About

Hello. This is the personal website of Owen Griffin. There isn’t much here, except my CV.

  • Infinite scoll and disposable content

    Infinite scroll is a web design technique that loads new content as the user scrolls down the page. It is often used by social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook as it allows you to continuously read users updates. Invented by Aza Raskin as early as 2006, by 2018 it was viewed as one of the reasons that make social media more addictive, with the inventor advocating against its use.

  • Extracting NTIS MIDAS measurement characteristics as CSV

    Each of the MIDAS sites report different “measurement characteristics”. This could be vehicle speed or traffic flow for a lane (or carriage way).

  • Using xmlstarlet to extract DATEX2 locations

    The National Transport Information Service (NTIS) provides live information on Highways England’s road network. This includes Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling (MIDAS), which provides information from around 6000 sites and is around 37GB of live data a day. In this article I describe how I extract the locations of the sites from DATEX2 into a CSV file which can be easily imported.

  • Familiar bugs caused by onClick and onSubmit events

    Occasionally I encounter a problem which seems familiar, that I recognize, but don’t immediately know the cause. The solution still takes time and I often take the same steps and follow the same processes used previously. Today I re-encountered an error caused by the default submit event handler cancelling a download.

  • lnav install with ansible

    lnav is a Linux log file viewer. I use it for viewing local log files as an alternative to tail and grep.