matt and Christian, I was able to attend and take part in the ‘Robots and Robot Venues‘ track at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford in Palo Alto, California. It proved to be an extremely interesting three days, spending time around others working with educational robotics platforms and gaining an insight into some [...]

I’ve taken up managing my deployed web applications with subversion, similar to how I manage my wordpress installs.
However, a new issue arises. The source code to my apps is not neccessarily a public domain, open source deal (like Wordpress), and there is nothing to stop someone going to http://example.com/.svn/ or http://example.com/some_directory/.svn/ and poking around at [...]

Since mplayer got decent support for SSA/ASS subtitles, complete with embedded fonts I’d been meaning to check the feature out. Recent subversion builds of mplayer had required an upgrade to freetype 2.2.1 from whatever ancient version Apple ship with OS X 10.4, and after enabling passing ‘-ass -embeddedfonts’ to the media file, I was slightly [...]

An exploration of Brooks’ Subsumption Architecture in combination with the occam-pi language for creating robotic control systems. This paper was presented on September 18, 2006 at Communicating Process Architectures 2006, Napier University, Scotland.

In trying to program for real-time control, good platform-assisted concurrency is vastly useful. It seems sensible to keep the limitations of a sequential execution process out of the actual software and instead, in the underlying runtime. (see TVM). Highly concurrent runtimes for small devices aren’t prevalent, and a lot of work with small robotics devices [...]

In continuation of the theme ‘using my blog as a personal notepad’, here’s a small snippet for use in an Apache .htaccess file to ensure that visitors/incoming links not using the www. form of your site’s domain are redirected correctly.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.co\.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Make sure to escape periods in the RewriteCond line with [...]

Did I mention I really like maintaining Wordpress installations with subversion already?
svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.1
One command to perform a no-pain, no-hassle update to Wordpress 2.0.1. Great!