I read an interesting article on Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends site the other day about Biomimetic Robots, so called because they were inspired living biological entities (like cockroaches and scorpions). The variety of designs which researchers have produced are fascinating, I especially like the ‘sprawl‘ robots developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University.
These “hand-sized hexapedal robots are prototypes designed to test ideas about locomotion dynamics, leg design and leg arrangement and to identify areas that can be improved by Shape Deposition Manufacturing“. Check out the video’s on the site, the way these things move is ingenious!
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After over 120 days uptime the web/mail server had a wobbly some time in the early hours of the morning and fell over. The site was then offline until 12.45pm today at which point I persuaded my mum to crawl in the loft and restart it! Thanks! It’s extremely frustrating being 250 miles away from a server which isn’t responding - I’m not exactly sure what caused it but hopefully it wont happen again any time soon.
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Had my first Japanese class this afternoon which was great fun but fairly challenging. There were only about 12/15 people in our group which was good and made pronouncing things out loud a lot less embarrassing! Interestingly about 50% of people in the group were Chinese foreign students but they all spoke very good English so it wasn’t a problem talking to them. We learned a lot of basic stuff like greetings and introducing yourself which was fairly easy but it’s once you start constructing sentences out of it all that it becomes a bit of a headache! Luckily our sensei (teacher) was very good and explained things at a pace I could keep up with.
For homework we’ve been set a Hiragana chart to complete which basically means learning how to write the squiggly characters (one of a set of three different symbolic systems). The task in itself isn’t very hard but remembering what they all mean is going to be a nightmare! That said I’m definitely looking forward to next weeks lesson - it beats the drudgery of some of my other lectures!
If you want to learn a few words of Japanese yourself a good place to start would be here.
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Finally got round to watching the first in the classic trilogy of the newly released Star Wars DVD box set last night. What instantly struck me was the amazing quality of digitally restored transfer.
The picture looks fresh and is clean of all the nasty scratches and grain which mar previous VHS (and dodgy DivX) releases. The badly degraded master prints were restored by film restoration expert John Lowry of Lowry Digital Images who made his name restoring other classics like ‘Indiana Jones‘. The process by which they do this is quite fascinating but needless to say it involves a fair few powerful computers and some very complex algorithms. For more information on subject take a look here and here.
As for the changes which George Lucas has made to the film, which fans love to obsess and argue over, I see no real cause for concern. The films are basically the same as the 1997 re-release versions with a few minor tweaks made, mainly for consistency with the other films. For an exhaustive list of the changes (with pictures) see here.
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Went to the first Anime society meeting of the term this evening. We watched a great (but exceedingly depressing) film called ‘Grave of the Fireflies‘ (Hotaru no haka) which is a story about the struggle of two children to survive during World War II.
The story revolves around Setsuko and Seita who are brother and sister living in wartime Japan. After their mother is killed in an air raid they find a temporary home with relatives but after quarreling with their aunt they leave the city and make their home in an abandoned shelter. I won’t say much more about the plot-line as it would spoil it if you haven’t already seen it but needless to say not all stories have happy endings. It works particularly well in highlighting the plight of ordinary people and serves as an good illustration to how during conflict it is usually the innocent who suffer the most.
After this light beginning to the evening we met all the new freshers who had joined - I think some of them looked a bit bemused by the whole experience! We then voted on what series to watch this term which I would mention but I can’t remember what they were (someone enlighten me please!). As a side note, hearing someone speaking Japanese with a slight Scottish accent was fairly amusing, weather the person in question is aware of this I’m not sure! It reminded me of school language lessons where people were speaking French with a heavy Norfolk accent - hilarious 
In slightly less interesting news… Had my first ‘Distributed Computing‘ lecture today, unfortunately the lecturer didn’t exactly bring much enthusiasm to the subject which wasn’t very inspiring but anything beats what we had to put up with last year in certain quarters (hint hint).
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