Dale Mellor

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.

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.
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 as part of the global Dark Energy Survey (DES), and iPad-based public engagement software at the BlueDot festival.

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!

Programming

FOSS: Free, open-source software

As well as on the local server (links below), all this software is also published on Github.

GNU mcron
All the power of Guile to schedule unattended jobs on a computer.
iBash
A modified bash shell which calls out to Guile procedures to intelligently re-work the command-line inputs on the fly.
Micro HTTP Server C++ Library
Give your C++ application an embedded web server so that it can interact with users through a web browser.
Trader Desk
Yet another stock price charting application; this one holds historical data locally and is extremely responsive allowing interactive exploration of the markets.
Market Data Service
Not actually open source, but a freely provided simple service which supports the above trader-desk application by providing market meta-data.
C++ library for interfacing to the above Market Data Service
Get live market meta-data into your C++ application.
Kraken (cryptocurrency exchange) API C++ Client Library
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.
  
  A simple, static page currently stands in place at https://tribalvillages.org/deaf/social.
BookBlog
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.
- The software development page is https://bookblog.sourceforge.net;
- My own BookBlog is at https://rdmp.org/dale-mellor/bookblog.
Robots

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

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.

Understanding Deaf Culture, a critical review of a book written by one Paddy Ladd.

The Bubble, a poem about deafness.

((There are some other minor warblings about deafness here.))

Mcron white paper, version 1.0, June 2003

a fun sci-fi screenplay I wrote for television and am now releasing to the public.

Non-parametric MTB rainfall forecasting system, version 2.0, February 2003 (unfinished)

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...

A couple of other things from former occupations.

(4 MB)

(45 kB)

Yep, I confess, I did it, I went and painted the melancholy wildebeest...
48 pixels (1 kB) | 256 pixels (10 kB) | 480 pixels (25 kB) | 1055 pixels (90 kB)

Other sundries

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).