More Than Just For Reading Week

Hey everyone! Another end-of-week Reading Week blog post. Got so much going on right now it's unreal, so I'm hoping to bring you all up to date on what's happening, and in fact this blog post will pretty much summarise my life at current (hence the title).

My University work has obviously slowed down a little this week, but pre-reading week we were quite busy. We get one-pagers every week which are designed to make us read the research papers given, which does take time. And we've also been working on a University project to build on top of something called Rime, based in the Contiki OS. We're building a reliable multi-hop communications stack; which basically means we're building something that can send messages across multiple devices and also guarantee that they get to the other side (see my previous blog post for what those devices are). So, for the past month or so, including reading week, I have been working with my classmates to produce first the RFC for this and now we're working on implementing it. The due date is Friday, so I've been quite busy coding that up.

Then of course on top of that I've also been working part-time, which has got to the stage where I'm now working three times a week; one full day and two half-days (so really two full day's a week rather then one and a half). We're working on a rather large project that we had to bring more people into, which is great because it's giving me a taster into how real teamwork works. This will give me great experience for when I do my masters group project that I do in the summer, and I've already got ideas as to how to organise that properly.

Another large area of my life that is growing rapidly, and one that I haven't mentioned on this blog much (if at all), is my participation in what's known as the Zeitgeist Movement, to the extent that I now have a separate blog in which I detail my reasons for joining the movement as well as post my thoughts and insights. If you want to find out more about what the movement does, and have the time to do so, I highly encourage you watch Zeitgeist Addendum, which is the film that refocused my views completely. Personally, I feel that the Zeitgeist Movement is something worth pushing forward and thus I am very active in the UK movement, being one of the administrators of the official UK site (and also part-creator of the site), and so this has been taken up quite a bit of my time keeping the site running and working on new things for the site. As well as that, the movement itself is currently pushing ZDay 2010, which is a worldwide event that will occur on the 13th March. There are quite a few events happening in the UK on ZDay, so feel free to check that out.

And now we come to my other stuff that's been going on; the lesser end of the stick, but oh so much sweeter. I am of course referring to my recent delightful relationship change. I now have a girlfriend, a wonderful beautiful girl called Ruth. Yeah, it came as a complete shock to me too! But she really is the embodiment of perfection. And I have to say I love her :)

So you want to know how we met? Well, OK then. When my flatmate and I moved in at the beginning of our masters, we started to go to our old university's student union for Pub Quiz, for two reasons. Firstly, my flatmate and I knew the place well while my flatmate knew the quiz-master even better. And secondly, it was within walking distance of the flat. Anyway, my flatmate knew someone who was attending Goldsmiths and was part of his pub-quiz team last year, and she brought along her flatmates, one of which was Ruth. And then we got talking, and I began to see the similarities between us (we both love Star Trek and anime, for instance!) About a month ago, I found out that she was interested in me, from various signs, and so I asked her out. And we've been going out since then! So yeah, there you have it! What a nice coincidence...

Anyway, think I've covered a lot of stuff in this blog post; in fact, this pretty much summarises my life at present. So for now, I'm signing off :)

The Rollercoaster Week

Friday 29th January at 11:34pm - What an evening! What a week! It's been a wild rollercoaster of a ride, and we've only just reached the peak!

The above extract is something I posted onto my Twitter feed regarding last week, and which I think holds true. I had quite an interestingly busy and unique week last week and it almost seemed as if this week and last week would merge together.

It started off normally. Monday I went and spent the day in the office, followed by an evening at home. That evening I looked over my plans for the remainder of the week and instantly saw an anomaly... I was fully booked every evening of the week for social events, and also on Saturday as well.

Tuesday I had my usual day at Uni followed by my usual day at my local Student Union's pub quiz. Wednesday was Uni, work and then a trip to Stamford Bridge. Thursday was a full day of Uni followed by a most enjoyable cinema trip to see Sherlock Holmes. And Friday was a morning at Uni, the rest of the day until late at work, and a wild night on the town with my programme class mates at Las Iguanas.

Saturday I went paintballing with a group of friends, which was once again extremely muddy! And my group came second due to bonus points the other side picked up for a kamikazee run. Sunday was a day spent in work, followed by a well deserved evening relaxing.

All in all, it really was a non-stop week; although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself thoroughly, because the week was a lot of fun!

Dragon Age Origins

Having played Dragon Age Origins for a good amount of time now, I actually think I am beginning to like it a lot. The game presents itself well, and the storyline definitely draws you in. The animation is superb, the sound effects excellent, and the gameplay well structured and enjoyable. That said, it is quite a gory game to play, so much so I actually turned off the persistent gore in the options menu, which made the game a lot more enjoyable, so I'm glad they kept that in the options.

The game itself has you play as a Grey Warden, a Jedi Knight of olden times if you will, peacekeepers and defenders against this horde of evil creatures called the Blight. After the initial intro section, you end up travelling the lands to try and gather everyone together in order to stave off this Blight while being seen as an outlaw and outcast by those ruling.

Before I go on, the intro section is most interesting. Depending on the race, class and sex you pick to play as, your storyline changes to reflect that, so much so that it gives you a unique entrance into the game compared to other characters people might pick. There are six locations, with a possiblity of twelve different intros, compared to what race and class you choose, and with minor changes depending on sex. And as I said, the choices you pick at the beginning influence how people react and see you along your quest.

So, you travel the land with your companions to gather people together to stave off evil. And along the way you pick up companions to join you and help you complete your quest. You can have a total of three companions travelling with you at any time, so you need to swap your party in and out to get the best out of them. The decisions you make during gameplay also influence the game heavily, and influence your characters. The game provides a way for characters to indicate their approval of your actions, and of course different characters will approve and disapprove of different things. I've had situations where one character highly approves, and another highly disapproves. There is also the option of romance along the way for some companions, if they approve high enough...

The game's camera angle is also quite fun, as it supports both top-down and behind-the-character views. Top-down gives you a very much Neverwinter Nights feel, eerily so, so much that when in that mode you could have someone look over your shoulder and say 'you playing Neverwinter?' The behind-the-character view allows you to play similar to Star Wars KotOR, and really shows off the superb graphics and feel of the game, and is where I play personally. But it supports both, with very quick transition between them.

Overall, Dragon Age Origins is an awesome game, and if you are an RPG fan over the age of 18, a must get...

UCL Second Term

Woo! I've managed to get more then one blog post posted in a single month, and in the space of just under three days too! Amazing!

Anyway, onto the topic. As you may have guessed by the new ticker on the right-hand side of the blog, my second term at UCL University is well under way. So I thought I might give you an update on what is going on...

As you may know, I'm currently studying an MSc in Networked Computer Systems since September last year. The first term was definitely a lot of fun and was very interesting, but was extremely hard work to complete. The courses involved learning about the underlying structure of networks and, in particular, the Internet; learning about distributed systems used in the world and the procedures involved in keeping them secure; a look into operating systems and how they influence networking; and a final course in Network Performance.

Network Performance was probably the hardest course I have ever taken anywhere, even over Physics, due to it's high use of extremely difficult mathematics. I am so not a mathematician, so I really struggled with this course.

Another thing that really brought me down last term was 9am lectures, every single day. For those of you for which this is the norm, do understand that this was coming from an extra-long four month summer vacation with late mornings and equally late evenings, so I was completely unprepared for what was involved.

This term, it's a little different. While 9am lectures happen 2/3 times a week, I do get slightly longer lay-ins. I also get a completely free day on Monday, which I am using for work. But my afternoons that I used to have are now turning into evenings, so it's a trade-off from the previous term.

Of greatest interest this term, for me personally, is Network and Applications Programming, which is a purely programming course in C in which we program on TMote Sky's, shown on the right hand side. These small devices contain various sensors, buttons and LEDs, and a small radio chipset; and use an OS called Contiki that is specifically designed to work on memory-constrained devices such as these. We will be working to program a multi-hop routing algorithm between the devices which will eventually allow for a button to be pressed on one side of the room and an LED to flash on the other side, with each of the devices routing between each other to get things to the other side. This is what I came to Uni to do!

So yeah, all in all my course is definitely coming along nicely, I'm enjoying my time and learning a lot at the same time.

Into 2010: The Next Decade

Heya all! It's been some time, yet again, since I posted. In fact, here's a fact for you; last year I posted just 5 blog posts. That's abysmal!

This year, I intend to do better. A lot better. In fact, I intend to once again get into regular posting of blog articles, but this time, I'm taking a slightly different approach to my blog writing. Instead of posting regular fortnightly posts, I'm going to keep 'running drafts' going. With this approach, I might have various different drafts around different topics running alongside each other, side by side. As I develop each blog post, others might get posted and/or created, until eventually I deem the post ready and it gets sent out.

This way, I will always have something I'm working on. It might be a weekly update, or perhaps it's information on a particular interest, or perhaps I'm reviewing a particular TV show/movie/software/website/etc.

I'm also planning on organising my labels better, although I'm not entirely sure the way to do that. Do you think I should be general about my labels (ie type of post, general area of where I'm posting) or specific (like I have now, individual topics)? I'm more leaning towards the former, but it means going through all my existing posts and updating their labels. Which I guess I need to do anyway...

To show my interest in blogging full-time again, I've gone and got myself a copy of Blogo for Mac, which I will be using to organise my blog posts without even having to be online. Which is awesome!

Right! That's all for now. Hopefully you'll see another new blog post in a future near you!

Moving Forward

So. I've come back to that which is blogging. I'm starting to lean towards making a little free time to update you all on what's been going on. But it's been so long since I last posted a blog I'm just going to be brief on what has happened over the last few months.

So, last time I posted I was during my exams, right? Well, let me bring you up to date on that. I completed my exams and spent a wonderful few months waiting for the results. Then they came in... First Class Honours! So yeah, I was very chuffed. Getting a first was no easy task, and I had a fantastic time at Goldsmiths. The graduation ceremony in September was very good too; the robes, the speeches, the photos and saying goodbye to friends. It was awesome; photos available on Facebook.

Jumping back to July, and my birthday and summer party happened on the same day. I will be posting up pictures of that event onto Facebook in the near future, so if you're looking for them then keep an eye on that. The day went really well; I know a few friends who turned up and had a great time. The weather was perfect, and the food really nice (cooked by friends of my Dad's girlfriend Dana from Romania). Overall, the day went really well.

Speaking of Romania, in August I took a small trip out there with my Dad, Dana and my younger brother Andy. It was a most interesting trip. I got to meet loads of new people, as well as have the experience of seeing how people live on farms and the like, it was like going back in time! But the cities were all well developed and had some interesting differences to most cities, such as having cars going round a roundabout three times hooting their horn to show off a married couple. The reason I went to Romania was for a wedding of a friend of Dana's, and that itself was great fun, but the entire trip really was a lot of fun and very inspirational at the same time, and it was well worth going.

So, what's new now? Well, I've now moved! That's right! I now live in central London, which is awesome. Having a lot of fun in my new flat. I'm also attending UCL to do my masters in Networked Computer Systems. Again, it's a lot of fun and although it's challenging, I'm definitely learning some pretty awesome stuff. Had to learn calculus!

And the future? Well, that's still to come. But this has been a quick wrap up. I haven't covered everything, but I thought if I was to get back into blogging there has got to be sometime. As for sorting out my labels; not really sure what to do with those... lol

Exam Season

Hey ho! So I have been extremely busy lately, no doubt as many of you have noticed. I've stopped playing EVE Online and many other games to focus on my Uni and Business work. And luckily, I've got both of these out the way, the Uni because I'm finished, and my Business because I've taken a leave of absence.

The reason being? Exams!! My Univeristy Third year exams start on Wednesday, and go on for three weeks (two per week). I have my last exam on the 29th May, and from that date I am completely finished with University (I think, I might still get my Viva sometime in early June, we'll have to see...)

Anyhow, I'm only a month away from finishing my three year degree at Goldsmiths! So obviously, I have taken a break to pour every ounce of available energy into gaining this degree. Still, I have managed to find a little bit in my breaks to post this blog entry informing you all that I still live, and that I haven't forgotten my blog.

I've just been too busy to do anything else but work, and am now too busy to do anything else but revise!!

P.S. I will be organising my labels for the posts soon into various categories. Hopefully :)

Reset Button time... Again!

Yo blog readers! I know what you are thinking! Another random blog out of the blue around a month after the last one and to be followed by more silence of a similar length. I always seem to open my latest blog post with 'I haven't posted for a long time because...' and I seem to have done it again! Well I am a busy person after all :P

Anyway, it's time once again to hit that reset button and try to start blogging more often. So, let me continue this blog post with what I've been up to over the past month or so since my last blog post...

Well, for work I've been doing a lot for the company I work for as well as a lot in my Uni project. I still have a lot of work to do in both, so I'm going to be busy on these two for a little while longer. On top of that, of course, I have all the lectures and assignments my other Uni courses are providing me with, so all in all work is really keeping me on my toes.

In my free time, I'm usually spending a lot of it browsing the latest news feeds and keeping an eye on Facebook and Twitter (see my blog post here if you want to know what Twitter is) , with the help of my trusty iPhone. I've also been watching anime and Star Trek DS9 a lot when I'm a little too tired to think. And of course one shouldn't forget the USS Andromeda!

That's not to mention I'm not busy at home too. I still have my usual duties to complete here and there. On top of all this, I am also going to the gym once or twice a week to do weights. Trying to build up some muscle! I have my own personal trainer who helps me with the weights and stuff.

So as you can tell I have very good reasons for my infrequent blog posts. I do have interesting things to blog about; it's just I need to find the time to blog it!

Anyhow, until the next long and distant blog entry, I'll sign off.

-- Post From My iPhone

Into 2009: A Blog Update

It's been a long time since I've posted a blog entry. The reason being that I've been extremely busy. Even too busy to play games as often as I'd like as well, as my EVE Online Corp would know...

So! What have I been up to then? Well...

For starters the development of my Uni's third year project is well underway. It is quite a large project though and I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to meet all it's goals entirely by the time I have to finish it... but that's not too big a problem for the general public as I can easily expand it now I've got a stable framework.

The other large project that I'm working on is for the company I work for, worldflow. I am creating Java and PHP based web services for the project I'm working on using quite a few technologies I've only just met (not used to create the services, I know how to do that, but to organize all the code properly...)

Put those two large projects which take up the majority of my time anyhow, on top of my Uni, with it's lectures, labs and other assignments; the home based duties I have; the gym I'm just getting into; quite a few trips here and there; and watching Star Trek DS9 with my brother, and you'll begin to understand what's taking up my time.

I've also been keeping everyone up to date on my progress through other means. That is, through Twitter and (sometimes) Facebook. This often done from the comfort of my iPhone! In fact, I posted this very blog post using an iPhone app called BlogPress, a fantastic blogging app that hasn't crashed once despite the reviews that say otherwise.

Needless to say I use my iPhone a lot. In fact, with over 1GB worth of apps, I've actually reached the maximum number of pages of apps allowed by Apple: 9 pages of apps (that's just under 144 apps on my iPhone!)

Anyway, as this is the second time I've written this blog post (previous version lost during posting due to lack of Internet; my fault entirely) I will finish here. Hopefully with this new iPhone app I should be able to post more reguarly, but time will tell!

Until next time... Live Long and Prosper!

-- Post From My iPhone

eReader for iPhone

I will hopefully be bringing you up to date on what I've been up to recently in the next few days. I've just been so busy on my project and other Uni and work-based work lately that I haven't had much time to do much else, although my project is coming along quite nicely.

Anyway, down to this blog post which is a special blog entry that has been requested by a friend of mine on how to best use eReader for iPhone / iTouch, with screenshots! So let's get started.

Installing eReader on the iPhone

To install eReader on your iPhone, you require the iPhone firmware Version 2.0 or higher. If you don't have this firmware (found in Settings > General > About) you will have to update your iPhone through iTunes.

If you have the firmware, then you can install the app by either using the App Store located on the iPhone or through iTunes. Through iTunes, you can simply click on this link (iTunes link) to reach the iTunes page. Through the App Store, search for "eReader" and it's the first option.

When you have installed eReader, opening the app should get something similar to the following screen above.

Creating an eReader.com account

To upload any new eBooks to your iPhone eReader app, you need an account on the eReader.com website. Go ahead and create one of these now by following this link. Once you have successfully created an account, you can login to your eReader.com account and move to the next section.

Adding eBooks to your eReader.com Bookshelf

Once you have logged into eReader.com, at the top of the website, look for a link called "Bookshelf". Click on this link and it will take you to a page that looks similar to the image on the left. If you haven't bought any eBooks off eReader, this page will be empty. Any books you do buy off eReader can be found here.

If you want to add your own eBooks to your bookshelf, you can click on the link found in the top-right of that page that looks like the image on the right. Note that eBooks must be in .pdb format. If they aren't, you will have to download an eBook converter. The converter I use and recommended is from Stanza, and is Stanza's desktop client. You can also download Stanza from iTunes, and this is yet another good eBook app I highly recommend. More on how to convert can be found later on in this tutorial.

Clicking on the personal content link on the eReader.com website will take you to a page that is like a private section of your Bookshelf, and will allow you to upload your eBooks into your Bookshelf. You have 25 MBs to play with, and you can always delete eBooks off the website if you need to and they won't be removed from your iPhone / iTouch. So the space isn't a big deal unless you are trying to transfer eBooks bigger then 25MBs in size at any one time.

Transferring eBooks to your iPhone

Once you have all the eBooks you want on your Bookshelf, you can transfer them to your iPhone / iTouch. Your iPhone / iTouch will need to be connected to the Internet in order to achieve this, and you should be logged into the eReader.com website.

First, open eReader and click on the + button in the top right. You will be presented with the following screen shown on the left. Choose the option at the top of the screen labelled "eReader/Fictionwise shelf" and enter your eReader.com account details.

On the next screen, your iPhone will load in a list of all the books it can find on your Bookshelf, both from the eReader's bought books section and any books you've uploaded to your personal content section. Tapping on any book will ask if you wish to download the book to your library, which, if you accept, will promptly do so and respond with a message once it's downloaded.

eBooks on your eReader account will remain there until deleted off the iPhone. That means that even if you delete your eBooks off your Bookshelf on the eReader.com website, they will still remain on your eReader on iPhone's Bookshelf until you have deleted them there also, and vice versa. These two Bookshelf's are completely independent.

A final note before I end this section. eReader flourishes best with eBooks; that is, text. It doesn't do so well with multimedia .pdf files or the like. If you are looking for an app that does, you should try out Air Sharing (iTunes link) instead.

Converting eBooks with Stanza Desktop

The final section, as promised, is on Stanza desktop. Once you have downloaded and installed Stanza desktop, to convert simply open any file that Stanza opens (and it supports a lot of formats!) and then go to File > Export Book As... > Palm Database. You can give your new .pdb file a name, save it in a secure location on your computer, and then upload the file to your personal eBook area on eReader.com.

Final Notes

I hope this quick sweep through eReader has been helpful for you! Feel free to leave any comments and I will get back to you as soon as I can. And of course, hopefully I will get back into regular blog posting soon!

Countdown to Christmas

Christmas is fast approaching from all sides. This year, it really does seem to be sneaking up on me. Oh well... I will of course keep you up to date on all the happenings.

Since I got back from Computer Science 2008, I spent Thursday just relaxing around catching up on a few things, Friday organising what I need to get done and then tidying up the house a bit, then playing on EVE before going to watch a movie. Today I woke up late and have spent the morning playing with my younger brothers, Logan and Byron.

All in all, I've had quite a few unproductive days. So hopefully in the next coming week I can actually get some real work done. Anyway, until my next blog post!

Computer Science 2008 - Day 3

Today was truely driven to research in the field, for everything we visited was trying to drive the field of computing forward. After waking up early once again, and having breakfast, we headed straight to the first talk, that of our chosen industrial challenge related to the future!

• Track A: Industrial Challenge Session 1
  • Air Traffic Control
  • The Changing Face of Industrial Research
• Track B:Industrial Challenge Session 2
  • Finance
  • Service Oriented Computing
• Track C: Panel - Research Careers

We decided to go with Track A, which we promptly went to. The Air Traffic Control session was given by the company NATS (formerly "National Air Traffic Services Ltd."). NATS controls the air traffic control systems that operate in an around the UK and the Northern Sea, and offered us a fascinating insight into their basic operations and primarily the research problems facing the company.

Some of these problems include developing technology to support airspace design (the design of airspace to be more efficient and 3D made); modelling airspace change for safety, environment and delay, and whole network modelling and management, among others. They also pointed to SESAR as a major european research group, and the fact that research delivers both business benefits and opportunities, alongside increasing relationships with the universities that are researched with.

The next speech was on industrial research from BT, labelled BT Innovate. BT have 100 years of innovation behind them, the infrastructure to show for it, and the ability to provide numerous services to customers. In fact, BT takes an extremely low proportion of it's profits from the standard telephone numbers, so it is suffice to say that BT is no longer just a telephone service company, but a whole lot more.

The technology that BT offer include the development of fibre optics, which make things go further and faster, and the design of the 21st century network with new service capabililities on one network (a single IP network). As such, BT have migrated to this new network infrastructure to be able to offer more, better. But they still need more improvements. They still want to offer more high value services utilising the ever growing Internet usage over the next few years.

After a short break, we moved on to interdisciplinary research challenges. These include computer use in other sciences (or even beyond sciences) and look at big questions. The different strands are below:

• Track A
  • Engineering
  • Nanosystems
• Track B
  • Open Data in Science (Cancelled)
  • Physics
• Track C
  • Biosciences
  • Medicine
• Track D
  • Psychology
  • Humanities

We eventually decided to follow Track A on Engineering and Nanosciences (although due to Track B's late canellation in Open Data in Science, you could switch between them).

Track A started off with Engineering, which is said to be quite dependent on computing nowadays, in things such as CAD, solar-powered car's, satellites and modelling. We looked at how computers were utilised in real-world engineering environments, and particularly looked into agriculture, or precisely, "precision agriculture". This utilised computer vision (which enables computers to see) and the processing of digital images as signals for decisions, measurements and control. This is useful in agriculture to enable automated robots that are environmentally friendly and can look after, spray and de-weed the crops.

The robot used GIS/GPS to get the vehicle to the field, then would use the camera to locate individual plants. This would then enable real-time navigation and spraying. To detect the plants, a bandwidth detector is used (so dark colours would be the dirt, white colours the plants) and with a bit of processing (such as removing small objects and passing the results through a Kalman filter), the plants and their boundaries can be found and identified. Then, these plants can be checked whether they are weeds or not.

If you are interested more on this technology, you can view the Silsoe Research Institute and also view the Tillet and Hague Technology site (the robot we looked at was the Autonomous Crop Treatment Vehicle, which you can watch a video of there).

The next talk was on nanotechnology. This looked at technology that was being developed at nanometre size. To the layman, a nanometer is the length the fingernail grows in a second. Nanotechnology is the ability to measure and manipulate matter at submicron scales, and is applicable to Moore's Law.

With everything becoming more powerful and yet smaller, heat is an increasing problem. But there is also a problem with physics that can't be worked around. This is due to the limit of the size of atoms. The challenges for nanotechnology are to continue Moore's Law while going around current physical limits and keeping this all within a reasonable price range. This can be done using new devices and fabrication paradigms.

For example, the use of a single atom memory can be done using salts and not silicon, due to the increase in ions. Electronics can also be self-assembled, and the use of bio electronics can come together to help as well (using biological organisms to develop technology at a nanoscopic level). This could also be solved by rewriting software, but with increasingly complex systems this means increasingly complex software.

After lunch, we were presented with the final talk... on Quantum Computing. Unfortunately, I am not very good at mathematics or physics, and so this topic was way over my head. If you are a computer scientist who is interested in mathematics and/or physics and are good at it, then this subject may interest you more. And if you want to understand more on what was presented, then speak to Saqib. He understood it a lot more then most people there!

Before I close off this conference, I would like to provide a few more photo's of various locations around the college that I took at various times. First, a few of the external:

A view from my room

The main building at night

The Cavendish Building

Then, I also took a few of the rooms that were offered to us. This of course is not representative in any way of the entire university rooms, but just gives a small insight into the rooms we stayed in:

Our first impression

A nice bed

The desk in the room (with more shelves going up)
The phone - it's an IP Phone!
En-Suite Bathroom! Each!

Overall, this entire experience has been wonderful! It has been extremely worth attending, and I have not been disappointed by anything presented to me during my time here. It was all completely awesome and fascinating at the same time! To also meet so many wonderful people who are fellow Computer Scientist's in the field (including so many cool professors and businessmen) was an honour indeed. I had a great time and, if asked, would most certainly go again!! Thanks to Goldsmiths College, London, for giving me the oppourtunity to go, and to the conference organisers for such a fabulous conference; you know who you all are! :)

And that's me signing off. Phew!

Computer Science 2008 - Day 2

I woke up at around 7:15 this morning, having set a few alarms to wake me up then. Breakfast was in the great hall, and was a nice buffet of stuff (pastries, and the full English breakfast). By 9am, we were all back in the auditorium for today's first speech on procrastination, called The Power of Procrastination. This was spoken to us by Jorge Cham, who is the same guy who has created the comic Piled Higher and Deeper.

The speech itself was extremely funny and well put together, and utilised Jorge's comic strip character's. All I will say regarding the speech is that procrastination is not like laziness. Laziness is not doing the things you have to do; where as procrastination is not doing the things we have to do, now! For the rest of the speech though, you really need the wit and charm of Jorge himself.

Next up was the first set of mini tutorials for that day. We had a wide range of different tutorials on offer, as listed below:

• Track A - Natural Language Processing and Text Mining (Cancelled)
• Track B - Self-Adaptive Systems (Creating systems that manage themselves)
• Track C - Designing Technology for Human Values (Human-Computer Interaction)
• Track D - Realistic Imagery (Cancelled)
• Track E - Web Science (from Wendy Hall, who has worked with Tim Berners-Lee himself, on how we can't predict how the web will grow)
• Track F - Computer Vision (Microsoft Research on Graphics and Maths)
• Track G - Design for the Future Internet (BT Research on the new technology for the future of the Internet)

Obviously there were a wide range of different tracks available to us, and we could only choose one. We decided on Track B - Self-Adaptive Systems, and were not disappointed! This track focused on how we can engineer self-managed systems that have autonomous adaptation. And for those of you who were wondering, this topic literally shouts "Prolog!" Indeed, a lot of the early work done was, we were told, written in Prolog. So for those failing to find a use for the language in the real world, self-adaptive systems is one. A big one.

The systems themselves should change/update their behaviour dynamically in response to changes, without a human's aid. Such as self-configuring themselves, self-healing and self-tuning. This would follow the basic architecture of Collect -> Analyse -> Decide -> Act -- Feedback Loop (although this was the early model and later models compressed this into Controller, Sequencer and Deliberator) with the three-layer architecture model.

There were a few examples with the cat and mouse game (where the cat and mouse can't be in the same room, and the controller must manage this without human intervention) and the Koala example (with a robot that had to take a ball from one location to another). This really was a most fascinating and enjoyable tutorial; creating a networked community of self-autonomous robot's (even virtual robots) would be so enjoyable!

After lunch, we got another wide multiple choice, this time in a group of workshops:

• Track A: Tech Briefing: Infrastructure at Google
• Track B: Research Methods
• Track C: Intellectual Property
• Track D: Changing the World
• Track E: Getting your Paper Published in Journals
• Track F: Digital Divide
• Track G: Future of Science Publishing

After a healthy debate of what we should go for, we went with Track A, Google! And once again we got a most fascinating talk! The Google talk was a very popular talk, and they had to bring in extra chairs in order to fit everyone in. To summarise this lecture would be extremely difficult; and to write everything I wrote would take too long. So I'll try and find a bridge between the two.

Basically, Google works off decades of Computer Science research, most of which is intertwined with engineering. The user's view of Google is to organise the world's information to make it more accessible and organisable. However, there are large design challenges for that, including the vast scale, huge data growth, wide geographical distribution and the huge latency challenge that Google has set themselves (getting search results and the like delivered to the user "in a blink of an eye".

Google has a vast number of highly efficient servers in highly efficent data centres (they use huge water cooling). These data centres (which are actually warehouse-scale computers) off extremely fast responses and are highly managed. Google is extremely efficient in whatever they do; trying to keep waste to a minimum and recycling all waste they produce.

They also have fast moving applications, good OS System design (using Linux), loosely-coupled distributed systems, distributed data storage, processing and interpretation, and use a wide variety of programming languages (including but not limited to, C++, Java, Python and Javascript). But it's the way they do software development that fascinates me...

They have small teams that use an agile "launch and iterate" philosophy (that is launch internally). Once a product is launched, any engineer across the entire codebase (that is any engineer in Google!) can work on the code. This may seem completely chaotic, as with people working in small teams all editing each other's work, there are going to be variations; but there are strict style guides (and I mean strict) with automated code tests and constant code reviews. Engineers are also given the tools they want. If you want Eclipse, sure! If you prefer Notepad++, sure!

Overall, Google has an integrated tech platform and offers tools on high-quality output with continous agile improvement methodologies. Fantastic! There are also a lot of open research issues within Google; improving distributed systems and information extraction being two (contact me for a full list).

After a short break (Google sort of overran a little) we had our second half of mini tutorials, out of:

• Track A: Interaction Design
• Track B: Immersive Environments
• Track C: Programming Language Semantics
• Track D: AI for the Web
• Track E: Sensor Nets
• Track F: Computer Gaming
• Track G: Human-Centred and Affective Computing

This time, we decided not to go with Computer Gaming but instead go with another also interesting subject, that of virtual reality and Immersive Environments (Track B).

Virtual environments are where you movements are tracked and the display and audio are changed along with you. The kit is often also voice activated. A few examples of virtual environments include Twinity, Neer and of course, Second Life.

However, they also offer some virtual tools, such as the historic Nintendo series (the Nintendo VirtualBoy, the Nintendo Power Glove, the Nintendo Wii).

However, the research tools used were the UCL ReaCTor, a Virtual Reality (VR) "Cave" system. This system is used because head-mounted displays often cause motion sickness due to high latency (ie, you move your head quickly, and the display updates too slowly, seconds afterwards). This is due to the primitive OS and the low screen refresh rate.

By using the Caves, people are able to immerse themselves more fully in a VR system. This provides a tool, a high-bandwidth human-computer interface, it exploits proprioception and participants treat VR differently from desktop graphics. This is evident from the fact that users behave as if VR was real. As such, reactions are usually appropriate for the situation (they treat virtual characters as real people, react to explosions and projectiles, and also to large drops).

The avatars themselves obviously make an important part in the creation of VR systems; the more realistic they look, the more realistic people expect them to behave, and therefore the less believable they are if they don't behave that realistically at all (if they look realistic that is). Therefore, if you have a stupid AI, make it cartoony and it's more believable.

I'll finish off once again with information on the dinner. We went to Girton College, a 5-10 minute drive from Homerton College. The Gala dinner was officially sponsored by Microsoft Research, and it was very nice of them to do so. At Girton, we entered a nice hall and was offered a Christmassy lunch. To start was pumpkin soup. There was turkey, with sausage wrapped in bacon, and veg. And for desert, was homemade christmas pudding, followed by coffee and tea.

As can be seen by the pictures, we all had lots of fun blowing up balloons (presented in little christmas boxes along with poppers, tape and a horn) and then letting them go to whizz around the room making noise! Overall, a fun evening to end another amazing day at this wonderful conference!

Computer Science 2008 - Day 1

Heya all! So, here is my blog post on the Computer Science 2008 conference I am attending in Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge. You can see more on this on the Facebook page, or on the official website, including a list of all the major sponsors that sponsor the event.

It took Saqib and I about 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to Cambridge. When we arrived, we were registered and given a badge registering our name, and our College name (Goldsmiths). Before we proceeded to hand in our bags to the Porter, we got given another bag (provided by Microsoft Research) filled with wonderful goodies. The images shown here only show some of what was being offered to us.

Oh, and the small things in the image on the left, from left to right, are mints (which Saqib didn't get), two usb sticks, a calculator, and a funky notebook from Google with the front page being a representation of Google Earth zooming in on what is (supposedly) Google's headquarters. Simply awesome!

Then we had the introductory speech. The conference was stated to "open doors to research", with many opportunities for research being offered. This was clearly so as the conference is being hosted by the UK CRC (UK Computer Research Committee).

The keynote speech for today was on Security Messages, and it was given by Lorrie Faith Cranor from Carnegie Mellon University, all the way in the US!! It was a fantastic speech that covered how approximately 64% of all people ignore most of the warnings they are shown, how this is, and what we can do to improve on it.Most people ignore warnings because they don't understand what they mean, or what to do about them, or they are too similar to each other. As such, most security breaches are due to human error. Therefore, there is a significant human threat to security from not only malicious humans, but also unmotivated or incapable humans.

A "human-in-the-loop" framework was presented, which listed ways for communication to be effectively. This leads to the human threat identification and mitigation process, a way of identifying a task, automating it as much as possible, and then finding out when that task as failed and mitigating any failures as much as possible. By automating as much as possible, and improving warnings, people should pay more attention to the less frequent warning messages that are shown.

To find out more about this subject, visit the offical CUPS website.

After a lunch break came the Grand Challenges. There were 9 Grand Challenges overall in Computer Science, and you can find out more about them by viewing the PDFs available here (although they miss out GC8 which is Learning for Life (how to use technology to help us learn) and GC9 which is Bringing the Past for the Citizen (using technology to review the past)).

We picked two of the Grand Challenge's to look at, and the two we saw was GC6 (Dependable Systems Evolution) and GC9 (Bringing the Past to Life for the Citizen).

GC6, hosted by John Fitzgerald from the University of Newcastle, was all about using automated verification to deliver warrantable software; that is, software that we can trust not to continually give us blue screen's of death. This is down by producing design languages that can be rigorously analysed by humans and by machines, and having formal methods that offer in "hidden" push-button tools that perform these analyses.

For example, Microsoft's Device Driver Verification, as device drivers caused 85% of Windows XP crashes. Doing this helped improve the stability immensely. Another case is the Pacemaker challenge, making complex software that is guaranteed to work in a cardiac pacemaker.

By using formal methods to verify software, it offers a larger stage in design and less testing and bug fixing. The area is wide open, and if you are interested in this area of expertise I have contact information.

GC9, hosted by David Arnold from the University of Brighton, was all about reconstructing the past using technology. It was designed to be a cross between Time Team, Laura Croft and the European Digital Library. Among offering both economic and social benefits, it would enable architect's, historians and archaeologists to work together to show off history.

There were different ways to communicate this history. Through Avatars, Bluescreens, an RFID game, and a virtual reality overlay. There is also a lot to do in this challenge; the sheer scale of data capture as everyone has their own cultural heritage, views and interpretations; there is the simulation vs artificial life; there are digitalisation issues; semantics issues (what to record and what are their significance); how to tell the stories of the past; using images to tell stories; and the challenges of using legacy data.

The final talk was on the Rough Guide to Entrepreneurship. It was hosted by Jack Lang, an entrepreneur from Cambridge. He stated that an entrepreneur is someone who starts a project without having the full resources or knowledge. There are many reasons to become an entrepreneur, either because you can see an opportunity, because you have a good idea, or simply because you just can. You must obviously know why you are doing it, and that will be either for fun or profit.

Now is a good time to start, because everyone is providing the money and support to get you (and the rest of the economy) started. There are also a lot of eager people out there to help you, the Government included, and of course if you can "dare to begin" then there is the adventure. You do need to have a good investor criteria (if you are going to get someone to invest in you), and for that you need to know your market, your technical advantages, your people and the finance available to you (with the market being the most important criteria for high-tech... who needs a fooglefarg?) Oh, and by clicking that link, you can see the slide notes for this lecture.

Finally, I just want to bring you up to date on what happened over dinner (the welcome dinner and icebreaker). The dinner was lamb (lovely!) with potato, carrots and broccoli in a candlelit (quite dark) atmosphere. Desert was chocolate orange tart. Then, things began to light up for the icebreaker, which was none other then Caribbean drum kits!

And yes, we played the drums!

It is hard to summarise the four lectures (and the evening) we had today in a simple blog post, but I hope I did my best in trying to give you a taster of exactly what we experienced. It truly is an amazing conference and I am once again honoured to be part of it. More pictures and information to come in the future blog posts!! Until next time :)

Computer Science 2008

Right, it's extremely late and I don't have much time, so I am just writing a short blog entry this week to say that I will be attending Computer Science 2008 conference in Cambridge from tomorrow. I will of course be keeping you all up to date, both via Twitter and this blog.

If I know you, and you wish to access my protected Twitter stream, and you have a Twitter account, then look me up by visiting my Twitter feed (see link on right). If not, don't worry as I will be posting nightly posts on this blog with updates on all that has happened.

Right, night all!

Twitter is now Protected

Just a quick note to let everyone know that my Twitter account is now protected. What that means is, if you want to view my Twitter updates, you have to have your own Twitter account and you have to be a known friend. If you match those two statements, then speak to me :)

Have a Happy Twittery Holiday!

Welcome to December! Another year almost up, another year looming on the other side, another year older. Time seems to pass so fast!

Sorry I haven't updated for two weeks, but last weekend (and this one just past) I was quite busy doing other stuff. Suffice to say I haven't had the time. However... I have found a wonderful new way to keep you all informed during my long absences of blogging!

Twitter!

"What is twitter?", you may ask, and a good question too! Twitter is a service that lets me update what I am up to as easily as sending a free text message. This will allow you to keep up to what I really am up to, rather then relying on my sketchy blog posts.

Anyway, to summarise these past two weeks, I'll simply talk about what I can remember... which is only stuff from the past week it seems (especially considering the hour I am writing this blog post at). To start with, this past week has seen me working on both my Design report for my project, my Logic assignment, and an E-Commerce assignment, at Uni. I have also been doing various things for the companies I work for.

On Friday, we hosted a surprise party for my brother Andrew, to celebrate that he turned 18 in early November. Quite a few of his friends turned up, and we had a nice dinner followed by a late evening. Then the past two days have been spent finishing off both my E-Commerce and Design report assignments; luckily both have been completed for now!

In the future, I am going to Computer Science 2008 from the 15th-17th of December, up in Cambridge University. Looks to be a good programme of entertaining computer science stuff. Really looking forward to it and going to be sure to keep you all updated with extremely regular Twitter and Blog posts, complete with photos!

I also break up this Friday. So this is my last week at Uni before the Christmas holidays really start. And you can see my personal countdown to Christmas day over on the right (under my Twitter Updates section).

Right! I will finish this post by wishing you all a Happy Twittery Holiday!! Yeehar!! :)

Mirages

So, what have I been getting up to in the past week? Well... at Uni, we've been getting on with learning again, except in my project where we have switched to designing the system. We've got a few assignments back and will continue to get them back this week as well. I've also been given a bursary which will allow me to go to Cambridge for a research conference labelled "Computer Science 2008" sometime in December.

I've also been working on various projects outside of Uni, a few for a couple of companies I work for. This has helped, as always, to provide me with real-life work experience which works alongside my University's given work; allowing me to strengthen each side with the other.

In EVE Online, I recently decided to purchase a GTC and sell it for in-game ISK (the games currency), making me richer then I could ever imagine being. Now I need to sit down and plot... after all, in EVE, you really can do anything if you have the means to do it.

I've also been watching Robin Hood, the BBC's recent version, Series 2. It's getting quite interesting with a lot of twists and turns in the story. And I've just finished off a book series called "The Mirage Makers". The book series follows quite an adult storyline and at times was quite depressing, but I read it all and witnessed the triumphant conclusion which really does make it all worthwhile. It is based in a fantasy world where an evil empire rules and tries to take over the world, and the fantastic path of how one person and her son can change the course of everything. Fantastic read! (Which is why the title is what it is)

Finally, I'll finish off this blog post by saying that I've got App Store mad! That's right... I just love to spend a few hours browsing the App Store for new and exciting applications that I could install on my iPhone. Perhaps one of these days I'll get my website into order and get it so I can show you some of these things!

Until next week then!

A Fresh Start

Hello everyone!

Through my wonderful use of OmniFocus, the great tool for both my Mac and iPhone that I'm starting to use more and more to keep track of things, I am planning to update my blog on a far more regular (weekly) basis, and hearby name Friday "Blog Day". I will use the evening on Friday for posting a blog entry representing the past week.

I will also be looking into updating my website as there are various parts of my website that are really out of date. I've just been so busy doing other things that I haven't had the time. Especially with my third year at uni, and all the other projects going on in the sidelines.

Finally, I may very well be posting up more pictures like the one I did on the 1st November. That was a great game!

Anyway, let's move off what I plan to do and move into what I have done. Well, the last few weeks have been the busiest weeks possible at University. This was because it was assignment season. I had four projects I had to do, one for each of my courses; and some of them were quite difficult. I should be getting my results for each of them over the next coming weeks.

I'm also getting back into finding time for EVE Online. I plan to get up to 65 mil on the game and then finish off my trading spree. I also intend to revamp the Media Center, not that anyone uses it mind; and that includes replacing the video tutorials with written tutorials (and screenshots) at some point.

Well, I am going to finish there. So until next week, have a good time!

Chelsea 5-0 Sunderland