Introduction
Welcome. My name is Peter Murphy. This is my website.
What can I do for you?
I can program. I have several years of experience with the following technologies:
- C/C++, C# and Python
- HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Apache and Django
- Windows and Linux
I can teach. I also have several years experience of ESL teaching in Việt Nam and Australia. I possess a CELTA. More recently, I have completed a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (as delivered by Chris Morton Powerful Seminars). I can also provide editing and proofreading services for students.
For more information, please see my resume; it is available in Microsoft Word or PDF formats.
What else can you find on the site?
You can find the following things:
- A token About page.
- A Colophon: technical notes on how this site was put together.
- An essay on typing Vietnamese.
- And a Blog! Code written in Python and Django. Posts written in English. See below for the latest stuff.
- New! Chord Generator. To discover all your favourite chords.
- New! Glyphviewer. For inspecting fonts.
Clients
- New! Web redesign for PostPressed, a book publishing company in Mt. Gravatt, Queensland. Original website redesigned to allow dynamic content entry using the Django web framework.
Latest blog posts...
Cultural Competency and Indigenous Education
. . .
There's been a bit of consternation at Larvatus Prodeo over the post Culture Wars: self-fulfilling prophecy time. The gist is that Universities Australia have a new National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency. "Not something, if you read the key points, I’d have thought should be overly controversial". Yet at the end, we had:
This proposal is no more appropriate than incorporating Marxism, Christianity or any other extraneous topic into all courses.
How did it get from one to the other? I think the process went something like this. Let's think of this post as an exercise in "mental forensics".
Elementary Spam Detection with Django
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I leave my site alone for a few weeks, and take a short holiday in the UK. When I come back, I find 20 spam comments on my blog. I better do something about that. Here's some code I've implemented to fight the problem.
Võ Nguyên Giáp: 100 years old today.
. . .
It's newsworthy. Not many other veterans from the Việt Nam conflict got to score a century. So what would I like to say about him? I'd like to avoid the twin perils of hagiography and defamation. Let's go with a small bullet point history.
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ (1930-2011)
. . .
And so departs a Prime Minister and Vice President of South Việt Nam...
It's ironic that someone so flamboyant and historic in real life got overshadowed by their daughter before death. You've never heard of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên, daughter of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ? Then you've probably never heard of Paris by Night, the Vietnamese language variety show she's been hosting since god knows when. It's very, very big in the "overseas" Vietnamese community. But unless you're a speaker or married to one, it's probably passed your notice. Never mind that - let's talk about the big man himself.
Announcement: Glyphviewer 0.1
. . .
I am happy to announce the first iteration of Glyphviewer, a web application to analyse and display web fonts (fonts accessible only from the web), and present the results in the browser. We are not talking about your standard Times New Roman, but more exotic typefaces like DejaVu Sans and Essays1743. Users can use Glyphviewer to examine fonts without manually downloading and installing it on their computer. This application will attempt to list all the characters supported by a font and show header information as well.For best results, use Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera. IE and Safari users will be able to see what characters and heading information is supported, but won't be able to see the font.
Glyphviewer can be found here. For more information, see its documentation.
The announcement out of the way - does Glyphviewer work for you?