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. Three years later I got my doctorate in modelling radar rainfall data, and decided I wanted to give the world the greatest forecasting system of all time. Ten years later I had gone around three loops of funding cycles, each taking me back to square one, so I went to find something commercial so that I could make a lasting visible contribution to the world.
For a time I found my place developing software implementing e-commerce based at the Amsterdam outpost of a Massachusetts company. Then the dot-com bubble burst and the company turned its toes up. Back to square one again.
And square one was 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. They closed that down to make 200 scientists redundant and... back to square one.
At Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, at least working on and around satellites was interesting! There they needed my 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.
Now at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Manchester working on weak lensing detection of the distribution of dark energy in the cosmos. Iʼll write more when I understand what I am doing!
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.
Enjoy!
The following entries are sorted according to decreasing vitality.
Doing a favour for a good friend and her cohorts, this is a Joomla-powered managed web-site which is used to pass on news and information about this social group.
The web site is at http://tribalvillages.org/deaf/social.
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.
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.
Copyright © 2003 Free Software Foundation |
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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. | ||||
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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. |
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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. |
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.
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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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 | |
You can read my BookBlog here.
