Planet SUCS

From the outside, the type systems of languages like Haskell and ML tend to look like a sort of archaic ecstatic religious rite. The bleeding mendicants pause as they shuffle past, sing a verse in praise of the purifying pain of strong typing, then prod themselves with pointy sticks and progress along their lonely road.

Bryan O’Sullvian, commenting on his own quotation of Yaron Minsky. I’ve heard people complain about Haskell’s type system as being too strict, but once you figure out how to get things to type check, you can actually use it like a miniature theorem prover. Which is, essentially, what it is.

Oh yeah, and it’s my birthday today.

Prelude Control.Monad> let truthPermutations n = replicateM n [False,True]
Prelude Control.Monad> truthPermutations 3
[[False,False,False],[False,False,True],[False,True,False],[False,True,True],
[True,False,False],[True,False,True],[True,True,False],[True,True,True]]
Prelude Control.Monad> let satisfies p [x,y,z] = p x y == z
Prelude Control.Monad> filter (satisfies (==>)) $ truthPermutations 3
[[False,False,True],[False,True,True],[True,False,False],[True,True,True]]

Try expressing truth tables so succinctly and at such a high level in an imperative language. The list monad rocks.

On Planet Haskell today, sigfpe posted a fairly readable (i.e., hopefully comprehensible to non-experts) essay about Data and Codata. I intend to do a talk on this topic someday, but in the meantime, you might find this enlightening.

Clever :-)

 

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

— James D. Nicoll on rec.arts.sf-lovers (from 1990; quoted at Language Log.)

Desperately poor paraphrasing from! Monkey Island = hooray! For anyone curious (i.e. just me, because nobody who reads this will actually get the reference), no they aren't Gwynn's monkeys (Gwynn is actually an awesome name, I just realised.)

I've been busy recently, flitting from London to Swansea to Somerset to all over the place recently. Has been very tricky to keep track or even relax properly. There's a part of me that's convinced that everything would be easier if it were just term time again already and I didn't have to worry about all my various concerns tearing me in lots of different directions over the holidays. Apologies if I wanted to see you this summer and things just failed to come together for whatever reason. Stuff is tricky is all.

On one hand, I want to write all about the various fun things I've been doing over the last seven weeks, but on the other, I've really been too busy actually living life to document lots of them and I'm sure there's a lot I'd simply forget as a result. I guess the most important thing is that I'm about to graduate. Feels strange. And not very real, almost. Maybe after the ceremony's over, I'll come to terms with things a little more. And I can't wait for all the excitement and fun that the next academic year will bring. As for after that, who knows? I'll try and keep all you people in the wide world of the internet well posted (no pun intended). See you on the flip side.

Well, it's official. I'm leaving Swansea.

I move out on August 16th back up to Lancashire where I'm going to spend a year living at home and saving cash. Yes, I've decided to take a gap year.

Why? Lots of reasons. Firstly, I really want to go travelling for a month so I'll need to save for that. Secondly, I fancy a change of pace and some real-world experience to balance my perspective with respect to postgraduate edumacation. Thirdly, I'm rather broke and fancy actually having some cash in my savings account.

So, all in all, a year out seems a good idea. I'm going to miss Swansea lots and all of the most excellent friends I've made here over the years. So long, everyone. And thanks for all the fish.

I expect we shall meet again very soon. Be excellent to each other! 

Exams are over, Summer is here and things are going well

I started working part-time (10 hours a week) at Jane IT Systems in the Digital Technium a few weeks before the exams and am now working down there 2 or 3 days a week (9-5 etc) which is nice. The work is reasonably interesting, the pay is good and the part-time nature over the holidays suits me, as I get lots of free time to have my holiday and do my own thing

I’ve mostly been potting around with a few different odds and sods and trying to do a bit of reading to broaden my horizons, although I’m doing doing all that well Luckily, the project selection came to the rescue and helps provide me with a bit of focus. I originally select OK-5 (the 5th project with Oliver Kullmann), “Solving Large Sudoku problems” with the idea of doing something along those lines but a bit more general, and was given that project but upon talking to Dr Kullmann, I was persuaded to do a project involving SAT and AES (OK-2) which sounds more interesting and gives me lots of reading to do on Rijndael, SAT, lots of cryptanalysis and SAT papers etc

The fact that several books were recommended by Dr Kullmann to read, as well as the fact that I’d been looking at some maths books (I want to bring my calculus up to speed so I can get my head around Fourier stuff :() and some others (some on Rails, Haskell etc) meant that I made a nice book order -

• Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering: A Comprehensive Guide
• Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic
• Design of Rijndael: Aes - the Advanced Encryption Standard (Information Security & Cryptography)
• Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)
• Programming in Haskell
• Student Solution Manual for Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering Third Edition (just in case I get stuck, it’s nice to have the full workings to understand the exercise)

I was a little disappointed by Programming in Haskell as I hadn’t really researched it and was expecting something a bit bigger that covered the topic area in a lot more detail but I guess that’s my fault but the rest are great, I just need to find the drive to read them

Sadly, I was running out of room on my current bookcase with most of my books wedged in above others and so on. This lead to me getting another bookcase and spending most of Friday afternoon putting it together

Lastly, results arrived today and I’m quite happy with them I think I’ll try and work a bit on getting the specifics down and gaining a more in grounded/familiar in the subject areas next semester and perhaps see if I can push to ensure high marks and make sure the marks are earned. At the end of the day, the grades aren’t really all that useful, it’s what you learned from the course/modules, and it’s far too easy to forget a lot of the material if you aren’t immediately using it which is rather pointless.

CS-221	Programming with Objects and Threads	86
CS-213	System Specification	90
CS-216	Theory of Programming Languages	86
CS-217	Computer Graphics I	90
CS-218	Compilers	87
CS-219	Database Systems	89
CS-221	Functional Programming I	97
CS-226	Computability Theory	95
CS-228	Operating Systems	85
CS-232	Algorithms and Complexity	90
CS-238	Data Communications and Computer Networking	98
CS-244	Software Laboratory	89

My full results have finally turned up on the uni intranet. Highlights: 6 modules (70 credits) from level 3 and 4 modules (40 credits) from level 2 at >70%, weighted average 67.7%. Soooo close to a first :(

I think bad time management cost me the grade. I should have done some work towards the project and/or the report for a School of European Languages module over Easter, but was lazy and didn’t. Then a couple of weeks later I had deadlines for both on the same day; I chose to work on the dissertation (which was obviously more important as it’s worth 20 credits vs. half the mark for a 10 credit module), but if I’d picked the report, the mark wouldn’t have been capped at 40% and the weighted average would have been over 68%. Then a couple more percentage points on another module (most likely TPL, Software Lab, or German General Language III) would have got another 10 credits at >70%, which would have got me a first on the preponderance principle (within 2% of a classification boundary, if you have at least 120 credits above the boundary you get the higher classification).

You might have heard of the Garfield Randomizer. Turns out a similar thing exists for Dinosaur Comics.

I actually came across Dadasaurus Rex a couple of weeks ago. It lends itself very well to the treatment since not only is the panel layout the same in each strip, the art is the same as well. Here’s a rather excellent one I got:

A fairly accurate depiction of what happens when you don’t get enough sleep, I think. :)

If you thought the one-line definition of the Fibonacci sequence in Haskell was beautiful, try this:

import Control.Monad

powerset :: [a] -> [[a]]
powerset = filterM (const [True, False])

A black box for sure, unless you have “internalized the list monad“. But it does show how stonkingly powerful monads are.

I just got an email from Virgin Media. The first part I noticed was:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

I immediately thought, “What on earth? Surely they don’t expect customers to stick around with such extortionate call charges.” Then I noticed the context, and realised that it possibly should have read:

it’ll cost 25p per minute to call it from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.

The actual wording was fine, but the way I started parsing it made me interpret it in completely the wrong way. “It” in the actual wording means “our broadband helpline number”; but initially I parsed it as the dummy subject of an impersonal sentence, so I thought it was saying all calls from a Virgin home phone would have those charges. The altered wording adds an “it” referring to this helpline as the object of the embedded verb phrase, making my interpretation the only sensible one.

In the real world, I did two interesting things today. First, I went to the CS office to pick up my degree results: I was awarded a 2:1. I then went to talk to Dr Berger about applying for an MRes; this I have now finally done, as well as an EST bursary which would require going to Munich for a few months (no downsides there!). I mentioned the result, and he said it was disappointing, because the overall score was about 67%, only a couple of points off a first. Annoyingly, I won’t know for certain what pulled me down for some time because I was only told the overall classification, not marks for each module. Even the average I only know informally, because Uli told me. But the bad marks are apparently on the German side, so as a CS student I’m better than I look on paper.

… writing without nouns.

But ahhh, to write nounlessly is to live anew, not to be tied to thinking concretely, not to be anchored, not to be grounded, but rather to lift off and fly, as if previously to write was just to crawl, penned in, hemmed in, restricted.

And I might add, like an Oasis song, to say everything and yet say nothing. (The traditional way to express this is to call it “abstract nonsense“; the book Abstract and Concrete Categories: The Joy of Cats has this cute limerick which captures the feeling:

There once was a man from Bay Shore.
When his fiancée said, “I adore
The beautiful sea,”
He said, “I agree,
It’s pretty, but what is it for?”)

Journal time: I came back from a week back home in Hampshire today, after going with my brother to the Muse concert at Wembley on Sunday. (Woo! That was brilliant!) We also went to a Spanish restaurant for Dad’s birthday, which was pretty tasty.

Our degree results came out yesterday, but I wasn’t around to get them, so I’m having to hold my breath until Monday.

Following on from my previous entry about getting sponsored to upload pybackpack into Fedora, I’m pleased to say that I’ve now been sponsored. I was surprised that it came so soon but after writing the previous blog entry and requesting a sponsor on fedora-devel-list@, Jeremy Katz got in touch with me and, after I had made a few necessary fixes to my packaging, approved it and sponsored me. I’m now awaiting the pybackpack CVS module to be created and then I can go ahead and maintain my package in Fedora. Happy days. Thanks to all the people who took time to review my RPM packaging and provide excellent feedback.

[Link]

I finally have a nifty little Projects page thanks to a little scripting of my own, RunPHP , Text-Control (to remove the damn stupid formatting that WordPress does with <p> etc even when editing in code mode) and a little extra magic (updated Text-Control so it can be used in Pages etc). I’ll sort it out, tidy things up and add some more interesting projects later but it’s nice to be able to just plonk a few details in an XML file and it’ll update it all for me.

Also something that cropped up today, for anyone who was wondering why the hell searching in XP etc for files with a certain phrase in them doesn’t search most files - http://www.techbytes.ca/techbyte95.html - tells you how to fix it. It’s rather simple but a little annoying if you don’t know about it.

After spending 5 minutes browsing the computing section in the Waterstones on Oxford Street in Swansea, I was shocked to see 14 different titles on Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system(!), just 4 on Apple's Mac OS and zero titles on Linux.

How do Waterstones choose which computing books to stock? Open source software is having a profound effect on the IT industry and I didn't see a single title covering an open source topic. Every title seemed to be a "How to do X for dummies" or some other basic step-by-step guide.

Where are the broader books covering concepts and fundamental computing principles? The Waterstones on campus is stocked with such titles. Why not the outlet on the high street? Doesn't John Everyman need to know anything about computers beyond how to turn them on?

At 11am on Wednesday 6th June 2007 I was officially free from the horror and pain that was the 2nd year Computer Science Exams! Wooohoo!

Overall I think the exams went very well, I don’t expect I will back in the August doing any resits and I am confident that I have held my 2-1 average (which I am very happy with) plus I just found out earlier today that I got 87% for both my Group Project and my UML Essay (Software Lab Module) so that has put me in an even better mood than I was before!

Wednesday was a great day, first off it was straight to JCs for the first official post-exam pint (which would have been my first pint in at least a month)

After JC’s we went down to Pub on the Pond for some more drinks and of course food (I had a rare 10oz ribeye steak) Loads of people turned up and I think it was a great success :) The rest of the day consisted of going to the Beech, another pub and finally wind street. :D

The photos of the whole day are available here.

Now the exams are over it is a little strange, I can wake up in the morning roll over and go back to sleep! I think Nick worked out that we had been in Uni every day for about 25 days straight revising. With many of those days starting as early as 8:00am and some not ending till 10:30pm it has been one hell of a hard stretch but hopefully all this work will pay off when the results are released! Now I am going to spend the next week or two relaxing and enjoying the sun. There are some fun things planned such as the SUCS beech party, the Xtreme Radio Awards night (I am getting a suit for it tomorrow!) Nick Bill’s birthday bash, Dan’s Photo Gallery Showing plus the usual drunken fun and long lie ins!

Though when all that is over I have to get back to work. I plan to work very hard over the summer earning money as I need to clear my overdraft and I want to earn enough money so that next year will be comfortable (and so I won’t need to work during the Christmas holiday) I would really like to stay in Swansea over the summer but of course it all depends on what Job I manage to get (IT Wales) I have an interview for a Job in Cardiff which looks promising, if I get it I will be staying in Pontypool (getting lifts into Cardiff with my Mum!) if however I don’t get it I will try to get a full time Job (or several part time Jobs) in Swansea seeing as most of my experience of Swansea is wet cold and windy and I would really like to enjoy the City during the Summer months.

Well it is going to be time for Curry soonish (well time for pub first!) so I better go but I will leave you all with a random Firefly quote

Dr. Simon Tam: “You’re like… a trained ape. Without the training.”

(In response to Gimbo.)

Speaking of Unix, I have thought that there is a pretty close connection between lazy evaluation and Unix pipelines. On the xmonad home page there’s an example for using dzen that looks like this:

while true ; do
    date +"%H.%M %a %b %d"
    sleep 60
done | dzen2 -ta r -fg ’#a8a3f7’ -bg ’#3f3c6d’

Of course, if that was strictly/eagerly evaluated, dzen would never run, because of the infinite loop. But what actually happens is that the two commands, joined together by a pipe (indicated by the | character), are executed in parallel; the while loop runs date, producing some output, which it writes to a pipe (just a first-in-first-out buffer shared by the two processes); it sleeps for 60 seconds; then it runs date again; sleeps again; …, ad infinitum. Meanwhile, dzen reads its output, until there is none left, then blocks until the loop provides more.

As you may know, pybackpack originally started off as a Google Summer of Code 2005 project for Fedora. Since I took over maintaining it, I’ve been keeping the Fedora review request alive in the hope that pybackpack would eventually get to where it was first intended. Of course, my distribution of choice is Ubuntu and most of my open source work that isn’t pybackpack is Ubuntu-orientated so getting pybackpack into Fedora hasn’t been high on my list of priorities, but I would like it to happen.

The first Fedora review request bug for pybackpack was opened in September 2005 and the latest bug (it had to be redone when extras was merged with core) has been open since January this year. Since then I’ve managed to get pybackpack sponsored into Debian (and consequently, Ubuntu). The Debian sponsorship process took hardly any time at all - just a day from ITP (intent to package) to upload, if I recall correctly. I thought it might be interesting to compare Debian and Fedora’s new package processes point-for-point to see where the big difference lies:

Debian:

• Uploads of new packages are sponsored by Debian Developers
• The process:
  1. File an ITP bug
  2. Build your package
  3. Upload package to somewhere accessible
  4. Request a sponsor
  5. Fix any problems highlighted and repeat until approved
  6. Package uploaded by a sponsor
• Maintenance of your package is your responsibility, through the sponsor, who will encourage you to improve your packaging skills and start your journey to becoming a Debian Developer (if that’s your goal).
• An alternative is one of Debian’s teams (e.g. the python team or the games team) will take over maintenance of your package. This is similar to how the Ubuntu MOTU team works, and from what I’ve seen, it works very well.

Fedora:

• Package submitters are sponsored instead of packages, so they need to be granted access in order to upload their own packages.
• The process:
  1. Build your package
  2. Upload your packages somewhere accessible
  3. Request a review on the bugzilla
  4. Have informal reviewers comment on your package
  5. Make required fixes and repeat until approved
  6. Meanwhile, prove your knowledge of the process by reviewing others’ packages or submitting more packages of good quality
  7. Wait for a sponsor to pick you up
  8. Get sponsored
  9. Apply for the access in the Fedora account system and finish up the rest of the process for becoming a contributor
  10. Upload your package using CVS
• Your packages are maintained by you (correct me if I’m wrong). By this point you’ve already been become a Fedora maintainer, since it was a prerequisite.

Looking at this comparison, I can’t help but feel that Fedora has made it too difficult and daunting for new contributors to get new packages into their archive. Especially busy ones who are the upstream maintainer and have other projects to concentrate on as well. It’s true that you get upload permission at the end of the process but not everybody wants to, or has the ability to, get that deeply involved. If Fedora wants to attract more packages they should probably decouple the process of becoming a Fedora contributor with upload rights, which is a lengthy process, from the process of getting a package approved for quality, which is a short and focussed process.

So, I guess I’ll have to do some reviewing of other new packages and cut through more red tape before I get pybackpack into Fedora. I’m not totally against that, but my heart isn’t really in it and I’d rather spend my time working towards becoming an Ubuntu MOTU and improving pybackpack. If anyone would like to take over maintaining the Fedora package of pybackpack from me, please do get in touch.

[Link]

I’m here to shoot a pilot.

— Nobody, apparently. A director called Mike Figgis was supposed to have said it, but apparently the story was a hoax. But it still makes a funny example of what not to say to the security people at an airport.

Computability Theory went really well. I don’t want to hazard a guess to my grade but I am very confident that I passed and considering I was very worried about this exam (didn’t think I would pass) I am now very happy :D

For anyone out there who cares/did the exam themselves. I did question 1 and 2 (did anyone seriously even think about doing question 3?)¹ I finished pretty early (I left by quarter past three)² and I only missed it 1 e. So, 4 exams are down only 2 more to go, Horray! The end is in sight (well almost) only 4 more days of revision to go and it will all be over (and so far at least I don’t think I will need to resit anything) if I keep this up all will be well with the World and I will be able to enjoy the summer holiday! (The thought of no deadlines or exams for three whole months is amazing!)

¹Question 3 was about “Primitive Recursive Functions and Equivalence Theorem”
²The exam started at 2pm

Well I am on my 1/2 hour revision break (10:30 - 11:00) and thought I should write a quick post…

My Graphics exam (last Friday) went quite well, could have gone slightly better (but isn’t that always the case?) but overall I am pleased with it :D

Next two exams (tomorrow and Thursday) is Networks and Computability Theory (respectively). Individually all the Network topics are quite easy, however there is loads to know. Computability Theory is quite the opposite, not many topics (I am focusing on countable/uncountable sets, Turing Machines and Unlimited Register Machines) however the actual content is very hard (see my rant)

The exams are really starting to get me down now plus I am even have trouble sleeping (which is very rare for me!) only 8 more days to go; I cannot wait till the the 6th it’s going to be great :D First I plan to go to JCs straight after the exam, then at about 1pm head down to pub on the pond for a meal, then after that? well miscellaneous drinking and partying I think!

I am still hoping to get an IT wales job, although as I haven’t heard anything yet I doubt it will happen but you never know I might get lucky and get a job at the last minute.

anyway it’s almost time for me to get back to work so I better go!

PS

I noticed that there are a couple bugs with the site atm, not quite sure what caused them but when I have some time (prob not till after the exams) I will sort them out (The bugs being twitter and the background image)

PPS

I have just been speaking to Joe (aximillie) and apparently he was at the Full Ponty the other day and was doing flips with Fraser (Asborn) with a bug crowed watching and cheering them on (pretty cool) apparently they were so popular some random guy videoed them and posted it on youtube…

PPPS

Firefox just crashed! Thank the Wordpress Gods for auto-drafts!

I just wrote the following snippet of code for my dissertation:

intNatI :: Int :~= Nat
intNatI = Iso {
            to   = fromInteger . toInteger,
            from = fromInteger . toInteger }

The components to and from have totally different types (to is Int -> Nat, from is Nat -> Int). Yay for type inference! :)

Ah, good old the 'Random' category, it's saved me from pain and suffering many a time. Niftily. Well, I'm kinda done with university for the time being. For anyone who was unaware, I'm not leaving and will be here next year doing an MA in English. Should be awesome.

Towards the end of things, I was getting a little bored with having to go to lectures week after week, but I still enjoyed the seminars which is a good sign because I've got plenty more of those next year, hopefully with people who are as enthusiastic about the subjects being discussed as I am. So what have I been doing with my spare time? Well, I finally managed to catch up with Barny and have a quiet drink and discussion of all the stuff we've both been up to recently. It only took us about two years of living in the same city. I've also started watching Cowboy Bebop, which has been brilliant so far. Interesting one-shot episodes and hints at metaplot behind everything. I've also been writing again. Which is kinda nifty. I'm not sure quite if it will come to anything or not, but I suppose it's kinda good practice for later life. I'm fairly uncertain what exactly it is I'm doing. I might have to put a small bit of it up here and get some opinions. Keats believed that he needed to enter a sort of a dreamlike state, known as 'negative capability' in order to write his poetry and I think I'm mildly the same, actually. Or perhaps not in terms of dreamlikeness, but I do seem to need a bit of sleep-deprivation, a bit of random inspiration and a bit of mild depression. And metal. Metal seriously helps with just about everything, it's remarkable.

I guess I'm increasingly looking forward to this year being over. It's been fairly long and complicated and, well, I can't wait to see what will happen next year. What's that? Optimism for the future? Whatever next, eh? 

“Put on your Carvery face and I’ll buy you a crumble” - Nick Bill

Pybackpack 0.5.1 has been released. It contains a hefty portion of small tweaks to improve ease of packaging and fix a few bugs. See the changelog for more details. You can find the latest version of pybackpack on the downloads page on the wiki.

Pybackpack deb packages are now available in Debian’s unstable and testing repositories and consequently, from the universe repository in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Packages for 0.5.1 should be uploaded soon.

[Link]

Computability theory is a horrible place where infinity can be counted, and up is down and down is left and left us up and up is also up and down which is also right which if you put in the power set inverts so it points towards itself which then leads to a subset of arrows all recursively pointing towards the natural numbers if and only if the natural numbers feel like being counted if they don’t they will tell the integers to team up with the rationals and take on the real numbers because the real numbers thinks they’re to big to be small

</rant>

On a random trawl through teh stuff and things that is the internet, I found this - check it out, it's rather cute, in a morph / pingu etc sort of way!

www.lejo.nu also available here

…It would be this… (probably)

I would like to have the power/money/ability/savvy to take Central America and forcefully introduce it to Renewable Energy.

If  every home could have a small solar panel on their roof, or in their ‘garden’, I think you could produce enough energy to keep the home going. I have done no maths to prove this, but would be interested to know if anyone has…

C.A. has a big problem with its fast development… it has been launched into ‘our world’ by Corporate America’s sponsership, and penetration, yet they haven’t really had time to adapt; the production of litter and power consumption are huge yet the means with which to deal with these issues are not in place -  they burn rubbish on the roadside (or simply LEAVE it by the roadside; which admittedly is only slightly worse than just burying it as we do) and there are frequent power cuts; when the oil-fed generators that keep the countries ticking cant take the strain.

So… what? Why is this happening? I dont really know but i can postulate this:

They either lack the education to deal with the problems, or the resources.

The former would mean a large scale project to help introduce ideas of power saving, recycling and so forth, which from an entirely cycnical/conspirational POV would be difficult because American Oil companies must be raking it in from the huge consumption of oil here,

The latter just cannot be true - the transport out here is fantastic - you can get from anywhere to anywhere with anything for little to nothing- why this doesnt include moving rubbish to a central location maybe through lack of care or just that it is an ‘unnescessary’ expense.

If I could buy one of the large areas of waste land in any of the Central American Countries, and install large solar panels, I would. Providing of course it is both feasible and actually contributes something. I guess, of course if it was it would have been done, no?

The rubbish problem is something completely different. I don’t know how you would cure this. Maybe instead of just burning it wastefully, it could be used to produce power.

A sign in my Hotel:

“Please turn off fans, lights etc when not in use - Nicaragua’s power is produced by burning oil and is very expensive. Welcome to the third world!”

A note scrawled underneath:

“Buy a solar panel!”

I think that says it all.

PS - if anyone out there knows of a project to do just that - install solar panels throughout CA, please let me know. Or if you are interested in starting such a project…

Well I had my Operating Systems exam today and it went kind of so-so. I am confident I passed but not confident I got a decent grade :( I am a bit bummed out as I did loads of work for it and the exam wasn’t that bad, I knew the answers to pretty much all the questions but unfortunately I just didn’t have enough time to write them all down! (I was scribbling right up the the last second) this means that I pretty much missed out a whole question which I could have otherwise answered, I didn’t quite finish another (again one that I could answer) and the last few that I answered were very rushed.

If I had an extra 1/2 hour (and/or managed my time better!) I think I would have been able to get a high 2-1 or even a first, but as it stands now I have no idea… Oh well! Hopefully the marking will be relaxed!

In non-scary-exam news I watched the last episode of Heroes (of Season 1) and it was fantastic I am kinda sad that this season is over! Now the only shows I have to watch is Lost (which jumped the shark a long time ago) and Doctor Who. Though on the plus side I watched a episode of Lost the other day (Season 3 Episode 21) and it was the first episode in a long time that I really enjoyed and had no complaints about. Is it possible to recover? I hope so, but I wouldn’t but any money on it.

Well I have to get up early tomorrow to cram for my Graphics exam on Friday so I think its almost time for a nice early bed sleepy sleep time….

Good Night!

Wow. I haven't blogged in ages!

Let's recap, shall we?

I've finally finished my dissertation. w00t. I'm going to do a MRes in the FIT lab next year. Awesome. I'm in the process of applying to Google for an internship. Sweet.

In the Google vein, the pizza efforts are proceeding slowly. Here's a section from the last e-mail:

"To give a full update on the reason why, we began working with a Card Provider who made and failed to keep to several promised deadlines (these were the dates I was providing). We have now canceled the agreement with this company and will not be doing businesses with them."

They should be doing a direct transfer to current accounts and then the ball will be rolling. But with only a few weeks of term left, it looks like the proper start of it will be September. Oh, well...

In terms of other things, it's been a hectic term with lots of craziness, both in and out of the lecture hall. I'm very much looking forward to graduating - after such a long hard uphill slog, I can't wait to stand, smile and pose for a photo at the summit of my degree.

My first impressions of Nicaragua, after leaving Honduras on Saturday are pretty good. For a country that has faced large amounts of stress from various opposing political parties, of whom most have a large amount of corruption within (but I guess all political parties do..), it is certainly prospering. In some areas at least… The amount of kids begging on roadsides is quite alarming, signalling with their hands for ‘1 dollar’. The problem here is, kids in Internet cafe’s do the same… which doesn’t say a lot for either honesty or what they consider poverty.

It is true however that most of the country is poor. So far I have only been to Leon and Granada, both prospering towns (both involved in the wars of the past too).

Leon is a nice city, but incredibly hot. The surrounding volcanoes (Cerro Negro, Telica…) offer hikes and  extreme volcano boarding (which I unfortunately missed out on due to food poisoning). Speaking of food, there is an amazing little ‘Comedor’ near the big cathedral, barbecuing all sorts of food - chicken, burgers, beanyeggythings, plantain, rice and beans… lots of typical Nicaraguan food. Very very tasty, very very cheap. (I dont think this is where i got poisoned, incidentally). We stayed at a place called Big Foot Adventure which is a wicked little hostel, attached to a cafe that serves to your door, has a little pool, a free pool table, kitchen and is pretty relaxed about everything. YOu can’t book as yet but if you email Darryn (the Aussie owner) he will probably hold a bed for you (there were 8 of us, so he held a whole dorm.). The only problem we found was that its too hot… probably due to time of year - thunder storms every night. Darryn, if you read this - invest in some more fans (we would have stayed longer…).

Opposite is a hostel called Via Via, which seemed equally nice, but we only ate there, and did a quiz run by Quetzaltrekkers. (But lots of the questions are about themselves, which sucks. but its for charity so meh.)

Now in Granada, staying at Hotel Oasis (sistered with Lazy Bones in Leon)… WE shall see what Granada holds….

oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap

I have added Gravatar images to the comments, so hopefully now whenever anyone posts it will display their avatar by their name (and if they have dont have one then it should display a subtle question mark)

Leave a comment to try it :)

Edit: If you don’t have a gravatar and want one go to http://site.gravatar.com and sign up! All you need to do is put in the email address you use when posting comments and then upload whatever pic you want!

24 hours is the amount of time I have to revise each module (3 days, 8 hours per day) and I’m not sure if its going to be enough. Just going to have to work as hard as I can and hope that it gets me through!

So far I have revised Graphics, OS and Compilers; today is going to be System Spec day I think, I almost forgot how god awful revision truly is and with 6 exams and very little time to prepare this revision/cram fest has got to be the worst revision period so far. *sigh* at least I can take comfort in the fact that next year will have far fewer exams (more coursework panic but I prefer that to exam panic!). Regarding next year I have managed to narrow down my choices and I have come up with this list

History of Computation
High Integrity Systems
Cryptography and IT Security
High Performance Microprocessors
Project Specification and Development
Internet Computing
Project Implementation and Dissertation
Building Reliable Web Applications
Mobile Interaction Design

I am not sure what to do for my last two modules, possibly Designing Algorithms for one as I have heared good thing about it, but Algorithms isn’t exactly my strong point (but I suppose I can’t avoid all the maths modules as this is a mathematical course!) Professor Faron Molller is the module lecturer and I really enjoyed his Level 1 module “Modelling Computing Systems ”

Any suggestions or comments would of course be welcome!

In other non-academic news I have been playing the new Halo 3 beta (well I had 3 or 4 games!) and I have been obsessing over Left 4 Dead which looks unbelievably good (and seeing as I saw 28 weeks later the other day which was a fantastic film I am in a very pro-anything-to-do-with-zombies mood)

Last but not least I have added a widget linking to Rich’s sponsor page, he is running the New York Marathon in order to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society. If you can please sponsor him by going to his page

Yesterday the second round of the Swansea University Computer Society lightning talks was held. I gave a talk entitled FLOSSing Your Bits - a student’s guide to starting an open source project. The slides are online [PDF] for anyone who might be interested in starting their own free/open source project. It’s not a complete (or unbiased) guide but I think I’ve highlighted the important aspects. The slides should make some sense on their own but a video of the talk might be available online some time soon. Thanks again to the computer society for a very enjoyable and educational evening.

[Link]

Well, I have an awful lot to report since Mexico.

Crikey… where to start.

Guatemala would be a good place I guess. To sumarise:

• Stayed in a paradise hideaway and got very drunk. Rode down a river on an innertube.
• Floated in a lake in Flores.
• Climbed a Mayan Ruin or 6. Watched the sun set and rise from the top.
• Partied ‘underground’ in Antigua. (not literally… as in… ’secretly’)
• Drank lots of coffee in San Pedro.
• Went Hot Tubbing the Natural way in Xela (no, not naked. I mean via volcanicity!)

Then to Honduras!…

• More ruins.
• Dived in Utila. Dived some more. Got another Diving Qualification. Drank a lot. Drank some more. Dived some more. Burnt my feet on a dodgy quad bike. Probably drank more.

thassit.

End.

Without a shadow of a doubt that is the best quote in the world!
click

Lecturers are officially over, all that is left now is exams.

It has been a tough term but I am not going to complain here (enough of that here) what I am going to do instead is get my head down and revise! My grand master plan for revision is to go in to the Library early (be there for 9am) then work in 2 hour blocks (2 hours revision, 1/2 break) meaning that I will leave the library at about 7pm. This way when I get home I can switch off knowing I have done the work for the day :)

I have been playing with Google Analytics over the last week and I am very impressed. The interface is very slick and it provides all the statics that I want :D although it isn’t as powerful as MatrixStats it is free (which is always a big plus)

OK time for website updates!

I have added a coupple of last.fm widgets which I think are pretty cool :D (there are some more I want to add but I think it would get a bit crowded, what do you think?

I have uploaded a fair few galleries (and I hope to add even more) so make sure you check out my gallery section

In particular I like the Manorca photos, although they are photos from only the night we arrived and the first morning they do represent a good picture of what the holiday was like!

The title of this entry (if you take “buffalo” to be 1) the obvious noun with identical plural, 2) capitalised, the proper noun referring to the American city, and 3) a verb meaning approximately “bully”) is a grammatically correct sentence of English. (I first came across it in The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker, but was reminded of it recently.)

In fact, according to Wikipedia, for any n ≥ 1, buffaloⁿ is a grammatically correct sentence, if you disregard capitalisation. (”Buffalo!”, “Buffalo buffalo”, “Buffalo buffalo buffalo”, etc.)

Don’t you just love natural language?

I despise group projects. Ive had ones in the past, but this is awful. I have no idea how im going to pass it, and everything has to be in in 2 days. I dont see why i should have to do it and have pretty much no sleep but otherwise I cant see how its going to get done.

Fun times- suckstobeme™.

Today my blog is two years old. Aww, isn’t it cute.

Since the 8th May 2005, I’ve managed to write a very humble 106 entries and attract a similarly humble 55 non-spam comments. I’d like to thank all three of my regular readers (my mother being one) and if any of you think I should make my blog more readable or worthwhile, do feel free to contribute a comment to bolster next year’s statistics.

Reading back over my first few entries, I notice just how much I’ve learnt about the world, Linux and the tech world in general and I also notice how I’ve changed as a person. For instance, I rant a lot less these days. That’s a good thing. One unfortunate change that seems to have struck me is that my writing style is a lot more formal and less quirky these days. I really should go back to writing like I did in such entries as "I Wish I Was a Naked Penguin" but perhaps to not such a degree of silliness.

Anyway, I’m starting to see why people keep journals and write blogs, now. It’s cool to look back on yourself two years ago and see how you’ve progressed. Even though you write for the world to read, it’s enjoyable to read the entries back for yourself, even if it does just teach you how immature you were back then.

One thing’s for certain - I don’t half ramble on sometimes :)

[Link]

It’s been a very busy few weeks and sadly it’s only going to get worse *sulk* got some more deadlines next week and then of course exams start soon. V worried about this set of exams but I spose I am always worried about every set of exams!

The project decision has to be made soon, I have already decided what one I want but of course that does not mean I am guaranteed that project so I do have a few back ups but I am absolutely dying to the project I have in mind and if I get it the third year will be looking even nicer that it did before. I really can’t wait till I can do interesting modules and of course an interesting project!

Talking about projects my group project was due yesterday and it turned out really well. We had over 100 pages of documentation and a fully functional program; everyone in the group worked really hard and after seeing some other groups I think I was very lucky being in the group I was!

My newly discovered television obsession is House I am now 3/4 of the way through the second season and am loving every second of it and in case anyone out there hasn’t seen it already make sure they go see it sometime soon, although the down side is I am forgetting what Hugh Laurie really sounds like… I should go back and watch some Black Adder to remind myself :D

I have one other recently discovered obsession, but this one is for the Wii and it’s called Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2. It is oh so much fun not just because I was a fan of Dragon ball but because it is a really fun beat em up, once you get the hand of the brilliant (yet initally tricky) control system you can pull off some great moves and the whole fight feels really fast and complicated anyway it is a game worth getting at least for the Wii, I imagine the PS2 version wouldn’t not be quite as good because it is the fantastic control system that gives it that extra edge.

Oh yeah one last thing, I have finally set up a proper gallery system thanks to the NextGen gallery plugin this means that I will be uploading lots of photos over the next day or two but I have already uploaded a few photos from a recent BBQ outing :)