News

Election

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:52:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:55:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:34:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:39:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:39:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:16:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:34:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:09:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:53:00 +0000

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.

Bloody Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:04:00 +0000

I have recently warmed to Linux.

I then immediately went off it again.

I tried to install a touchscreen. According to the webosphere it was going to be a relatively easy job. Sure it involved manually editting a few config files here and there, but no worries there.

Sadly it doesn't work.

Partially because the touchscreen isn't the model that has working Linux drivers, its a variant, so you have to download slightly different drivers for it, that have the same name, and there's no version info.

Partially because it took me a while to figure out which configuration file I was editting, (no, not XF86Config, \etc\X11\xorg.conf don't you know).

But mostly because the bloody board has jumpers on it that switch it between Windows compatability mode and Linux compatability mode, and I don't have the required diamond-edged drill bit, or ridiculously tiny alun keys that I need to break the bloody case open and remove said jumper.

A colleague, many moons ago, did get the touch screen working with the evil windows jumper in place. He doesn't remember how, and I can't figure it out, so after three days I'm doing something that I've never done before.... I'm giving up.

For an engineer to give up it typically involves threats to his/her family and an automatic weapon. Sadly, I simply can't afford to spend any more time on it.

This makes me sad and angry.

I've written an email to the manufacturers of the robot concerned explaining that the screen simply isn't responding to configuration requests, (annoyingly it is sending out info when you touch it, but I have no way of translating that info into a mouse pointer.) I'm actually begninning to think it would be easier to reverse engineer the protocol and write a decent driver for it myself.

Yey for imaginary quiche!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:22:00 +0000

Despite our best efforts to avoid giving money to "the man" by spending our hard earned squid at supermarkets, h and I do occasionally raid the bargains section of our local Sainsbury's.

Today we scored a small victory for local traders by purchasing an imaginary quiche.

Two quiches that had originally been on special offer had been reduced as they were rapidly approaching their sell-by-date. They had accidentally left the original special offer in their software system, so the check out reported that I could have one quiche for 79p or two for the grand total of 78p.

I hereby conclude that the second quiche has some form of imaginary component. I'm hoping that eating it will also make me thinner.

Three cheers for imaginary quiche!

Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:55:00 +0000

- I am trying to cut back on caffeine again. This is largely because I'm sick of feeling like shit in the morning, as sleep is the longest I go without ingesting some form of stimulant and withdrawal is a be-atch.

- Jonh* and Emma are coming to visit this weekend. I book us a table at a yummy veggie restaurant which I am now looking forward to a lot!

- Today I supervised my final labs for a couple of weeks whilst the little buggers go and celebrate the spin on a pagan-birth festival of their choice. This means less money, but more time to work!

- I want to go campin'. Soon.

*not a typo, that's how he writes his name

Why Biology Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:13:00 +0000

I'm trying to put the finishing touches to my journal paper. This would be great, if two separate reviewers hadn't asked me to add a section discussing the biology of the dendritic cell, ( a part of the immune system).

There's a problem with this... have you ever heard people use analogies like "this man is the Einstein of modern art" or "the Mozart of plumbing" etc etc. Well I am the small retarded monkey, with braces, glasses and asthma, of biology. A veritable runt of the litter in the field.

I'm actually ok with it.

Aside from the fact that I resent being asked for it, (when you write a paper on neural networks do you add a section detailing the mechanisms of sodium-potassium pumps etc?) I'm totally ill-equipped to write it. My supervisors are totally ill-equipped to write it. To be honest they weren't entirely equipped to write a paper on robotics, but that's besides the point. The fact is that I'm a cyberneticist, in a computer science department, writing a paper about an algorithm, for a journal about intelligence. Did anyone see the word "biology" in any of that?

Ok, ok I might have been a bit misleading. It is a special issue on "Artificial Immune Systems" which obviously has ties to biology. But I'm still not happy with the idea. I personally think that the entire thing will further detract from a paper which if I had my time again, I would have cut other things out of to concentrate on the wonderful, wonderful maths of it all, (not my maths you understand, I speak of Monsieur Laplace's genius - but he died in 1827 so the praise will fall on deaf, if not slightly gooey, ears).

Eug

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:27:00 +0000

I am ill.

My glands are like beach balls and my head feels like it has the entire cast of the Dutch clog-dancing goat herd in it.

Yet I'm still in work.

This is for three reasons:
- I'm teaching a lab today and the effort of arranging cover would be too much (& I'd miss the opportunity to infect the little bastards).
- I'm being assessed today on my presentation skills. I hope that "looks like there's only max strength Beechams between him and the plague" isn't on the list of common presentation errors.
- I have journal paper corrections due in on Saturday that I'm still in the thick of.

I suspect that I will be taking a large proportion of next week off.