Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Absolutly awesome birthday. I’ve finally managed to upload the videos from my first flying lesson in an Ikarus C42. I took off at a local private airfold at 11:15 this morning (I was just a passenger for take off and landing and wasn’t in any control). I was able to have a camera suckered to the side window to video the lesson. Take off is at 7:35 in the first video. The final video shows the landing at 11:00 and the inside cockpit at 13:25. The weather conditions were near perfect in the morning but turned wierd in the afternoon. Checkout the handful of hail!

For those interested, the Ikarus is a two seater microlight aircraft with a maximum cruise speed of 194kph (120mph). See the Ikarus C42 wikipedia page for more details.

A quick way to increase the responsiveness of firefox is to turn off the disk cache and turn on the memory cache. This will keep a cache of recently visited websites/images in the computers RAM instead of on the hard disk.

Go into about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to FALSE, then right-click and select NEW -> INTEGER and type browser.cache.memory.capacity and set to 100000 (for 100mb).

Now your memory is being used for the cache instead of your hard disk. If you have loads of memory (more the 2GBs) then you could set the cache figure to say 200mb or higher for even better performance.

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

I was thoroughly impressed with this regex. I’m not going to reiterate what other people have already explained. So instead I will place links to other blogs that explain this very cool regex primality test.

http://montreal.pm.org/tech/neil_kandalgaonkar.shtml

http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2007/03/18/a-regular-expression-to-check-for-prime-numbers/

http://zmievski.org/2010/08/the-prime-that-wasnt

Thanks to <a href=”http://rantsofageek.com/”>Theo</a> for sending me a link to this!

This year has been a good haul, some awesome presents from B and family.

I’m a fan of difficult puzzles (ideally if there is a prize) to the point of sleep deprivation. Let me show you the Isis puzzle. It’s titanium, heavy and fits in your hand (but not if you have small hands, then you need two). It’s also nearly impossible to open. I’m not giving away any clues at all, we managed it and I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

I’m also a fan of LEGO and this year I was ecstatic to see I had the new LEGO NXT kit. I got bored of the default builds and chucked together this remote control arm in an evening. I’m hoping to improve it and bolt it onto a telepresence robot such as the Rovio.

The additional sensors such as the RFID sensor also look very interesting. I’ve been interested in cataloging everything in the house with RFID chips and then using multiple sensors to see if we can locate the items in 3d space. That way we would never lose anything :)

The other cool (some may say odd) present was my DNA results from 23andme. I’m not going into detail on the results but it was well worth the $206 and I think everyone should get this done ASAP.