minus zero

I bought a new camera at the weekend, a Praktica MTL 5 from eBay. I spent the weekend taking photos with Dad's LTL 3 and I realised how much more fun a Real Camera is than my Lumix digital camera. The Prakticas are by no means top of the range, but there's something satisfying about the clunkiness of the shutter release and fiddling with loading a film into the back.

I'm a bit late to the party, but Enter Shikari are fantastic - a fun blend of post-hardcore + trance that sounds like it's going to take them into orbit. And they've shunned major label interest to release their debut album themselves, a bold move indeed.

SUCS has organised a lightning talks session next Tuesday, and I've been coerced into giving a talk... I guess I ought to work out WTF I'm going to fill 10 minutes with now.

I have a research topic!

After spending a couple of months wading through research papers and trying to get a feel for the area, I've settled on 'discovering music on the move' as the area of mobile HCI that I'm going to concentrate my PhD research efforts on. There seems to be a lot of activity in the areas of creating and consuming music in a mobile context, but I've not (yet) found much that deals specifically with the joy of discovering a new band, song, or genre of music. Now I've got to knuckle down and read everything there is to read, and then write a literature review by January 15^th... Eek.

In other news, the Annual SUCS Christmas Party is taking place tomorrow at the House of Geek. I'm looking forward to it, although I can't help but wonder how it's going to differ to last year's gatherings now that people such as Steve, Jo, Tudor, Darren etc. have moved away. Photos on Friday!

The Summer of Code is turning out to be pretty exciting stuff, and my project is progressing rather nicely. So far I've got a nice GUI written that can actually perform backups although there are a few major bugs that need fixing before I do a release (not to mention that being able to restore data might be nice ;)).

Integrating with rdiff-backup has been easier than I'd imagined, however its tendency to spew a fatal error and shutdown Python rather than raise an exception is frustrating.

Planet SUCS to the rescue! I screwed up and forgot to back up my blog from the server in Swansea before Steve pulled the plug, oops!

I've moved Dave's Grumblings permanently(ish) from Wordpress to the new SUCS Blog system we're working on, hence the new layout. I managed to salvage the majority of the old entries from Planet SUCS though, which was rather lucky.

Please test everything and try and break it :) Post comments too! I've added all sorts of AJAX niceties, so knock yourself out with it.

The SUCS beach party was a blast; I ended up staying all night. It was pretty cool to watch the sky get darker only to be replaced by light from the bonfire, and then watch the fire die out as the sun rose behind the clouds again. I'm sure there's some technical term for that contrast, but hey I'm a computer science student and as such not expected to know such things.

The best bits of the party are innumerable (uncountable? ;) ) but there were unfortunately a few things which did create a bit of a bad atmosphere. There were a couple of 3rd years (non-members, as it happens) who really got on everyone's nerves. Overall though, a fantastic evening.

Photos from the night: rollercow's, FireFury's, Arthur's, psycodom's, Steve's (with a few by me).

I'm back home in Trowbridge now - so far I've done next to nothing and it's been fantastic. I discovered a new rowing machine in the shed, so there's no excuse not to do some exercise now (damn!).

Oh, and I talked Mummy into cutting my hair for me:

The 3 weeks of pain known as the exam season have drawn to a close, and I'm now two thirds of the way through my degree (summer resits notwithstanding). A scary thought indeed, as it feels like the past two years have flown past. The remaining segment of the course promises to be the most interesting, challenging and important, in equal measure, and I'm looking forward to it moreso than either of the past two Septembers.

A relatively relaxed summer awaits, in the meantime, and it'd be a lie to say that I'm not looking forward to getting home - I can't wait. Much as I love being in Swansea, and hanging out with all the people I know here, the end of term is when the money and energy runs out (doubly so in the summer term) and I can't wait for a bit of home cooking and not having to worry so much about finances and bills.

Anyway, on a lighter note, tonight is the fabled annual computer society beach party, and a thoroughly good excuse to get sloshed with like-minded geeks, hackers and department staff. Last year's party was a mighty event, and (because I've had a hand in organising it, of course) with any luck the trend will be continued this year.

Expect photos (via Steve) at some point (hangovers permitting ;) ).

Andy came out with the quote of the year today, a single sentence which pretty much perfectly describes Milliways:

welshbyte makes a bad pun, FireFury moans about something not working, stringfellow asks for help with something and gets wound up when told to rtfm, davea says something cool, Arthur offers some wise, yet accidentally condescending words, wedge corrects our grammar, pwb corrects our spelling, rollercow prods the exec to do things, sits turns up to ask rohan to lunch and disappears, rohan cracks an even better pun than welshbyte and all is stable in the world of mw.

Awesome, in a word.

Plutonium, Uranium, Neptunium and Americium (workstations in the SUCS room) have just been upgraded to 512MB RAM each, which should make things a bit snappier. Neptunium has also had a bigger, better, faster hard drive fitted to replace that knackered old 4GB hunk of junk we used as a stop-gap after the last drive failed.

Each of those 4 machines has also had UT2004 Demo installed, and while the 3D performance isn't exactly staggering, it's fast enough to have a deathmatch or three instead of lectures/revision/coursework.

We bought some speakers to live in the room as well, so ask a friendly member of admin to get them out of the cupboard if you fancy listening to some music.
In the near future we'll probably replace the crappy monitors on Platinum and Thorium with some massive 21" beasts, for your viewing pleasure.

That's all :)

After much grumbling and discussion about the subject for a while, the SUCS team (led by chckens) finally got around to setting up Planet SUCS. It should give members more of an idea of how much work we do for them (ahaha!). The new SUCS game server is also live, albeit it on a limited campus-only basis for the time being. We've got in contact with the LAN Society to help publicise it and hopefully we'll end up co-operating with them on events in the future. Setting up the server was a lot smoother than I'd anticipated, but I hope LIS see sense and let us open it up for off-campus members to use. It totally sucks that I spent ages setting the thing up and now can't actually use it.

In other news, I sorted out my choices for the 3^rd year project. I'm looking forward to it immensely as it'll be a good opportunity to do something creative. Doing set coursework is OK for so long, then they get boring and restrictive. The project counts towards 25% of next year's marks which is quite a hefty amount, I hope I snap out of my recent trend of leaving work until the day before (or even after) the deadline.

The choice of projects on offer was mind boggling, I narrowed it down to the maximum of 7 though (in order of preference):

• A web log system (AG-7): This was something I suggested to the ever helpful Gimbo and he seemed happy enough to take me on, w00t!
• A web log client (AG-6): Related to the above, but a prescribed project rather than something I'd thought of. Could be fun - the brief is to create a blog client that can talk XML-RPC to upload entries to a blog. Funnily enough, I'm posting this entry with a client that does just that.
• Rich music meta data system (MJ-2): The purpose of which is to find and exploit links between a user's listening habits in different situations/activities/locations. What's slightly odd is that I had an almost identical idea about a year ago, but never got around to implementing it in anywhere near the depth this project requires.
• Tamagotchi e-mail (MJ-4): This one could be seriously fun - create an e-mail client where each message is its own distinct entity with 'health' that changes depending on several factors, such as who it's from, when it needs to be replied to, etc. It's an exciting prospect, and I think if it was done properly, it could become a massive part of how we interact with each other using e-mail.
• Real time CSS Editor (NAH-6): Not so revolutionary as the above projects, but quite nifty nonetheless. My vision of this would be a two-paned window that updates the HTML display in one half while you create/tweak the CSS in the other. Would certainly speed up web design.
• Web Server Log Analyser (IR-11): This one involves working closely with a local company to generate statistics on their web traffic. Might not sound all that exciting, but there's a small part of me that's nutty about statistics - I often write logging code into things I create even if I then completely neglect the possibilities they present.
• Online Source Code Version Control (NAH-4): Basically a CVS/SVN type affair. I touched upon something like this with some code I wrote for the group project, so it would be fun to implement it more fully. Although after I'd handed the sheet in, it was pointed out to me that 'Web Services' probably meant .NET Web Services. Ugh.

Although I'd be happy doing any of the projects I've chosen (obviously), I'd rather do the ones towards the top of the list (obviously). Here's hoping I get good enough grades!

If you're wondering about the title of this post, I direct you towards Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Pure genius.