Once I wanted to be a fire engine driver. Then I accidentally did
well at some things at school, and wanted to go to
university. You canʼt get a degree in fire engine driving, so I
decided to go in for subnuclear quantum physics. I found myself
spending most of my time making the big calculators work better,
so after I graduated I looked to do something computational and
ended up spending the next four decades banging keyboards.
At the University of Newcastle upon Tyne: radar rainfall
modelling (it got me a Ph.D.!)
Developing software implementing e-commerce (shopping carts and
payment processing) based at the Amsterdam outpost of a
Massachusetts company, spun out from MIT. Then the dot-com bubble
burst and the company turned its toes up.
At the Underpinning Technologies Group of the Section for Earth
Observation at the Monks Wood site of the
Centre for Ecology and
Hydrology, a research arm of
the Natural Environment Research
Council: analyzing aeroplane- and satellite-derived images of
the ground, and implementing field computing infrastructure for
the 2007 Land Cover Survey. They closed that place down in 2008
to make 200 scientists redundant :-(
At Surrey Satellite Technology
Limited: software to point antennae and track satellites
across the sky, autonomously operate ground-stations, and to
negotiate the error-free downloading of Earth observation images.
If I find spare time and spare energy, I hack. I hack my
house, cars, computer, web server, mathematical models,
science fiction... if itʼs hackable, Iʼll have a go. If it
doesnʼt look like it belongs to me, it soon will. This page
is a summary of my hacking activities, for your amusement.
Very much a work in progress, just beginning. The GNU
Mcron program referred to below is old now, and contains a
lot of dead wood in the name of compatibility with very old
standards. The new version will be leaner and even more
adaptable.
Another work in progress. Systems like Signal
and Mastodon are supposed to be distributed, but
in practice end up either being quite centralized or very
inefficient. This is an attempt to make federated
networking much more efficient.
Just as with the old C++ version below: get market data,
live order books, and create trading orders on the Kraken
cryptocurrency exchange using their REST API.
Before that, 30 years a professional C++ developer.
As well as on the local server (links below), most of this
software is also published
on Github, which
I hate.
Yet another stock price charting application; this one
holds historical data locally and is extremely
responsive allowing interactive exploration of the
markets.
Get market data, live order books, and create trading
orders on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange using their
REST API.
Attic - decrepit old projects
>>>
Attic - decrepit old projects
^^
GNU
“The coolest operating system on the planet. Sat astride a
2.6.X Linux kernel, and draped in a flowing Gnome2 ballgown, it
howls in the face of Windʼs 200X inches/hr. Such is the system
Iʼve built from scratch and now maintain exclusively on all my
PCs.” — Big words around the year 2000, but at least Linux is
still going strong! I currently use Debian Squeeze for
servers, and the latest Ubuntu for laptop/desktop work, although
Iʼm seriously starting to go off that.... I currently run
Debian stable everywhere: it is the universal engineerʼs
operating system!
GNUbik
I must have wasted half my youth on
these silly cubes, now Iʼm wasting... just wasting!
This isnʼt exactly my program, but I did add the
Script-fu subsystem and the AI to solve the blasted
thing. The project is hosted
on Savannah.
Charity web sites
Guildford HOH Support Group
Fully commissioned web site
with the remit to make it as cheap as possible; managed to bring it
in at a total cost under £200 for five years (the charity
wanted to pay for all the time up-front as their funds are very
variable). It was also required to be ultra-simple for the charity
to use.
The web site is at www.guildfordhoh.org.uk,
though the current incarnation is nothing to do with me.
The Keep (Guildford HoH/deaf Social Group)
Doing a favour for a good friend and her cohorts, this was a
Joomla-powered managed web-site which is used to pass on
news and information about this social group.
One day I decided to catalogue my collection of books
(as I was starting to lose track of all the storylines),
so I wrote this software which allows me to write my
thoughts down after reading each new book, and then just
for free they become available to anyone else who might
be interested.
These are notes I made as I was
building and designing software for my experimental robot
manipulator arm. It is still a work in progress, and I only wish I
had more time for this fascinating hobby.
Rainfall Data Modelling Portal
Fallout from my Ph.D. days. Seems a shame to let the
accumulated intellect go to waste... This system was
based on the Internet superserver which I once owned,
but nowadays itʼs just another cloud machine, perfectly
adequate for the job.
The RDMP system itself is at
https://rdmp.org/rdmp (now bit-rotted to
ruins, but may some day return)
The RDMP
development hub.
The meadow
This is my little pet project to develop an
interactive photo-realistic picture of a meadow. The
project has no defined structure - I will simply add a
little something to it every now and then, and weʼll
see what it grows into!
The last snapshot is shown here. Remember that with
the real thing you can move around the scene.
This hasnʼt been touched now for eight years. Looking
at the water that has passed under the bridge in that
time, Iʼm sure that if I were to pick this up again
Iʼd be using one of the graphics libraries that can
take advantage of the dedicated hardware now
available. Probably would use the current GDK which
is based on Cairo, backed by OpenGL.
The Village
Having gotten involved with the online UK deaf
community through various forums, I felt that the
community would do better with a more immersive kind
of online environment, in which the members would
feel more like part of a village community. In the
end the participants decided that they wanted a
basic forum, and the software finished up being
nothing special.
CEH Phenology Observatory of Great Britain
This was my main development for CEH, a project to
monitor the dynamic state of vegetation growth on the
ground, for the whole of the British mainland.
The raw satellite data were furnished from the Dundee
Satellite Receiving Station, and downloaded to the site
every day; the processing line in the observatory is fully
automatic, so that images appear very soon after the
satellite makes its pass over the country (usually shortly
before midday).
I left instructions for its maintenance, but, alas, it no
longer exists.
Writing
Current
Broken
Spark, science fiction serialization being progressively
(albeit slowly) realized.
Bridges, C. P., Kenyon,
S., Shaw, P., Simons, E., Visagie, L., Theodorou, T.,
Yeomans, B., Parsons, J., Lappas, V., Underwood, C.,
Jason, S., Mellor, D., Wellstead, P., Schofield, A.,
Linehan, R., Barrera-Ars, J., Dyer, B., Liddle, D.,
Sweeting, M. N. (2013)
A Baptism of Fire: The STRaND-1 Nanosatellite.
Proceedings of the
SmallSat conference, Utah.
Kenyon,
S., Bridges, C. P., Liddle, D., Dyer, R., Parsons, J.,
Feltham, D., Taylor, R., Mellor, D., Schofield, A. and
Linehan, R. (2011)
STRaND-1: Use of a $500 Smartphone as the
Central Avionics of a Nanosatellite.
Proceedings of the
62nd International Astronautical
Congress
Mellor, D., Sheffield, J., OʼConnell, P. E. and
Metcalfe, A. V. (2000)
A stochastic space-time rainfall forecasting
system for real time flow
forecasting. I. Development of MTB conditional
rainfall scenario generator.
Hydrol. Earth System Sci., 4,
603-615.
Mellor, D., Sheffield, J., OʼConnell, P. E. and
Metcalfe, A. V. (2000)
A stochastic space-time rainfall forecasting
system for real time flow
forecasting. II. Application of SHETRAN and ARNO
rainfall runoff models to the Brue
catchment.
Hydrol. Earth System Sci., 4,
617-626.
Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for
space-time rainfall. I. Model definition and
properties.
J. Hydrol., 175,
113-127.
Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for
space-time rainfall. II. Estimation of raincell
parameters.
J. Hydrol., 175,
129-159.
Mellor, D. and Metcalfe, A. V. (1996)
The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) model for
space-time rainfall. III. Estimation of the
storm/rainband profile and discussion of the
future model prospects.
J. Hydrol., 175,
161-180.
Mellor, D. (1993)
The Modified Turning Bands (MTB) Model for
space-time rainfall.
Ph. D. Thesis,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
UK
Painting
Crafting codeʼs one way to relax, and get a high when it all
works. However, sometimes you just have to get away from the
shackles of syntax and do something freeform. Below are some
of the less constrained hacks Iʼve done...
As practice before attacking the car, I did this circa
January 1991. It is airbrushed thinned emulsion (the stuff
you DIY put on walls) on very thin, wide (36″) printer
paper.
Sometime Mellormobile, the Golden Eagle
,
long since deceased but not forgotten...
Pictures of a former living room. Painting this had been a
great way to pass three years of dark winter Sundays...
Here is my GPG key, used both to sign
and encrypt e-mail, and to sign key GIT commits (the associated
e-mail address, dale-at-rdmp.org, is a black-hole and messages
sent there will NOT reach me).
Broken
Spark, science fiction serialization being progressively
(albeit slowly) realized.
Window on Winsfordʼs
Councils, deep dives into current and recent proceedings in
the councils which control the town of Winsford.
Dale Mellorʼs
Book Blog, a journal recording the books I read, with some
opinion but mostly just plain spoilers.
Some notes I wrote about the time I built a card Star Trek
Enterprise.
Right-Angled Triangles, a book
which provides an alternative approach to learning and
understanding the maths of right-angled triangles.
As practice before attacking the car, I did this circa
January 1991. It is airbrushed thinned emulsion (the stuff
you DIY put on walls) on very thin, wide (36″) printer
paper.
