Greetings, welcome to my web page.
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.
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.
If you feel compelled to comment or just to say hi, Iʼm at https://rdmp.org/dale-mellor/contact.
Enjoy!
FOSS: Free, open-source software
Since the pandemic,
re-focussed on Rust, Guile, and Guix.
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.
A fork of the GUIX operating system optimized for running internet services (web, e-mail, etc.) from a virtual machine in the cloud.
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.
All the power of Guile to schedule unattended jobs on a computer.
A modified bash shell which calls out to Guile procedures to intelligently re-work the command-line inputs on the fly.
Give your C++ application an embedded web server so that it can interact with users through a web browser.
Yet another stock price charting application; this one holds historical data locally and is extremely responsive allowing interactive exploration of the markets.
Not actually open source, but a freely provided simple service which supports the above trader-desk application by providing market meta-data.
Get live market meta-data into your C++ application.
Get market data, live order books, and create trading orders on the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange using their REST API.
Window on Winsfordʼs Councils, deep
dives into current and recent proceedings in the councils which
control the town of Winsford.
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.
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a fun sci-fi screenplay I wrote for television and am now releasing to the public. |
| 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 | |
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 |
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, 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...
A couple of other things from former occupations.
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Copyright © 2003 Free Software Foundation |
Yep, I confess, I did it, I went and painted the
melancholy wildebeest...
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You can read my BookBlog here.
My contact page is here.
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).
