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John Graham-Cumming

http://twitter.com/jgrahamc/

Biography

John Graham-Cumming is a wandering programmer who's lived in the UK, California, New York and France. Along the way he's worked for a succession of technology start-ups, written the award-winning open source POPFile email program and churned out articles for publications such as The Guardian newspaper, Dr Dobbs, and Linux Magazine. His first effort writing a book was the obscure and self-published computer manual GNU Make Unleashed which saturated its target market of 100 readers. Because he has a doctorate in computer security he's deeply suspicious of people who insist on being called Dr., but doesn't mind if you refer to him as a geek. He is the proud owner of a three-letter domain name where he hosts his web site: http://www.jgc.org.

Books

The Geek Atlas The Geek Atlas
by John Graham-Cumming
May 2009
Print: $29.99
Ebook: $23.99

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Blog

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John's blog posts are hosted at:
http://jgc.org/blog/

Parsing a JSON document and applying it to an HTML template in Google Go

November 20 2009

Here's some simple code to parse a JSON document and the transform it into an HTML document using the Google Go packages json and template.If you've done anything in a scripting language then you'll probably be surprised by the generation of fixed struct types that have to match the parsed… read more

Installing Google Go on Mac OS X

November 19 2009

I decided to have a go with Google Go since I'm an old fogey C/C++ programmer. Any new innovation in the C/C++ family gets me excited and Google Go has quite a few nice features (garbage collection is really nice to have and channels make me think of all the… read more

Geek Weekend (Paris Edition), Day 4: Institut Pasteur

November 19 2009

Leaving my SO in bed at the hotel with a nasty bacterial infection and some antibiotics, I went with timely irony to visit the home and laboratory of Louis Pasteur at the Institut Pasteur. (It's pretty easy to find since it has a conveniently named stop on the Paris metro:… read more

Geek Weekend (Paris Edition), Day 3: The Arago Medallions

November 10 2009

The old Paris Meridian (which was in use up until 1914) passes not far from The Pantheon which I visited to see Foucault's Pendulum. It's actual longitude today is 2°20′14.025″.To mark the old meridian the French decided to install some art work and they commissioned an artist called Jan Dibbets… read more

Parsing HTML in Python with BeautifulSoup

November 09 2009

I got into a spat with Eric Raymond the other day about some code he's written called ForgePlucker. I took a look at the source code and posted saying it looks like a total hack job by a poor programmer.Raymond replied by posting a blog entry in which he called… read more

Geek Weekend (Paris Edition), Day 2: Foucault's Pendulum

November 06 2009

Not very far from The Curie Museum is the former church and now burial place for the great and good men (and one woman) of France: The Pantheon. Inside the Pantheon is the original Foucault's Pendulum.The pendulum was first mounted in the Pantheon in 1851 to demonstrate that the Earth… read more

Some real data about JavaScript tagging on web pages

November 06 2009

Since March of this year I've been running a private web spider looking at the number of web tags on web pages belonging to the Fortune 1000 and the top 1,000 web sites by traffic. Using the spider I've been able to see which products are deployed where, and how… read more

Security Now #221

November 06 2009

I was a guest on Security Now this week and the podcast has now been released (as has a transcript). Steve Gibson and some other people asked me to provide the presentation in some relatively readable format.The original presentation is here, but it, ironically, requires JavaScript and Adobe Flash. So… read more

Geek Weekend (Paris Edition), Day 1: The Curie Museum

November 04 2009

So, it was off to Paris for the weekend via Eurotunnel and I managed to fit in four places from The Geek Atlas in four days. I was staying in a hotel in the Latin Quarter which is a stone's throw from... The Curie Museum.Here's Marie Curie's laboratory:The museum covers… read more

Der Geek Atlas

October 29 2009

The Geek Atlas ist jetzt auch in Deutsch.Kaufen Sie es hier.Die lebendige Geschichte der Wissenschaften ist überall um uns herum, man muss nur wissen, wo man hinschauen muss. Mit diesem einzigartigen Reiseführer kann man 128 Orte auf der Welt kennen lernen, die für bedeutsame Ereignisse in Wissenschaft und Technik stehen.… read more

Alain de Botton's Six-Part Series on Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

October 26 2009

I couldn't find a handy archive for this that listed them all in order. So here are the six videos from Google Video.01 Socrates on Self-confidence02 Epicurus on Happiness03 Seneca on Anger04 Montaigne on Self-esteem05 Schopenhauer on Love06 Nietzche on Hardship read more

Nerd is the new normal

October 22 2009

When I was writing The Geek Atlas there was a big debate about the title. My original title included the word geek, but O'Reilly quickly overruled it. By the time the final title was agreed, we went with a title that O'Reilly themselves suggested: The Geek Atlas.And then, just the… read more

Dyson's overpriced fan and the Coandă Effect

October 16 2009

The news the other day was filled with the news of James Dyson's new bladeless fan which costs an arm and a leg (seriously, £199.99 for a desk fan!?!). There are a number of interesting things about this fan.First, it appears to have no blades. It's just an annulus (or… read more

What is jsHub?

October 15 2009

Some time ago I blogged about a new open-source project I'm involved in called jsHub. Since then there's been a little bit of confusion about what jsHub is all about.Hopefully, I can clear this up in this blog post with an example.The ProblemThe home page of World Wrestling Entertainment has… read more

The Times' new science magazine: Eureka

October 14 2009

Hannah Devlin at The Times prodded my via email to tell me about the new science magazine they have launched called Eureka. What a wonderful idea. I'm so glad to see a major newspaper take science so seriously. So, I ran out and grabbed a copy.Oddly, the next day I… read more

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Multimedia

Webcast: Around the world in 32 minutes with The Geek Atlas
June 24, 2009
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes. Cost: Free In this webcast, author John Graham-Cumming presents a tour of 32 places from his book, The Geek Atlas, in 32 minutes. From Jaipur to Hawaii, via Spain, Paris, London, New York and beyond, The Geek Atlas...

John Graham-Cumming