tola

This is the first post on my new Drupal Blog. Hello, World!

To have one motherboard die is unlucky. To have another die in the same week is downright infuriating.

Dirty power? Faulty power cable? Phase of the moon?

Miffed.

Update: Good news! I just brought one of the motherboards back from the dead. I stripped it down completely and very thoroughly checked it over. Somehow the BIOS had become ever so slightly dislodged.

Happier.

Except for uni I have lived in Bourne, Lincolnshire all my life, but my parents have just moved to a bungalow in Colsterworth, just off the A1.

If this picture works, it's my brother cutting the grass, it's also the view outside my new bedroom window. Goodbye Bourne, I miss you.

Laura just pointed me towards this Wikipedia entry which names an Arthur Francis Benjamin Guinness (1937 - 1992), known as Benjamin, who was chairman of Guinness from the 60s. As far as I can tell, he was the great great great grandson of the original Arthur Guinness who purchased the first brewery in 1759 and was a member of the House of Lords and the 3rd Earl of Iveagh.

People who know me will know that my particular love/obsession with the black stuff makes this quite a weird coincidence!

This year Time has announced that you are Time Person of the Year. "Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world."

They're talking about user generated content and community collaboration on the web having taken off this year. They mention Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, SecondLife, Amazon, blogging, podcasting and open source software.

"This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them."

This is a time when we traditionally think about our priorities in life, as we see in the new year. It's a time in my life when I am struggling to comprehend the actions of both family and strangers in the name of religion.

I have found these words comforting.

An essay by Albert Einstein entitled "The World as I see it". Einstein said that he did not persue ease and happiness as ends in themselves, but followed the ideals of Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. He said that he occupied himself with the objective world and the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors in order to fill his life.

He describes a knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds.

I don't know if anybody noticed but my homepage and Twisted Lemon's homepage have been down over the new year period. We're back up and running now because Moose Computer Services have moved our hosting from the old virtual machine to a new, real server. Hopefully now we've got rid of our noisy neighbours we won't have the problem again :)

While tola.me.uk has been down I've been busy working on hippygeek.co.uk. Hippygeek now has subversion repositories and trac projects working (I've been playing with the Subclipse plugin for Eclipse. It's a bit clunky but a very useful feature.)

In particular I've started two new projects, webscope and moya. They are two projects I've been planning for a couple of years, but I've decided to make the thought process a bit more open in the hope that I'll make some progress towards implementing them. There's no code yet.

Webscope

"Webscope is a unified interface for managing your information with multiple modes of interaction. It is a web resource manager - a hybrid web browser, web server, media player and window manager replacement."

I'm hoping to write the front end using XUL, running on XULRunner, but the back end will include lots of other bits including an HTTP server.

You can click the link above for more information, or see the draft specification and UI mockups (which I created in Inkscape).

Webscope is an implementation of design concepts from my web site, including:

• Multimodal User Agent for the Web
• Web Servent

Moya

"Moya is software for a home information appliance, a central computer for the home. Features will include a media centre, social software and home automation with a minimalistic and multimodal web interface."

Moya will be a combination of lots of existing projects in lots of different programming languages, loosely coupled with APIs. Any new components will probably be written in Python, which I'm learning at the moment.

You can click the link above for more information.

Moya is an implementation of some design concepts on my web site, including:

• Home Information Appliance
• Device Independent Web Server
• Multi-tier Architecture for Distributed Information Systems

My plans for this summer have changed many times now. Due to my exam timetable I have a four month summer break and I've been trying to think of ways to use this valuable time.

I've had interesting conversations with IBM, a chat with someone from Sun, three interviews with Google, missed the deadline for the Google Summer of Code while waiting to hear about a summer placement. But still, I have nothing to fill my summer.

I've decided that I'm going to take the opportunity to start implementing some ideas I've been working on for three years, I'm going to start a business.

OK, so I've done this kind of thing a few times before. I've even ended up as part of a limited liability company building web applications and doing installations in London. But it's always just been moonlighting, a job on the side. This time it's all my own ideas, it's ambitious and I'm doing it my way.

I'm currently working on a business plan and cash flow forecast so that I can apply for some funding from my university.

Introducing Krellian. Watch this space.

We came 2nd!

For a second year group project we had to design an autonomous line following robot. We were given a budget (£40, of which we spent £17), a vague specification and told to go away and figure out how to build one. Below is a picture of our finished robot, BEAST (Ben, Evelyn, Alex, Sam, Tom) and yes, that is the HD DVD crack code printed across the front for the benefit of the unsuspecting press photographers who will hopefully publish photos of our robot :)

The robot was built for simplicity and reliability with a single PIC chip, a couple of stepper motor drivers, infra-red photodarlington sensors, 5V and 12V voltage regulators and little else (I'll open up our project wiki to the public when I fix python). This approach paid off today because we came 2nd out of 18 in the final robot races in the Great Hall at Birmingham University in front of a cheering crowd.

In our first heat we came off at the first corner, but after a quick nudge completed the course with no problems, albeit quite slowly. Unfortunately we were still running the software we programmed for the qualifying race which was designed for accuracy rather than speed. We had intended to replace the software with the fast version of the code which accelerated from low speed/high torque to high speed/low torque at appropriate times and automatically calibrated the white/black threshold for the infra-red sensors. Unfortunately our department is being refurbished and we didn't have access to a lab to do the reprogramming. But it didn't matter, we got through.

To our surprise we reached the semi-finals. Despite the technician putting our power supply in the wrong way around to start off with (thank you Alex for designing the electronics in such a way that this didn't just fry the robot!) we actually won the semi final. The opposing team's robot was built for speed. It was extremely fast but it turned out it was a little too fast because it burnt out one of its motors and we crawled past it on the home straight in a perfect case of the tortoise beating the hare!

We didn't win the final, but were very fairly beaten by a robot which had both speed and endurance, so congratulations to the winning team!

We were all absolutely thrilled with the result and it makes the hours of work worthwhile.

I want to say thanks to the whole team who worked brilliantly together (I didn't have to enforce my position of team leader once :P). Special thanks go to Alex for his algorithm simulations using a 2D gaming engine, his programming skills (I now trust him to compile C more than the CCS compiler) and his help with the electronic design. I also want to thank Laura for providing the tiger who did a great job of driving and turned out to be our lucky mascot!

All in all, we were on time, under budget and we came 2nd in the race! Suffice to say we all went down the pub afterwards to celebrate :)

The robot race mentioned in my last post was featured in the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Mail yesterday. The Birmingham Mail has a couple of pictures of me looking like a goon cheering on the robot in the semi-final.

It's not very clear in this bad copy, but that's a nice clean head on picture of the HD DVD crack code published in a Birmingham newspaper. Mission accomplished :)

I've uploaded a grainy video of the final moment of that race, when our (much slower but more reliable) robot crawls past the opponent which keeps going round in circles with a burnt out motor.

There's also a video of the robot completing a full lap, note the lecturer towards the end asking what the number on the front of the robot is and us trying to claim that it's just a random number.