30th November 2022 was quite a big day: Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT, an AI ‘chat bot’ which is… significantly more powerful than the 2000-era chat bots we are used to. Someone built a virtual machine inside ChatGPT. Others used it to write short movies, code for their job, essays for school and college, and a … Read more
I recently gave up a perfectly good career as a software developer, and instead I plan to write blog posts and shoot YouTube videos for a living. I figure that it’s worth writing down why I have made this decision – if only for myself. I don’t fully know what I’m going to write here … Read more
Many websites I visit nowadays seem quite bloated. Fairly plain websites whose pages carry out 200+ HTTP requests, pages with 1 MB+ of Javascript to download before they can render a simple website etc. Hence I’ve found Jekyll to be a really useful tool in generating simple, static HTML websites – but with the power of blog … Read more
My wife and I had our gorgeous baby son (Xavier) at the end of May. Whilst neither of us are hardened environmentalists, we have always tried to reduce waste where possible… which is tricky with a newborn baby! After all, babies go through a lot of nappies, wet wipes and cotton wool and clothes. Plus raising a … Read more
In 2014 I started re-writing Plagiarism Guard in Python 3 using the Django framework (after starting off writing it in PHP). Plagiarism Guard was a plagiarism detection service. I mainly did this to teach myself Python (kudos to Learn Python the Hard Way) and also implement some (very!) basic NLP. I recently came across the source code and since … Read more
As mentioned on the homepage, whilst I am a full stack developer overall, I am currently doing more work on the server side area – especially with building more diverse, cloud-oriented applications.; mainly using Java 8 and Spring Cloud. Spring Cloud is a collection of tools, mainly of whom are powered by Netflix technologies such as: Eureka – … Read more
Back in 2014, I knocked up a simple jQuery image lightbox script based on jQuery V1. However this script now needs a slight tweak to work for V3, hence the final script has been updated at http://www.tristanperry.com/lightweight-lightbox/, and also on GitHub The only change is due to a change in jQuery 3’s breaking change to the load() function signature, and … Read more
I recently needed a simple image lightbox for one of my websites, however all the scripts I found online seemed overkill in that their file size were fairly large (as much as 60 KB), and some didn’t even lazy-load the images. So I set about creating a lightweight lightbox script which does lazy-loads – i.e. … Read more
Note: This article was written in late 2014, and whilst a lot of the commands and advise in this article are still relevant, a couple of links might be to an old ‘end of line’ version of software Plagiarism Guard’s footer has a ‘Blog Feed’ section which lists the five most recent blog posts from … Read more
Note: This article was written in late 2014, and whilst a lot of the commands and advise in this article are still relevant, a couple of links might be to an old ‘end of line’ version of software When deploying the new version of Plagiarism Guard, I didn’t want to disturb the existing install. So instead … Read more