We have moved to WordPress!

We have moved to wordpress.
You can find the new blog here:
http://blog.montyanderson.co.uk

My new avatar!

My awesome new avatar!
I took this image of tux of the internet and added the windows logo on.

Using Gravatar for Avatars (PHP)

If you want to easily have avatars on your website you can use a thing called Gravatar which hosts a person's avatar so it can be used on many websites. To get a person's Gravatar all you have to do is go http://gravatar.com/avatar then their email address with a MD5 encryption. Here is some code to get a person's Gravatar

Website Updated!

I have just updated my website and it now looks awesome!

About.Me

I found a thing called about.me. It allows you to create a personal page for you to link to. You can view mine at:
about.me/monty.anderson
Or you can view the embedded version below:

The Chessboard Equation

This equation is a way of working out how many squares there is in a chessboard; for example not each square but the four squares that make up a square and the sixteen squares that make up that. The equation is:

(n(n+1)(2n+1))/6

(Or for a spread sheet program, =(A2*(A2+1)*((A2*2)+1))/6)

In a spread sheet program like Excel (I have used Google Docs), you can add the formula above to have this outcome.

If you want to plot a significant amount of data, using a spread sheet program can be difficult, so I wrote my own python program to export data into a .csv file witch can be opened in a spread sheet program. Here is the outcome:

Chessboard Effect by Monty Anderson

This program displays the results and then exports that into a .csv file

Display results from 1 to 5

1X1, 1

2X2, 5

3X3, 14

4X4, 30

5X5, 55

Export complete, named 'Chessboard.csv'

Press enter to close...

If I then open up ‘Chessboard.csv’, I get a simple spread sheet with the data outputted from the program.

Download the Python program

Download the Excel document

The Raspberry Pi

I think this little machine is great! It was fairly simple to set up and most cables can probably be found in your attic!