About Me

Update: May 16th, 2012

In this blog I write about things that I personally find either interesting or useful and occasionally both. Hopefully these things will turn out to be of interest to people other than me.

I currently work as a science and engineering applications support specialist at the University of Manchester in the UK. In practice this means that I spend a lot of time worrying about necessary evils such as site licensing and software deployment but I also get to do some really fun stuff like teach people how to use things like MATLAB, Mathematica, Python, Condor, Beowulf clusters etc.

I also provide a code-review and optimisation service where researchers send me their code and I make it go faster. Languages I support include MATLAB, Mathematica, R and Python among others. On a bad day I might only get a 15% speed-up but on (very) good-days I achieve speed-ups of over 1,000 times!

It goes without saying (I hope) that all opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not reflect any policies of my employer.

  1. February 8th, 2008 at 23:35
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Dear Walking Randomly author,

    Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it a 8.6 (Great) score out of (10). Your blog is currently in the top ten
    in the Education/Math category of Blogged.com. This is quite an achievement!

    http://www.blogged.com/directory/education/math

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    Marketing
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  2. Glenn
    March 29th, 2009 at 20:32
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Hello,
    Somehow the feedburner link is broken and will not allow me to subscribe to your blog. I have been subscribed before, and in my old reader it says “an error has occurred” and in my new reader (google reader) I can not connect.

    Just wanted to let you know of the issue.

  3. Mike Croucher
    March 30th, 2009 at 10:53
    Reply | Quote | #3

    Hi Glenn

    Good to hear from you although it’s a shame about the circumstances. I wonder if you were experiencing a temporary glitch? I subscribe to WR myself in order to check that all is well with my feedburner RSS feeed and haven’t come across any problems. Clicking on the feed link in Firefox also works as expected.

    Looking at my feedburner stats it seems that there was a massive (but fortunately temporary) drop in google reader subscribers a couple of days ago. Coincidence?

    Anyway, I’ll keep an eye on things and I hope you can re-subscribe soon,
    Mike

  4. April 10th, 2009 at 17:17
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Very nice blog, I’ve linked you in my own (if you don’t want, please tell me and I will remove the link).

  5. Akshay
    November 12th, 2009 at 20:43
    Reply | Quote | #5

    Looking for some more tutorial on Mex file and Parallel computing on Matlab……….Nice Blog

    Thanks for writing such a nice blog

  6. January 14th, 2010 at 13:55
    Reply | Quote | #6

    Attend a presentation by people from NAG and your website was listed in their slides. After quickly reviewing the blog, I have to say you have done a fantastic job, Matlab, R, NAG, statistics categories especially interest me, many thanks.

  7. January 14th, 2010 at 14:27
    Reply | Quote | #7

    @Quant – Thanks for saying hello. Glad you like the site (yours looks nice too!). There will be more on NAG soon.

    Best Wishes,
    Mike

  8. Liam Gretton
    September 23rd, 2011 at 11:19
    Reply | Quote | #8

    Great site – it was recommended to me by a NAG representative, but there’s plenty more than just NAG stuff here to interest me.

  9. September 25th, 2011 at 22:29
    Reply | Quote | #9

    Thanks Liam :)

  10. Gary Palmer
    November 23rd, 2011 at 23:26

    Extraordinarily clear writing. Will there be a Mathematica textbook?

  11. Yannis Bonis
    January 20th, 2012 at 00:32

    Hi Mike!

    Congratulations on a great blog! Good stuff! Keep it up!

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