Arbitrarily Green

MSP Again

\o/

As such I've renewed incentive to try and get an initial version of Tornado out of the door at some point, prefereably before the first MSP meet at the end of the month. How realistic that is is an issue of concern, especially since dissertation work is looking like it's going to take up most of my time from now until next year. I'm sure I can chip away at it between runs of my learning algorithms though, so here's hoping.

Adrian and I have been mulling over how to get ELMS deployed at Edinburgh Uni. Since neither of us can spare the time to administer user lists and the like, we're going to have to make modifications to the university's 'authportal' site though I'm unsure how willing the Uni will be to cooperate. It's one of many things that are currently consuming time, and we really need to get it sorted (or at least most of the way there) in the next couple of weeks before the coursework load becomes debilitating.

ELMS, MSP, Tornado, dissertation, coursework, paid work, lectures, Guinness, applications for postgraduate positions... it's going to be a busy run up to Christmas. Go team.

Machine Learning Rocks

After having had enough of slow hosting, I decided to fork out for a second batch of the stuff, this time based in the States. Ping-wise it's not fantastic, not far shy of 250ms latency between myself and the new host. However, the amount of stuff I get lobbed in there for free is nothing short of insane.

Unlimited bandwidth, free MSSQL and MySQL hosting (to the tune of 2 gig each), ASP.NET 1.1 and beta 2.0, PHP, a nice control panel, 2 gig of web space...

Migrating my current site to the new hosting is going to take a while though. When you've used the same space for a dozen different things over the years, you accumulate what us technical types like to call 'a bunch of crap'. At the minute, pablissimo.com should point to the new hosting (your DNS mileage may vary, it's still propagating), with the intention of bringing pablissimo.net over in the next few days.

The reasoning went a shade further than mere speed; I needed things like MSSQL and ASP.NET for Tornado, my (ever so slowly coming along) portal project. I'll host a live development version on the new space, probably at somewhere like http://tornado.pablissimo.com, along with a documentation wiki and development blog for those interested. How I'll fit any of this in between paid work and my dissertation is yet to be determined.

My dissertation's actually pretty interesting. It's on multi-agent systems, and involves how agents in a system can choose to reward each other for their participation on a task. It's surprising just how much Reinforcement Learning techniques can accomplish, and to those with any interest in agent-based systems, machine learning and so on I wholly recommend the excellent Reinforcement Learning by Sutton and Barto. Since Q-Learning and eligibility traces will be the basis of my project, I'm certainly glad of having it around.

Me and my smaaaartphone

I've been using my C550 for a few days now, and to be frank I'm sorely disappointed with the user experience Windows Mobile provides. Things that should be simple aren't, things you should be able to do you can't and things you expect to be able to find out require you to download additional software.

For instance, when writing a text, if you for instance mistype a word, or forget to select the correct word from the T9 list, you can't then go back to that word and see what other permutations were valid in the T9 dictionary to correct it; you have to delete the entire word and start again. You seemingly can't change the earpiece volume mid-call, something that's hugely beneficial if you're in a pub or crowded room and want a volume boost. You can't seemingly navigate around your phone mid-call, you can't silence your phone but let it keep ringing (for instance if it's at night and your phone goes off, and you want to move to another room to answer it to avoid waking up your flatmates...), there's no immediate warning that you've gone over the 160 character limit of an SMS...

They're all little points, but they build up into a fairly unpolished OS for a phone. Other companies have had been at this for a while, so it's to be expected that their user experience will be more polished, but there is no shortage of inspiration for how to design a good phone UI. From a technical standpoint, the phone falls down too. The screen is very difficult to read in daylight conditions, it has an astonishingly poor 2 minute boot-up time from off, the battery life is sub-par, the camera is useless in low-light (and there's no flash or LED to help brighten things up), the camera's response time is shocking (nearly a second from when you press 'take photo' to the image actually being pulled from the CCD), the video resolution and framerate are dismal...

In short, don't get this phone. Ever. Get a SonyEricsson k750i or similar, it's a nippier, sleeker, more user-friendly device and it doesn't make me rue the day that I signed a 12 month contract to get this pile of crap.

So I decided on my project

I just spent two hours trying to get CommunityServer installed from source, and it was a fairly painful and not-overly-intuitive experience. So I of course gave up before I broke my keyboard. Really, all I wanted from CS was the forums system and membership management functions, but my level of patience seems to be down on the norm so I'm just going to have to write my own.

In fact, this is better news than it sounds. CS is far too complex and unnecessarily heavy-weight for my purposes when all I want is a simple, easy to use and more importantly easy to configure message board system.

The project I decided to spend my hobby-coding time on for the next couple of months is of the same ilk as Project Hurricane. The idea behind PH was to have a light-weight, flexible and easy to setup portal for student communities and societies at University and college. Whilst it by no means failed to achieve those aims, more could be done. So, and named as an homage to PH, I too will be making a student portal system tentatively titled 'Tornado'.

Tornado will take the idea of PH Communities, a project that saw hosted PH sites with a much easier setup, but reduce it from being centrally hosted to being hosted on a per-university basis. A university would set up a Tornado server, which would act as an administrative hub for all of the Tornado sites hosted upon it. Societies and interested groups at that university would come along and request to set up a new site, which would be approved by the administrators. Setting up the community will be simple, probably wizard-based. The whole shebang will be as light-weight as possible and expose a plug-in API for developing new components.

It's a lofty goal, and one that I'm not certain I can adequately complete, but I'll give it a damned good go. It'll be my first adventure using VS.NET 2005 as well, Luke managed to convince me that ASP.NET 2.0 was going to make my experience a lot more endurable.

So at the minute what I need is feedback on what kinds of things a society site needs. I've a list of the basics, and I'll be investigating societies in Ed at least to see what they have to say. So, I ask you, any ideas?

Goddamn proprietary formats

My RealCache program is getting there, though while making it, I decided that change the scope a little.

RealPlayer streams aren't actually that big; Annie Mac's latest 2 hour show comes in at under 30Mb. So, downloading them while my broadband cap isn't in place isn't so much of a priority. However, with my shiny new C550, being able to take shows like that on the move would be a huge bonus, like podcasting but for RealPlayer streams. You'd think it'd be easy.

In fact, what I considered would be the most difficult task was actually the easiest. Using MPlayer, you can dump the raw stream (in real-time, unfortunately) to a file on your disk, taking up all of 30Mb. Wonderful! Of course, Real decided not to grace the Smartphone with a version of RealPlayer, and the 'hacky' ways of getting it to run on the device haven't worked out so well. So, clearly I need to convert the .ra file I've obtained from the net to something more useful for my phone. How about Ogg?

Now, we can't do that directly, so we need to convert the .ra file into something more base, like a PCM file. This is raw wave data, the same as a CD. So, by the power of a little maths, we can see that at 10Mb per second of audio, a two-hour show is going to need around about 1.2Gb of space to reside in. Christ. Still, I persevere.

Now I have my 1.2Gb wave file, I can use the Ogg Vorbis encoder to get that down to a lovely Ogg file for playback in TCPMP, an alternative to Windows Media Player that has the added bonus of supporting Xvid and DivX files. After encoding, it looks like I've got a 40Mb ish file. That's not too bad in reality, it'd be equivalent in WMA and an MP3 of comparable audio quality would have been upward of 70Mb.

So on my 1Gb memory card, my phone can happily accommodate upwards of 20 Annie Mac shows. Awesome! 40+ hours of her delightful, dulcet tones... Shame that the entire process takes a goddamn lifetime and over a gig of storage, mind. I'll see if I can't have RealCache automate the whole thing...

Slowly getting there

So, theSpoke v2's bugs are slowly getting fixed. I notice that people's profiles no longer display multiple Tier badges where not appropriate to do so (Mario's profile came up with both Tier 2 and Tier 3 poster badges which seemed redundant, but no longer). Some of the bugs on the site (or parts of the site that are counter-intuitive in navigation terms) are sufficiently glaring that I'm surprised they weren't picked up in the beta, but that they're being fixed at all is a start.

I'm going to start my new project tomorrow afternoon; afternoon as I plan on being thoroughly hung over in the morning. I'm still undecided what it will be, but I'd like it to be compact and extensible so that I can write about it in article form. For instance, getting a basic model up and running, then modifying it to get extra functionality into it. At the minute, a light-weight forum system or content-management system seem to be my front-runners, if only so that I can play a little with ASP.NET. However, there are plenty of these about already so I'll perhaps need to keep my thinking cap on a little longer.

I could of course start my 'major project', something of a community site, which would involve some extensive modification to Community Server (subsets of which I believe power this very site). There'll be more on that at some point, as I'll need some UK devs to join in.

In fact, contrary to this point last year, I've a lot of projects I'd like to get stuck into. It's a shame it's my fourth year at Uni coming up, since my dissertation will take a lot of time away from community efforts, though I'm sure I can at least achieve some of my goals or make a start on the others to the point that they can be taken up by interested parties. It's a shame not being able to see things through to their logical conclusions though, so we'll see...

New Spoke, new phone

The past four weeks I've been working my ass off for the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Shifting kegs and stock around at 7am is more entertaining than it sounds, and meeting Paul Merton was less so.

So, theSpoke got a face-lift. Actually it's pretty obvious it's more than just that, the whole shebang seems to have been replaced. Most of it's fine, though some of it's quite obtuse. For instance, while I'm writing this post, I've no obvious link that I can click to get back to my blog; I'm stuck in 'blog administration land', an area that has a similar feel to Milton Keynes. Also, the list of 'blogs I read' seems to have been eradicated, which is a total *** frankly. I had a list of ~30 blogs I used to regularly read and now for the life of me I'll be damned if I can remember five of them to re-subscribe to. Some teething problems remain, it seems.

New phone should be on its way though, a c550 on Orange. Always wanted a Smartphone to play with, and this one'll mean I don't have to go buying an MP3 player as well. A gig SD-card or two should suffice, can fit a couple SG-1 eps and some albums onto that bad boy for train journeys home. An actual report will follow, once (if) I get it.

That RealCache thing I started hasn't been touched since I started work; it's hard to motivate yourself to breathe let alone code after a 60+ hour week of physical work, but now that my contract's over I shall finish it off and duly post it. I'll also be making SharpDoku a little better, then starting a new project, the details of which have yet to be finalised. Hopefully it'll be marginally more long-term than anything else I've started recently; I'm thinking a light-weight forum system or similar if only so I can do some web-dev after my fairly lengthy reprieve.

Until then...

SharpDoku!

It's not perfect, far from it, but it's at least working. You can find the project page for it here on my website, along with source and binaries, plus a help file here.

I'm currently working on something to download RealPlayer audio streams automagically at set intervals. I listen to a lot of the recorded programmes on the BBC website, especially those on Radio 1. Mainly it's because I'm not in to hear them live, but sometimes I like listening again to a show since it was that good, in particular Annie Mac's show's always worth a revisit.

So, once completed (another day or so I would imagine), you can provide to my program a list of the streams you want to download, when the show normally finishes (in the case of Annie Mac, that'd be 11pm) and the day that the show is on. Then, during some off-peak time period you define (Nildram caps my bandwidth outwith the hours of midnight to 8am), it will go off and download the new shows for you.

It's then a case of adding the .ra files it downloads to your Favourites in RealPlayer. Hey presto, no waiting time. What's even better is that if you've a laptop but no internet connection (or one you have to pay for often), you can download whenever you get a chance and then play back at your leisure. Like podcasting, but slightly larger and more obtuse.

With luck I'll have some more to say about that tomorrow. And with more luck I'll be able to push another couple of articles to my website, though that might be blue-sky thinking...

Hobby coding, oh how I've missed you

Microsoft Windows Vista?

What a godawful name =(

Wasn't Longhorn cool enough?

Form filling

I usually hate filling forms, everyone does. Loan forms, job applications, tax forms, university forms, they build up.

However, sometimes there are forms to fill that I cna enjoy. I recently filled in the evaluation form for this year's Imagine Cup final down London way; what should have been a few hundred words turned into a couple thousand. It was all retrospective though, and therefore fairly easy. The most interesting one I've done so far this year has been the MSP application form.

In filling it in, I realised how much I wanted to do this year and how much I actually managed to schedule. And in filling it in, I came up with a couple of new things that I want to do next year, regardless of my participation on the programme.

For instance, at Edinburgh there is little MS presence at all. We're part of MSDN AA, though have no access to ELMS. Our degrees are accredited by the BCS, but no mention of de facto standards and industry certification is made in the required Professional Issues course for that accreditation. I don't mean just MS certification here, that wouldn't make a great deal of sense, but proper coverage of all of the available options.

So, my mission next year will at least be to have the discussion, regardless of its outcome. That on top of a couple of other little ventures I have should see this being an interesting, and certainly busy year. So to maximise productivity I was considering a couple of purchases.

I want me a GPS unit, preferably bluetooth. There haven't been many uses of it outside of journey planning, so I wouldn't mind exploring what you can do with a location-aware application. Hell, location-aware web services, why not? Then I reckon a TFT would do nicely, my desk this year's a tad smaller than last. Oh and those X2's, I could do with one of those. In a new Shuttle box of course, dripping with caviar...

I'll stick to just paying the rent for now.

H. Christ, superstar

Jesus.

That was a tough few days there. First off was the final MSP meet down at Microsoft Research, Cambridge with some prize giving, some excellent presentations and some pizza. Then the two Daves, Chris, Emily and I headed down to London in preparation for the Imagine Cup 2005 final.

That was the first time that the team had met up to compile code, so the rest of the night was spent trying to fix the slew of problems that ensued. I managed about 30 minutes of kip, before our 6.30am wake-up call for the coach taking us to BT Tower, the site of the final.

After the morning presentations to the judges (and a broken demo, unfortunately), we had time to set up our stands for the afternoon of schmoozing with industry-types, press types and the other teams. It was certainly interesting stuff, and a valuable chance to get some feedback on our work. It was also a great opportunity to see the other teams’ work, something missing from last year that was a welcome addition.

Avoiding this man was difficult, his not-so-subtle photography style followed us all throughout the afternoon.

Congratulations to the winning team, Bitshifters, with their blogging application. It was certainly well-deserved, though a surprise to many who thought that Antranik-et-al’s music app would prevail.

The evening’s entertainment was the best I think I’ve been a part of with MS over the past year or so. Free pool, free bowling, free arcade machines, free food, free booze and let’s not forget the glow-in-the-dark wrist-bands. MS staff had a friendly game of bowling against BT staff, the result of which it may be best I don’t know. After some booze and the presentation of some more prizes for a quiz on-going through the day we left to head back to the hotel against a rather fetching backdrop:

All in all, an awesome time. Next year we’ll have no Luke nor Dave for the team, leaving myself and Dave R to think of something to enter for the Imagine Cup 2006. Third time’s the charm. It was also potentially the last time we’ll see Caroline, Mark and the rest of the academic team, so we’ll have to look at getting back on the MSP programme next year too.

Final thanks to everyone at MS for the four days, though especially to Chris who’s been the guy running the MSP programme this year, who’ll be returning to academia.

Leave Home

So myself and Adrian headed to see the Chemical Brothers at the Corn Exchange on Sunday, something I'd been looking forward to for months (though managed to totally forget about until two days prior). The gig was awesome, wrapping up on (amongst others) The Private Psychedelic Reel which is a personal favourite.

Myself, George and Fi are still homeless come the end of June, and it's getting to be panic-stations time. George is away home tomorrow, and Fi ain't back until Friday at some unspecified and likely unhelpful time of day. We've seen perhaps 15 flats so far, and through a combination of their not being suitable and their not being on the market any more we have signed the lease on 0 flats.

One of today's viewings was different; nice place, being repainted at the minute. Big lounge, 2 double rooms (suits George), top floor (suits Fi) and in Newington (suits me to the ground). Unfortunately the single room (which I would be inhabiting) was roughly the size of a Volkswagen Golf. Fitting a single bed and a desk in that room would have been a stretch, let alone a wardrobe. It's not off the cards yet; we could have the lounge be a (albeit large) double room and throw a beanbag or two into the 'single bedroom' (read: shoebox).

There's never enough technical content in these things of mine so I'll throw some in here. I swear, pretty much daily now, at the limitations of the Compact Framework. It's almost painful to use sometimes. Not only that, but designing a UI for a PDA when you've a lot of data to show is really quite challenging. Worthwhile when you make it work, but challenging nonetheless. However, having finally gotten past my hatred of the IDE's ability to outright lie to my face, the CF is falling back into my ambivalent books, if not good books.

The PictureBox does have a click event. Don't let the IDE fool you with its claims to the contrary.

YESSSS!

YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!

m-Home to m-Homehunting

So last Saturday (I realise it was a week ago, I've never prided myself on punctuality) myself, Luke, David, Adrian and more hooked up with the Academic Team down at the m-Home in London for a tour, and a couple of neat presentations down at the Electric Cinema. That 4am start was a killer, but worth it.

The m-Home is a three-floor house kitted out with (not inexpensive) off-the-shelf bits and bobs. It's demonstrated by actors who were chosen for their non-technical backgrounds (effectively 'normal people'), who take you through a few typical things you do round your home and show how the tech fits into it.

I was really quite impressed with a lot of it, the pictures I managed to take don't say a lot because the technology just didn't seem out of place for the most part. Ok, a PC in the kitchen mightn't be the norm but it was an interesting idea. After you wander round you come out desperately forcing yourself to put the credit card the goddamn hell away because you neither need, nor can come close to affording a touch-screen media centre or a laser keyboard. One day... Props (my homies...) to Chris for arranging the whole shebang, we were indeed a priviliged lot.

This past week Babbage was the recipient of the good news that we're one of the eight teams that'll be battling it out for the chance to represent the UK in the Imagine Cup 2005 final in four weeks' time. I'm going to spend that time rebuilding my parts of the project from scratch for shits and giggles, interspersed with trying to find somewhere to live.

There's a few of us looking at the minute, and it's not necessarily an easy task. Between the three of us who're continuing to live together next year we've requirements that start getting constraining; I want to live in a fairly specific area that's close to the Pleasance union (and uni, if you like that sort of thing), Fiona doesn't want a ground-floor flat and I can't say that I disagree, and George needs a double room. Still, we've three viewings on Monday so hopefully one of those will give us a better idea of how likely it is we'll be able to satisfy all of our requirements on our budget. Until then, more coding...