Posts from the “University” Category

Revised Thoughts

Posted on May 11th, 2005

Sorry again for the low frequency of posts these last few weeks – revision, revision… I H A T E R E V I S I O N. Got the message?! To be honest during these periods of *intensive* work there isn’t usually a lot to talk about but sufficed to say I’ve dragged something out of myself today! Yesterday saw the conclusion of my major project (worth 1/3 of this years marks) with a live demonstration – this seemed to go quite well and luckily the examiner didn’t ask any horrible questions contrary to what I had been expecting. Whilst some of it has been quite interesting it’s good to put a lid on it finally So here’s what the Software Engineering component…

Election Night

Posted on May 5th, 2005

So it’s election night here in the UK – whist’s the outcome is pretty much certain there have been unexpected upsets before so you never quite know what will happen in the next few hours. I went to vote at about 1pm and was a bit surprised to find the poling station unexpectedly quite considering it was lunchtime and you might have imagined that people would have come to vote on the lunch break but who knows…! I have to give a presentation for my Project Management course today. I did it on the topic of “Conflict Management” – it went OK I think, I didn’t much enjoy doing it but it seemed fairly well received! Talk about dumbing down – a classic case…

Adverse Effects

Posted on March 16th, 2005

It’s amazing how six months can pass so quickly, which incidentally is the release cycle period of the Gnome desktop environment. Last week saw the release of Gnome 2.10 and although I haven’t had a chance to upgrade yet the reviews are looking very positive. Everythings basically been polished up and better organised by the looks of things but this can only every been a good thing and I look forward to even better things to come in future releases! This is my last week in Durham before I return home for the Easter holidays (all 5 weeks of it!!) but before I get to excited I have to keep reminding myself of the pile of project and revision work which awaits me! Yesterday…

Synchronized

Posted on March 8th, 2005

Something which has really been bugging me recently – why-ohh-why is Hollywood insisting on remaking (badly) every Asian classic (by which I mean ‘good’) film they can get the rights to? For some reason the thought of taking a great film, running it through a translator and then removing all the intellectual or controversial bits seriously annoys me. People talk about multiculturalism but isn’t this the worst example of cultural vandalism? Are the general public so stupid that they can’t read subtitles? Heaven forbid that they might actually learn something about other cultures through film. I’m not advocating that foreign film be restricted for the privileged few but that we should be more open minded to different cultures rather than be hidden from them.…

Quasi Design

Posted on March 5th, 2005

Been a stressful last few days with deadlines looming and things are becoming a bit tense. Food in college has reached new lows recently so cheese sandwiches are becoming more regular Other than that things are good – at least my room is big, warm & relatively comfortable! Since my recent foray into graphic design I’ve been searching around the net and have found some pretty good design blogs which I’ve added to a new links category on the nav bar. Check them out! By chance I’ve stubled accross a lot of facinating photography related links recently which I though are worth sharing: Photos of Paris Flood, 1910 – Amazing Sepia and B&W photos of Paris underwater. World War 2 Pictures in Colour –…

Tube/Subway/Metro

Posted on March 1st, 2005

The design of the London Underground map has long fascinated me. It’s abandonment of conventional geographic layout was pure genius on the part of its creator, Harry Beck, in 1933 and continues to be the model for which the majority of MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) systems around the world base their maps today. I’d been looking for an excuse for a while to produce my own ‘underground’ style map using similar principles but never really managed to justify it… until now! Using some possibly rather tenuous reasoning I decided to map Durham (where I live!) as part of my ‘Network Visualisation‘ project that I’m carrying out this year for my course. The preliminary result can be seen below, and I’m pretty pleased with it…

Take-Two

Posted on February 28th, 2005

Spent the last couple of days grappling with parsing & updating XML in Perl for my project. I finally got it working but it isn’t particularly memory efficient as it takes in the whole database (5000+ nodes) in one big chunk. After the ever-rediculus Oscars last night I thought I’d offer my own impartial opinion on the best films of 2004 (as I did last year!). You’ll notice that none of these were even nominated! This list is not definitive as of course I didn’t see all the films last year this represents my own tastes: Top 5 Films 2004 Kill Bill (Volume 2) A Tale of Two Sisters House of Flying Daggers Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence Shaun of the Dead Update…

Visualised

Posted on January 28th, 2005

After a fairly intensive perl-hacking session last night I’ve finally managed to collect enough data to render the first proper visualisation for my major project using a force-directed algorithm (which basically means the graph arranges itself dynamically on the screen). At the moment I have a linked list containing approximately 4000 nodes which appear to be arranged in eight distinct clusters on the visualisation: Click here for the full-sized version This represents around half of the Durham University network. I have purposefully left out inter-collage connections as I still need time to make the scanning technique more efficient without DOSing the connection. It may not look much right now but I’m pretty pleased with it! If this sort of thing interests you check out…

eXtreme Programming

Posted on January 12th, 2005

XP is just one of the buzzwords going around the agile method programming community at the moment which I’ve been revising today. Unfortunately it bears no relation to the much more interesting art of ‘Extreme Ironing‘ which is one of very few sports I can empathise with! The view out my window in my loft room (not the one in Durham) isn’t particularly interesting but during the odd moment of boredom these last couple of days I’ve looked out to see a couple of nice back-lit trees which it seemed worth taking a snap (or two) of. I wish I had the time to go out somewhere with some more interesting subjects but there we go! Here are a couple of OK shots, both…

Domo-kun

Posted on January 4th, 2005

I discovered the hard way today that MySQL seriously doesn’t like it when you run out of disk space. One serious clear up and backup restoration later and the site is working again – so much for data integrity! I’ve spent the last couple of days writing an essay on ‘Evaluating Performance’ for my Project Management course and let me be the first to say it isn’t the most riveting of subjects! At least I now know what to do if one of my employees goes nuts during their annual appraisal and tries to attack me with a biro… I haven’t done a foreign film review for a while now so I plan to churn one out later this week, probably of the Ring…

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