About Quentin on Quentin Stafford-Fraser

Trustworthy and useful tools for mobile phone extraction

Enhanced Traffic Simulation for Improved Realism in Driving Simulators

A short clip showing part of the system in use: View on YouTube website

Analysis of yawning behaviour in spontaneous expressions of drowsy drivers

Human-like Guidance for Driving Navigation in an Urban Environment

Intelligent scheduling for in-car notifications

Demonstration of Jonathan’s simulator View on YouTube website

Pico without public keys

Password-Manager Friendly (PMF): Semantic Annotations to Improve the Effectiveness of Password Managers

To Have and Have Not: Variations on Secret Sharing to Model User Presence

Bootstrapping Adoption of the Pico Password Replacement System

Connecting to the Future

Connecting to the Future In July 2012, I wrote a set of three longish blog posts on the subject of IPv6. The first, Banish Mavis and Connect to the Future , explains the basics of IPv6, and why I think this stuff is much more important than simply handing out new IP addresses. The second, Tunnelling your way to the future , tells you how, if you have a Linux box on your network, you can give full…

Creating Drupal content using Python

Creating Drupal content using Python I wanted to import data into Drupal from elsewhere - in my case, from XML exported by another system. Perhaps the easiest way to interface with Drupal at a simple level is to use the Services module . This lets you, for example, create applications in other languages which can create, list, or update Drupal content. There is a mix of documentation for it, some…

Building Debian/Ubuntu packages using SCons

Building Debian/Ubuntu packages using SCons Background At CamVine we’ve been using the scons build utility as a replacement for our old make -based system. Sometimes it can be slightly non-intuitive, but we haven’t had anything like the depths of confusion that can occur in a big complex system using make . If you haven’t tried scons , I’d recommend it. I’d also…

Locking down the GNOME desktop

Locking down the GNOME desktop I was setting up a multi-user Ndiyo system , which was based on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. But this was going into a public internet-cafe-type situation where I didn’t want users to be able to do things like reconfigure the network or delete items from the menus. I gather this is easier to manage under KDE, but we had gone far enough with the default Gnome…

The Patent Cold War

The Patent Cold War Quentin Stafford-Fraser The current patent system is something of a farce. Almost everybody involved in it knows this, but it's a game we all have to keep playing because nobody can afford to be the first one to stop. The patent system has been with us for nearly half a millennium, and it has always, I think, been rather a good idea. Anybody who came up with an invention and…

If You Love Your Data, Set it Free

How I survived the move from Palm to Windows CE

How I survived the move from Palm to Windows CE Quentin Stafford-Fraser July 2001 Update - epilogue, May 2002 Background Having been an avid Palm V user for some time, and an equally enthusiastic Psion user before that, I had no real plans to change PDA again any time soon. I was familiar with the Compaq iPAQ because we had several of them in the lab - we would take them out of the box,…

The Life and Times of the First Web Cam: When convenience was the mother of invention

Also available here .

Self Esteem

Telemarq

Telemarq Telemarq is a five-person consultancy business, with a focus on software development but also undertaking a variety of other projects. Most of my current non-University work is done under the Telemarq umbrella. For more information, please see telemarq.com .

Orville Wright didn't have a pilot's...

from “Orbiting the Giant Hairball”

Camvine

Camvine Camvine formally Cambridge Visual Networks Ltd - was a company I started in 2007 to bring modern, internet-based management to the world of digital signage. Nowadays, it would be called an ‘Internet of Things’ company, but nobody had come up with that phrase at the time! We created a system called CODA - the Content Delivery Architecture - which allows you simply to drag and…

The Smartest Person

I love this one, and it has guided my career, or what passes for one, on numerous occasions.

DisplayLink

DisplayLink I co-founded DisplayLink (formerly Newnham Research) with Martin King in 2003, and was the CEO for its first couple of years. DisplayLink grew from a back-of-the-envelope calculation (quite literally) where we realised that general-purpose networks were getting fast enough that they could be the connection between your computer and your monitor. The company eventually focused on…

Face

This is the version I first heard and loved, but as with so many quotations, its history is a bit more complicated than that .

It's a sobering thought...

From the intro to ‘Alma’.

Brandolini's Law

This law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle , has a nice Wikipedia page .

Exbiblio

Exbiblio Exbiblio was a company I started with Martin King , with the aim of bringing some of the power of digital media to paper documents. I gave several talks about the ideas behind it; this one is from the GOVIS 2007 conference in New Zealand: Your browser does not support the video tag. Exbiblio developed some early-stage prototype products, some interesting underlying technology, and a very…

IMAPdedup

IMAPdedup From time to time I end up with duplicate email messages in an IMAP mailbox, often as part of copying and archiving mail, or sometimes simply as a result of being on the recipient list for messages more than once. Deleting these by hand is a nuisance, so I created a Python script that would do it for me. You can get IMAPdedup from GitHub . The documentation is now there.

Never attribute to malice that which...

So who was Hanlon? See my blog post for more info.

The elementary rules of logic...

See also Hume’s Maxim .

The public interest

Watt's the cost?

How much does a watt cost? How much will a 1-watt device cost you if you leave it running 24x7? How many hours of cheap-rate electricity do you have per day? Use '0' if you only have one rate, and the off-peak setting below will be ignored. Cost per kWh during peak/normal hours: pence/cents Cost per kWh during off-peak/cheap hours: pence/cents A 1-watt device running continuously will cost you:

You know you have reached perfection...

Are you being a fuel fool?

How far is it worth driving to save X pence per litre? If you use a site like PetrolPrices.com, you might find out that the supermarket 8 miles away is selling petrol at 4p per litre less than the one just around the corner. But is it actually worth driving that distance? Fill in the details below and we’ll tell you! What's the capacity of your fuel tank in litres? litres This site might…

A good programmer...

Higher-order Venn diagrams

Higher-order Venn diagrams Have you ever wondered how you can construct a Venn diagram with more than two or three sets? Back in 1989, I was working as the Computer Officer for my Cambridge college, Gonville & Caius . One of the Fellows, Anthony Edwards , was working on the design of a stained-glass window to commemorate the work of John Venn, an earlier Fellow of the college, and in doing so…

Ndiyo

Ndiyo The Ndiyo project was about taking very simple pixels-over-networks technology and using it to make IT more affordable and sustainable for the world. For much of the world, a PC costs about a year’s income. Picture your own annual income, and imagine that your next PC was going to cost that much. Then think about how many your kids could have… or how easily you could have…

Patents

Patents At the time of writing (Sept 2010), I’m listed as an inventor on the following patents & applications: EP0777173, WO0103389, USD463389,WO2005098609, WO2005101193, WO2005106643, WO2005114380, US2006026140, US2006023945, US2006026078, WO2006014727, US2006036585, US2006036462, US2006041484, US2006041538, US2006041605, US2006041590, WO2006023937, WO2006023718, US2006047639, US2006053097,…

PyGarmin

PyGarmin Back in the day when GPS wasn’t something you had built into your phone, but something for which you had to buy a dedicated device and connect it to your PC using a serial port, I wrote PyGarmin, a set of Python classes implementing the Garmin serial protocols. This lets you do things like downloading the tracks and waypoints stored on your device, and I’m pleased and…

Qhue

Qhue Qhue is an ultra-lightweight Python wrapper for the Philips Hue API. It aims to turn the API into convenient Python, with as little interference as possible. None of the methods are actually encoded locally in Qhue, which means it will automatically inherit most changes made by Philips at the server end. You can get it from the Qhue GitHub project page .

Rules of normality

uwsgiapp

uwsgiapp uWSGI is a somewhat eccentric but very useful framework for managing processes. It is typically used to run web apps behind a front-end server such as Apache or nginx. If you’re running those apps in uWSGI’s emperor mode , it will start, stop and reload them as you edit their configuration files. This is handy, but adding and removing files is not always the most convenient…

sshput

sshput Configure password-free login for remote SSH servers . Update: the standard command ssh-copy-id, available on some platforms, now does something similar, but you may still find some of the following usefule. If you use SSH to log in to a remote machine, you normally need to enter a password. This also applies to any of the systems built on top of SSH, such as SFTP or SCP, and those which…

An apostrophe is the difference...

A lovely example, if not always appropriate for polite company! See also this discussion .

Accomplish & credit

This is the most famous and pleasing version of the quotation, and is generally attributed to Harry Truman. However, Benjamin Jowett, about a century earlier, had said, “The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them”. I suppose this rather nicely illustrates the point.

alfred_itp - iTerm 2 for Alfred 2

alfred_itp - iTerm 2 for Alfred 2 The very handy iTerm 2 utility is a terminal program with lots of great features beyond the standard OS X Terminal. Alfred is an amazing app launcher for OS X. One of the features of iTerm 2 is the concept of ‘Profiles’. A profile can save a particular terminal configuration, including things like background colours, but most importantly, including an…

Notes for "Ansible - an absolute basic overview"

Ansible - an absolute basic overview Despite being several years old, my YouTube video giving an introduction to Ansible seems to be rather popular, and it is still relevant despite the numerous version updates that Ansible has seen in the meantime. There is one key change in the way Ansible playbooks are normally written which has changed over the years, partly to make them conform more to YAML…

The Importance of XML

The Importance of XML Quentin Stafford-Fraser Note: I wrote this in about 2001, when the world was a very different place - but I've kept it around for historical interest! I suspect there may be a great deal of confusion amongst non-technical people about what it is, exactly, that the much-hyped XML gives you. There's no shortage of confusion amongst technical people, too. So here's my attempt to…

'Brunch with Brent' and 'Linux Unplugged'

I enjoy much of the output of the Jupiter Broadcasting network , and one of their feeds, Jupiter Extras , has a range of programmes that don’t obviously fit into any of their other categories. Brent Gervais, a very capable and thoughtful host, has a subset of interviews called ‘Brunch with Brent’, and was good enough to invite me on to ramble about all sorts of things. Very…

A Free and Simple Computer Link, John Markoff, NYT

On 8 December 1993, the New York Times published an article by John Markoff about the new Mosaic web browser. Markoff included a reference to the Trojan Room Coffee Pot webcam (paragraph 7), as an example of one of the things you could now view using this new technology… A Free and Simple Computer Link – John Markoff, New York Times, December 1993 Link to the NYT Archive Think of it…