Sailing

Sailing

Down to Poole in Dorset very early this morning. I have finally got my act together to take the RYA Day Skipper course and spent the day learning to navigate using charts, pencil and paper. The maths reminds me of the boys’ A-Level homework and although despite being geeky enough to look up the cosine rule, drawing scale models of the “triangles of velocity” is probably quicker . 😉 …

Running Python on Windows XP

I wrote an article on installing Python; a bit of chat about why and a bit about how. I got myself a copy of the O’Reilley “Learning Python” book and started working my way through it. For various reasons, I decided to try it on Windows; I thought the binary install would be easier and I had some reasons for not trying it on Solaris. The windows install from python.org is quite cute, as you would expect but it requires some further configuration before the python imports and module search works properly.  …