Web Development by Alistair Robinson

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Goodbye and Good Riddance to Word Processors: A Better Way To Write Proposals

January 24th, 2012 2 Comments
A few days ago I tweeted: “Writing a proposal. Oh boy do I hate word processors. There must be a better way.” It turns out there is, though I ended up forging my own path to suit my skills and working methods. A little background… I need to produce decent looking proposals for web development projects. Normally I bite the bullet and suffer the awkwardness of Word or OpenOffice or LibreOffice or something, and then export to PDF. It’s all very clever: it took some great minds to produce this software. But it really goes against the grain. It feels so wrong. I like plain old text, and as a web developer I’m used to defining the style of documents by hand, in CSS, … read on »

Clean Energy 2: The Comeback of Nuclear Power in the UK

January 16th, 2008

“Nuclear power? To most people, it’s witchcraft” (Chris Patten)
To describe nuclear power as clean might seem perverse, given that some of the waste produced is so dangerous that there is no containment material that won’t be destroyed by it, and that it remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
But last week the government finally said yes to the construction of up to ten nuclear power stations, at least some of which might be up-and-running by 2020. They’ve put off the decision for a long time. New Labour, motivated for so long by the desire to be liked, refused to face the impending energy crisis. Now that the closure of many of our existing nuclear power stations is fast approaching … read on »

Clean Energy 1: A Milestone in The Glendoe Hydro-electric Scheme

January 16th, 2008 1 Comment

On January 7th the 200-metre-long tunnel boring machine called Eliza Jane broke through the side of a mountain in Scotland after sixteen months of grinding. The resulting five mile tunnel will take water from a reservoir up on the Monadhliath plateau down to Loch Ness, via an underground cavern housing a hydro-electric power station. It’s the biggest civil engineering project in Scotland, and the first major hydro scheme in Britain since the fifties I think. As such, it’s tremendously exciting: as I’ve mentioned before, hydro power sets me all a-trembling with fascination and a smidgin of dread. So indulge me.
The water head – the vertical distance from the turbine to the intake at the reservoir, is 600 metres, the highest … read on »

The Great Man-Made River Project and Libyan Democracy

April 13th, 2007 5 Comments

UPDATE 21st Feb 2011: Despite the general tone of this post, in which I show admiration for the achievements of the Great Manmade River Project and sympathy for Gadaffi’s political philosophy of direct democracy – I have no illusions about the real nature of the regime, and I FULLY SUPPORT any revolutionary pro-democratic action that is now taking place, and ABSOLUTELY CONDEMN the violent actions of the government.

I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart … read on »


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