F3

I realise I haven't updated here for a while, I have been overtaken by the mass of work coming my way from uni.

However, the next three days will be free of uni work and full of interesting new people. Later today I will be heading down to F3, courtesy of a very generous gentleman.

The next few days should prove to be an excellent opportunity to meet people I may potentially work with or see again in a professional context. Of course there is always the massive experience that I will gain from this, and hopefully I will learn a thing or two about where I see my career going.

The thing I am most looking forward to is simply meeting people, who are already professionals in what I would like to see as my future career, and engaging in conversation with them.

Tweets/Blog posts will follow.

Final Year Projects

Up until now I have been searching in vain for a suitable final year project.
The problem I have faced is that my suggestions have lacked a real sense of purpose or an actual real world purpose.

However that has changed now, I have finally decided upon a project direction. The problem I am facing now is that I may be in over my head. I have been conducting some preliminary research and have drawn a blank.

I don't know if what I am trying to do is actually possible in JAVA. If this is the case I may be forced to learn C++ at the same time as conducting my final year project research and continuing my normal final year studies.

Putting a sour note on my accepted proposal today was a letter from my car insurance company saying that they were increasing my premium as they did not have proof of my no claims discount. (No claims that I built up with them!)

First Day Back ...

Today was my first day back at uni, which was surprisingly rather fun.

I didn't have much to do in the way of work, as I only had a single tutorial in the afternoon, which turned out to be a big chat in the new "ubuntu lab" which has replaced the "sun lab" at long last.

Ther rest of the day was spend wandering town, visiting greggs for some early morning food and a cup of tea. Who knew greggs sold tea? They even sell bacon sandwiches! So much has changed in the world of greggs since I have been out the country.

We had a quick jolly to halfords, which was livened up by the epic shop for car cleaning products, under the watchful eye of the sales assistant.

Failing

This week has seen a couple of fails for me, the most prominent of them was the failure of my Ubuntu installation and then my Windows installation.

For some reason I noticed bits of my panels had gone missing and things weren't working quite right. Since Ubuntu doesn't take long to install, I opted to go for a reinstall which took me about an hour and a half to completely reinstall, update and install and configure all of my applications. Essentially returning my Ubuntu installation to the same state before the failure.

No sooner had I got Ubuntu back up and running did my Windows installation die on me. This could be easily fixed by simply repairing the MBR, however I am well overdue a clean install, which I have now been forced into.

I have yet to reinstall Windows, primarily because I am lazy and it currently has nothing to offer to me that Ubuntu can't do, other than my games. I will probably get round to doing it tomorrow whilst repairing the soon to arrive "dead" laptop that fell over while installing Vista SP2.

The big question is, which will take longer? The installation and reconfiguration of Windows XP or trying to repair Windows Vista?

Lego Mindstorms Safe Cracker

I was talking with a friend recently about the need for physical device security.

This then strangely lead onto cracking safes, which resulted in pondering whether or not it would be possible to design, build and program a Lego Mindstorms device to crack a combination safe.

I then did a bit of research and found that his has already been done in python using an arduino and a few other electronic bits.

Assembly wise, the device would be fairly simple to construct. The main issue would be turning a wheel accurately enough to be able turn the combination lock a single number either to the left or right.

My proposed method of attack would be simply brute forcing the combination, to test this I would obviously need to have something like a four digit code using a fairly limited range of digits so that the number of possible combinations is not insanely high.

The Wheel of Fortune

It's been some time since I last posted, not that I have been busy, more that I have been preoccupied with other things.

I am still on the hunt for both a job and car, the car status may change tomorrow though. :)
So far my luck with cars has been rather poor, all but one of the cars I have seen that caught my eye have been sold the day before I enquired about them.

My job luck has been just as poor, seems Barnsley is lacking in the part time employment options, which could become a problem when I have a car and need the monies for petrol and insurance.

I have been doing odd jobs which have yielded some money, which went straight into the car fund. Hopefully my job status will change soon, as I will shortly be in desperate need of a job once I return to university in September.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

The year in Italy has come to an end. Now back in cold rainy England.

A large portion of the year was spent complaining about it being too hot, and now I am home I will complain about it being too cold. There is no winning with the weather.

First night at home was bliss, having all my stuff back and my lovely comfy bed.
I also managed to finally get round to throwing out a load of old computer crap while I was unpacking, which uncovered a 5Mb hard disk that I still had lurking around on a shelf.

The most important tasks ahead of me now are the job and car hunt, which will both hopefully take very little time.

Right now however, is steak time!

*End Transmission*

Trip To Rosignano

On Sunday some of us decided to venture out to a new beach rather than going to our usual place in Viareggio.

We ended up (in the right place) at Rosignano. The beach was a short walk from the train station, although we did exit the train station into the car park the first time.

When we arrived at the beach we were greeted by hundreds of people already there, a short walk up the beach however lead us to some space.

The sand was extremely white, although this was artificially coloured by whatever the refinery next to it was pumping into the water. It seemed harmless though as many people were swimming in it.
The sea was clear blue, and was unusually warm at the bottom and cold at the top.

Later on in the day we encountered the "ice cream tractor", which was essentially a freezer on tracks with an electric motor driving it across the sand. It also had some music playing and sold beer as an added bonus.

Picture 1 | Picture 2 | Picture 3

EUI 5 A Side Tournament - Part 3

So it has come to an end, almost as quickly as it started.

The E-1337s have been bundled out of the Coppa Pavone after only two games, following two fairly convincing defeats.

It probably is a good thing that we went out so quickly, since from the start we were under prepared and all carrying injuries after just a few training sessions.

Had we stayed any longer we would have definitely lost in the next round.
All in all, a fun time was had by all.

< /E-1337s>

Microsoft Bing

Recently Microsoft launched their own search engine called Bing.
To me this seems like a very late attempt to spread the Microsoft name a little more on the web by essentially copying a service that has been run by the likes of Google and Yahoo for several years now.

It is probably a bid to try to associate the Microsoft brand with web search engines in the same way that Google has become synonymous in this field.

Interestingly Microsoft seem to have dropped the "Live" branding that they previously adopted for a lot of services (messenger, search, mail etc.)

I am expecting this to be axed in little over a year or so, or overhauled to ultimately create a Microsoft version of iGoogle by sticking bing, msn and hotmail together on one page.

EUI 5 A Side Tournament - Part 2

Yesterday evening was match two for the E-1337s. It was definitely a tougher game than the first, but we came through and after 40 minutes we were winning.
In the actual tournament that would have given us the win, but since this was just a friendly we continued playing which ultimately resulted in our defeat.

In our defence, we were missing a number of players so could not make any substitutions, and had to borrow a player for one of the other competing teams, compared to our 10+ strong opposition who were regularly making changes.

On the whole we didn't do too badly, few more training sessions and we should be ready for the tournament start next Thursday.

EUI 5 A Side Tournament - Part 1

Last night was the first training session for the "E-1337s" computing services 5 a side team, which really showed us what sitting at a desk all day does to the fitness.

Having said that though we didn't do too badly and we did win in the end.
We did however end up with injuries to almost every player.

Not put off by the injuries, we will be training again on Thursday against the Library team, which will hopefully give us a taste of what the competition will be like.

Nokia E71 At a Glance

So now I have my E71 and have been playing with it a bit over the weekend.

At first it was a bit tricky getting used to a few things, such as locating where particular settings were hidden.
Once I finished my personalising of the phone and having dug through the menus for a while things became clearer.

This is probably the first phone where I have actually liked one of the built in themes.

I've had time to have a play with a few of the Google apps such as maps, mail and youtube; all of which are really easy to use and do not impact on the phone's performance (unlike my last phone).

I had previously read and heard that the email manager wasn't particularly nice on the eyes, but in my opinion I don't think it's that bad.

Battery life is amazing, I have been hammering the phone now for three days and still the battery has not died.

A fun quirk I found was the facility to have the phone read a message or email in a very Steven Hawking-esque voice which provides some entertainment.

All in all I would say that this was a good buy and would definitely recommend the phone to anyone. (I may later retract this statement if I find something that really irritates me about the phone).

The only difficulty I have encountered so far is joining to my wireless network at home. MAC address filtering had to be disabled and I found typing my 63 character key was a little tedious only for it to tell me it could not connect.

I have now managed to join my wireless and all is good :)

I will continue to post on my experiences with the E71, which hopefully will all be good.

Why I (Now) Dislike Freecom

I had previously had no gripes with Freecom at all. I owned an 8gb pendrive and a 16gb by them, both of which functioned perfectly for some time.
Today however, I found that my 16gb pendrive is totally dead, formatting does not fix it as the partition shortly disappears again.

Fortunately the 8gb of data that was on there is mostly backed up in other locations (thank you dropbox).

I will probably replace the now dead pendrive since having 16gb of storage capacity in the pocket is rather convenient.

I will definitely not be purchasing a Freecom pendrive.

This opinion may seem a little harsh, but at the time of writing this I am rather bitter about the loss of my data (regardless of the backup).

Nokia E71 Thoughts

At the end of the week I will be obtaining a new Nokia E71.
Hopefully this will be much more reliable and feature rich than my current phone.

My thoughts and opinion early next week ...