technology

Unblock Us

18 September 2011

A few months ago, I complained that more and more online music sites have blocked access from Australia. Of course, the arcane licensing of intellectual property has also led to many other sites being blocked for Australians. Anyone living down under trying to access BBC TV via their iPlayer, or trying to stream US TV [...]

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Off the rails: mag-lev personal rapid transit

21 August 2011

I have not been thinking about blog posts much over the last week and a half: on the 11 August my closest friend died and his memorial service was a week later. However, I have received a guest post from a new contributor to the Stubborn Mule: Norwegian academic Trond Andresen from the Norwegian University of [...]

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Irony

9 March 2011

Last year I wrote about one of the more amusingly ridiculous attempted spam comments intercepted by my blog’s spam filter. It may be genius, stupidity or just an excellent coincidence, but a comment spammer has now attempted to add the following comment to that post: There are actually loads of details like that to take [...]

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Mobile coverage

12 February 2011

A friend and regular Stubborn Mule reader drew my attention to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald this week about the Australian telco Telstra. Much of the recent commentary has focused on the implications of the national broadband network (NBN) for Telstra. While the NBN certainly gets a mention here too, for me the [...]

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A gentle introduction to R

31 January 2011

Whenever a post on this blog requires some data analysis and perhaps a chart or two, my tool of choice is the versatile statistical programming package R. Developed as an open-source implementation of an engine for the S programming language, R is therefore free. Since commercial mathematical packages can costs thousands of dollars, this alone [...]

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NBN in more than 140 characters

27 September 2010
Colourful Optic Fibres

migNow that Labor has scraped their way back into power, it looks very likely that the National Broadband Network will go ahead in some form or another. Debates on the merits of the scheme continue apace, not least on Twitter, conveniently labelled with the #nbn hashtag. One frequent twitter on this topic, @pfh007, is also [...]

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How old is the Mule?

12 September 2010

According to one automated blog analyser, I am rather older than I thought I was: stubbornmule.net is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time The gender is correct and academic writing style I can accept, but I am not so sure [...]

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Protovis now working in Chrome and Safari

7 September 2010

Thanks to everyone who responded to my experimental Protovis post*, whether in the survey, via twitter or in comments on the post. It quickly became clear that my trick for including the code to generate the chart completely failed to work in Chrome and Safari browsers. I still do not fully understand why that is, [...]

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Getting Protovis working on WordPress

6 September 2010

When I started experimenting with Protovis*, I quickly found that getting it to work in a WordPress blog was rather fiddly. With a lot of help from Google (and this page in particular), I managed to piece together what needed to be done, but since I did not find any explanations specifically focused on Protovis [...]

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Experimenting with Protovis

6 September 2010

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on using graphics in R. During the question session, someone asked whether I had tried using Protovis, a javascript data visualisation library being developed at Stanford. It was an easy question to answer: no! However, a bit of subsequent investigation revealed that Protovis has been developed [...]

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