News

Women In Computer Science

2010-03-04T11:24:00.001Z

I was recently sent an email asking me to support "Ada Lovelace Day" an event organised to promote women in computer science. To me this is a deeply flawed notion as the crux of the contribution was to get people to write about "a woman in computer science who you admire".

To me, this seems counter-productive. I have a list of papers and researchers who I follow because I like their style of working, but their gender isn't revealed by "J. Smith et al" and I simply don't care. This event is asking for people to highlight the differences between researchers, shine a spotlight on totally irrelevant factors like gender and race.

I admit that CS doesn't come close to being a 50/50 split of men and women, but to me the problem is about making it more socially acceptable to all groups and promoting the subject in general. I'm passionate about my research area, it asks fascinating, fundamental questions about the nature of information, but I think that somewhere along the way we stopped teaching "science" (in the context of "what is science?") in schools and started teaching scientific theories and data. It's difficult to get excited or passionate about dry facts, but the quest for knowledge, the use of empirical and theoretical study, that's something to inspire.

Lets not promote women in science, lets promote science in all its wonderful complexity and beauty to all people.

No, your RSS reader is not broken

2010-02-15T11:36:00.001Z

Yes that's right, I finally got round to finishing the repairs to my blog, so I can once again pollute the ether with my tedious meanderings. A massive amount has happened since I was a regular blogger. Most notably, I have nearly finished my PhD. The viva is in March and you get your results on the same day.

Vivas can have four possible outcomes:
1) Pass - no problems, just publish away! This never happens, as if your examiner can't even find a typo they probably haven't read it.
2) Pass with minor corrections. This means that you get 3 months to perform corrections to the thesis. This is the most common outcome.
3) Pass with major corrections. Similar to above, but you get 12 months to perform more serious corrections, like new experiments etc.
4) Fail. This also pretty much never happens, as if your supervisor has gone to the trouble of organising a viva, they think that it's at least passable.

I'm obviously hoping for minor corrections, though major wouldn't be the end of the world. I'm actually pretty chilled about the entire thing. Not because I'm complacent, but because I'm actually looking forward to chatting about my work. I have heard of people working themselves up into frenzies, even lying to their examiners to avoid major corrections, and I just don't want to do that. I've done the work that I've said I've done and all I can do now is answer my examiners' questions truthfully and sensibly. Obviously a bit of "on-the-day-nerves" will kick in, but so long as that doesn't turn into actual fear that should be a healthy thing!

In the mean time, my folks are on a cruise, so I have the house to myself, (plus my girlfriend, who's a teacher, so we've got a week of lounging around the house planned :) ) so I fully intend to balance my time between baking, reading thesis, cuddles and of course... my xbox :P

Repair Test 1

2010-02-15T11:21:00.001Z

Hello

Test

2009-08-03T12:01:00.001+01:00

Test of fix to blog so I can actually publish again!

Wow!

2009-02-09T13:44:00.002Z

So the gap between blogs appears to be getting bigger, but that's probably got something to do with my facebook addiction and the sprawling vortex of chaos that I call a life. Either that, or some kind of temporal Doppler effect caused by my proximity to anomalously high levels of biscuits.

I'm not going to go into detail, but it's fair to say that 2008 sucked balls. Largely due to my own inability to avoid people who keep themselves ticking over with weapons-grade evil, (stupid Disney making me believe that they'd have a propensity to cackle maniacally and have talking animal side-kicks.)

Finally, it would seem that I'm recovered and refreshed from the ordeal and 2009 is looking up. I'm a busy little monkey, what with thesis writing and trying to rinse a couple of bonus publications out of my research, but I'm not feeling overwhelmed.

I'm splitting my time between my "office" in Stoke and Nottingham, which is so far proving to work pretty well. I'm already clawing at the walls and looking forward to moving out of Stoke, but that only serves as motivation to get my shit together.

So ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I hereby announce that boB is back!

Election

2008-11-05T09:52:00.002Z

So Obama has won. This was certainly the decision that I had hoped for, but I do have one tiny reservation.

Maybe it's because I'm British, maybe it's because I'm turning into a bitter old cynic, but seeing all those millions of people, world-wide, filled with hope for the future makes me think one thing... it's about now when everything turns to shit and your high hopes give you all that much further to fall.

I for one am bracing for a nuclear winter.

Scandal

2008-10-31T10:33:00.001Z

Am I the only person who is loving the fact that the man being identified as the victim in a taste and decency row is an actor who built his career on a marginally racist portrayal of a Spaniard?

Tidying

2008-10-23T13:26:00.002+01:00

Well, the time finally came. After nearly 2 months of living in my house, I decided that it was probably time to unpack. I am now surrounded by empty boxes waiting to be transported so they can live out the rest of their hollow lives in peace at my parent's house, (much like my sister.)

All in all, it's not a bad gaff. Though we don't have a tumble dryer, so I predict that it's going to take me about 20 years to get all of my washing done.

Science Minister Announces Desire to Place All Eggs in a Basket

2008-10-10T23:55:00.002+01:00

This news story worries me slightly.

The science minister seems to believe that its a good strategy to increase the profile of science by essentially buying into the cult of fame and getting us a nice figure head for "the kids" to identify with.

As a result I'm forced to question if the minister has ever seen the "Entertainment News" of any website. Allow me to highlight how this would go down:
1) British astronaut acquired
2) Government and slimy men in pin-striped suits who describe themselves as "Advertising Executives" spend more money than it took to get him/her into space, getting them into "Heat" magazine.
3) Impressionable children fail miserably to be impressed
4) The "Figure Head of Science" becomes increasingly a caricature of him/her self until they eventually have some form of personality crisis leading to a much publicised check in at a rehab centre.
5) The "Daily Mail" declares that it always suspected that those science types were no good and starts campaigning for the removal of anything rational from the national curriculum that would mean people would do anything other than blindly panic at the next health scare published by Dr Shit-For-Brains at the "Desperate for Cash Institute For Making Unfounded Claims Based on Dodgy Statistics".
6) The police round up science types and try to kill them with fatal doses of homeopathic poisons. When these fail to work, the national institute of homeopaths will claim that scientists "aren't like us" and have us drowned. We are strangely grateful.

Anger Management

2008-09-17T16:34:00.002+01:00

This week I have to move offices.

Not a big job really, I don't have a great deal of stuff in the office.

However, it becomes a slightly bigger deal when the office I'm suppose to be moving into still has people in it. People who were not told that they should be moving. People who haven't been given a room to move to.

Now it is a political bun fight, with various supervisors throwing diva tantrums left right and center.

On top of this I'm in trouble for not attending a pointless course that I was supposed to. It turns out that despite not replying to any of their emails, despite not turning up to any of their previous courses and despite the course being on a topic totally unrelated to my work, they registered me and billed the university anyway. When I didn't show, they took it upon themselves to send an email of complaint to both myself and my admin people.

It is fair to say that I'm not entirely happy with the way this has all been handled.

And in a shocking change from form I actually told people this, in no uncertain terms, something that is likely to get me into more trouble, but it gave me a warm glow to tell one of our staff that in terms of useful output, the teddy bear that she has on her desk would make a more than appropriate replacement for her.

I may be out of a job soon

International Politics and You

2008-09-07T23:39:00.003+01:00

As a single man I've become increasingly annoyed by the terms of endearment people use for one another. "honey", "sweetheart", "darling" not only are they sickly sweet, but they're not very imaginative. It used to be acceptable in cockney rhyming slang to refer to your friends as "chinas", (china-plate = mate). But I think that we should extend this idea and start calling our loved ones by using country-based metaphors.

"My little Easter-Island" for the partner who is mysterious but has a big head.

"She's my Switzerland" for your wife. Yes she's beautiful but the second there's a conflict she's going to end up amassing large amounts of wealth that's not hers.

"I'm your Iraq" is obviously for a catholic masochist, you're basically saying "enter me roughly and repeatedly, but each time pull out before you've finished."

Next year I want a card asking me to be someone's Palestine...

Apologies to people who read my blog via RSS - I've had to re-post this about three times to remove the horrible formatting errors that I introduced by writing it off-line and then copying it into my blog editor.

Inappropriate Behaviour

2008-09-07T20:39:00.001+01:00

One of my old school friends is getting married and has invited my parents to the reception.

At first I thought that this was a kind gesture, but I'm increasingly concerned that it's a ploy to make sure that I'm on my best behaviour.

Training for Idiots

2008-09-04T13:29:00.003+01:00

I just went on a training course that was aimed at giving advice to people about applying for research funding.

No-one had bothered to read the 9-page, big-print document that the organisers had sent out, but that was ok - they re-explained everything at the beginning in tedious detail.

The course then degenerated into people asking questions that either had common-sense answers, ("How do I estimate how much paper I'm going to use?") or things that they would have known had they bothered to either read the guide or listen to the first speaker.

The worst thing was, that there were so many idiots in the audience that they made the course over-run so I was sitting there, at the back of the room, eyeing up the sandwiches that had been praying for someone to eat them for the last 20 mins and hating each stupid person with a passion that I'm surprised didn't make me spontaneously combust. To make matters worse, two of the speakers started to nonchalantly graze at the sandwich buffet whilst answering questions!

They are now dead.

Greetings

2008-09-03T14:29:00.002+01:00

Well I survived my massive trip and the process of moving is nearly over.

By "nearly over" I mean that I only have two car-loads of stuff left to collect from my friend's house where it is in storage. Then I'll start unpacking...

Oh and I need to write two papers in the next two weeks.

Oh and could I just sort out some feedback sessions for teaching, and if you're not too busy could you start your thesis.

And by the way, would you mind awfully compensating for the incompetence of others, selfish laziness, political machinations, office moves, monkeys with guns, elephants with typewriters and badgers with an axe to grind?

Mental note: destroy humanity.

I'm probably over sensitive and over tired. I'm probably over-reacting and over-the-top. But seriously people! Shape up before the foot of righteous justice, dons the boot of violent intervention, (complete with the toe-caps of remorseless metaphor) and starts kicking the arse of obstructing morons!

Message ends

Sleep when I'm dead

2008-08-04T22:16:00.002+01:00

It turns out that moving your stuff into storage because you have to be moved out before you return from a very long trip abroad so you can move into your new place in September when you _finally_ get back is every bit as complicated and difficult as it sounds.

And I still haven't bought a wedding present for my friends' wedding, which is unfortunate, as its the day after I land back in the country...

No Sense of Humour

2008-08-01T10:37:00.002+01:00

One of our admin team has a poster from the Guardian of "Guardian Readers". It has cartoons of stereotypical Guardian readers with faux latin names underneath them: "Musician - musicalis musicalis"; "Crossword Addict- Intellectualus Frustratus" etc etc

I asked her if there was one for Daily Mail readers that just said "Racist".

No laughs.

What's wrong with the world?

Public Health Warning

2008-07-30T00:49:00.003+01:00

Its fair to say that things at work are not going well.

The only way to feasibly look at the top of my inbox at the moment is via google maps, yet somehow people do manage to don crampons, load up their grappling hooks and navigate to the summit to add more, (I don't recomend the North face, there's a top soil of expense claims that could shake loose at any minute.)

This is largely due to the fact that I've lost my mojo. I simply cannot make my head process coding at the moment and that is the bulk of my immediate work. I know that this is a purely psychological barrier, as at the moment all I want to do is write and we all know what will happen when its thesis writing time... my brain will simply switch to code mode.

As a result I'm not sleeping, I'm cranky and I'm finding it even harder to concentrate.

Please consider this a pre-emptive excuse for any irrational shouting that may occur over the next couple of days!

Breaking News

2008-07-22T10:44:00.002+01:00

I just saw on the BBC news website that the war criminal Radovan Karadzic has been found after spending many years hiding in Belgrade.

This man is obviously pure evil... his cover was practicing alternative medicine.

What. A. Bastard.

Code Monkeys

2008-06-03T16:46:00.003+01:00

I'm working on a new project as of today and my collaborators sent some source code written by a software engineer that had been left largely to his own devices for a year working on this project.

The engineer in question appears to have an issue with portability. The code was written in Java, which _should_ make it pretty portable, yes? No. They decided to write it so it only works with a specific plugin, that they have written, for a specific IDE.

I'm starting to work through the code now. I have absolutely no plans to put any more effort into making their code work. It has now become an extraction exercise so I can write my own project, using their code as a "how to". For a start it's supposed to be for a robot controller - so why they wrote it in one of the world's slowest languages I'll never know!

Microsoft API For Multimedia Tips

2008-05-21T11:13:00.004+01:00

I was recently asked by an artist friend to produce some software for an exhibit that would detect the presence of a viewer and play a sound clip in response.

After contemplating interfacing a motion detector to a laptop I decided to use a webcam and implement a simple differencing motion detection algorithm. I opted to use the full version of MSVC 2005 as the 2008 express version was a little feature light for me and I was developing for the gallery's windows machine.

Some of the issues that I came across may help others, so I've decided to document them here:

_Capturing data from a webcam_
This is A LOT harder in windows than it is in Linux. I've done quite a lot of Linux-based camera manipulation for my robots and it only really took me an afternoon to learn, and of course there was a plethora of open-source products that I could take apart and look under the hood to identify how to best perform the task.

I used the now slightly out-dated "Video for Windows" (VWF) interfaces, as I wasn't sure what version of windows that the target machine would be running and this, by MS's own admission, is the version that has the best chance of portability across versions. I was (eventually) able to download an example project that did everything that I wanted to do from the "Code Guru" website, (google "Ken Varn's Video for windows class interface"). It worked pretty well, but it took me a while to identify the monstrous way that VWF passes bitmaps of still frames. When you capture an image you are given a struct of type PBITMAPINFO. This struct contains all the gubbins for displaying a bitmap, the colour palette and whatnot, but not the actual bitmap data. This, under the MS API is stored contiguously in memory to the struct, with no direct pointer to it! This seems obscene to me, but I battled on and everything worked.

_Playing Sounds_
The API for playing wav files in MSVC seemed as easy as it possibly could be. The "PlaySound" function simply takes the filename of the relevant file and a series of flags that tell the OS what the source is, (file-based or memory-based) and how to play it etc etc. Seemed simple enough... but no.

PlaySound has a strict limitation that isn't brilliantly documented. When playing sound synchronously the file size has a 100kb limit, (which at the sampling rate that we were using equates to about 5 seconds). This was too restrictive for my app, so I needed a work round. It turns out that you can lengthen the memory limit if you choose to play the sound asynchronously, (i.e. pass the SND_ASYNC flag.) In this case it will play any file size that will fit into the available memory - but there's another catch. Because the sound is played asynchronously, there's no sensible way that you can check if the sound is finished, which was a problem for my application. In the end I played sounds with the SND_NOSTOP flag too, which meant that if a sound was already playing, it aborted trying to play the new sound. For my application this was the ideal behaviour, but I did notice that on the MS forums people were unhappy about this. My tip for checking if the sound has completed or not is a dirty hack, but it works.... simply play the sound of silence, (a short, pre-recorded wav file, that contains no sound) using the NOSTOP flag. If it plays successfully, the function will return TRUE and you can be assured that the other sound has finished. If it fails, (returns FALSE) then the sound is not finished. A bit dirty I know, but it does the job effectively.

_Application Distribution_
I foolishly just copied the release version of my program on to a memory stick, which was a stupid thing to do, but I took my chances. This didn't work, as the runtime libraries that I needed weren't on the destination machine. Instead I built an installer and the IDE made sure that all the relevant dependencies were packaged up with a minimum of fuss. This was really easy and worked very well.

One word of warning though - the machine that I was developing for wasn't internet ready and didn't have access to a connection. The installer NEEDED internet access as it installed some of the .NET runtime stuff via the MS website. In the end the only solution was to move the machine to someone's house with internet and quickly hop on for the install.

Apologies for the techy post, but this might help someone in the future, (probably me!) Ta!

Testing Microsoft Visual Studio Express

2008-05-14T16:34:00.003+01:00

I've volunteered to do a small project involving webcam access for an artist friend of mine and I decided that the easiest way to get an app up and running for a windows machine that could do everything that I needed would be to use MS visual studio express, as it is free and will work directly with the windows API. Brilliant.

Except that it doesn't work.

Sadly I can download the installers, but when they're downloading the things to be installed they just hang and die.

So far, I'm not impressed!

Security Again!

2008-04-30T10:09:00.003+01:00

Once again our university security admin team have delivered the high quality incompetence that I have come to expect. I've been locked out of my lab for three days now because the access rights of "a large number of postgraduate students" have been revoked somehow by accident.

We dutifully reported this to our local contact, who passed it on to security who continued to issue, "it'll be fixed tomorrow"s for the past few days, via our IT people.

This morning I phoned them (as they have totally failed to keep those people affected by the problem up to date with developments) to find out what was going on. The lady was very keen to tell me "it's nothing we've done", which is classic buck-passing and another total failure to take responsibility. Lets remember that they picked the system, spent a ridiculous sum of money replacing the perfectly good swipe card system we had, and now it has mysteriously failed, we are expected to buy "it's nothing we've done". Well actually it IS something that you've done. It's something that you do: fail to communicate, fail to consult and fail to provide an adequate service, you useless, miserable, evolutionary-dead-end.

Open Source C++ IDEs?

2008-04-20T17:22:00.002+01:00

I want an open source C++ IDE.

For a couple of years I've been using the CDT project for Eclipse and struggling on. I even got to a point where I thought that it was acceptable.

The other day I helped someone using the microsoft C++ development environment.

Eclipse simply isn't acceptable. Its difficult to configure, gives cryptic error messages, and I've simply never really felt that it sits right with me.

Most of all, I'm sick of installing it on fresh machines and spending hours trying to remember which elements of its labyrinthine menu system allow me to say "for the love of god, cygwin is THERE!!! Just use it you useless bastard."

I'm going to carry on using it in the short term. After all its currently my C++/Java/LaTeX project manager of choice. But the time has come to phase it out. Recommendations welcome.

What might have been

2008-04-11T21:57:00.002+01:00

This _should_ be a celebratory blog, full of the joys that I have actually managed to finish my conference paper on time. This _should_ be written whilst downing a well-earned glass of wine.

But it isn't.

The conference that I'm trying to submit to uses "Easychair" to manage submissions. IT. DOESN'T.WORK.

Myself and at least two other colleagues simply can't login. I checked to see if an over-zealous individual had set the deadline to be something ridiculous like 6pm, by trying to login to another conference that had definitely expired and the error message is different.

Basically you have to apply for a login, and the application system is knackered. Trouble is of course, that unless it unknackers before midnight, I'm screwed.

I will now make it my life's mission, at every conference and every meeting, to persuade as many people as possible that this system should never be employed for any conference. I have an entire career with which to carry out my campaign of victimisation. We'll see who goes bust first!

Bored

2008-04-10T14:53:00.000+01:00

I'm currently being paid an hourly rate to help out with a training course at the university.

It's on Word.

Soooooo very bored.