tola

Just signed up to Twitter as bfrancis (both tola and hippygeek were taken, grr). Not really sure why. I rarely find the time for a full blog post so maybe I'll like microblogging.

All in all yesterday was a very weird day, but by far the weirdest part was what my girlfriend and I saw in the sky from the car on the way back from the train station.We saw UFOs (unidentified in that we don't know what they were!)

At 9:30pm on 6th Sept 2008 travelling north on the A1260 near Thorpe wood we saw a formation of orange lights in the sky.

At first we thought they were stars, but they were too large and orange. Then we noticed they were moving slightly relative to each other. There were three groups: a group of two to the right; four in the middle and approx 3 or 4 to the left. After 1-2 minutes we passed underneath them and eventually couldn't see them any more.

They weren't stars because they were orange, large and below cloud level. They didn't look like aircraft because they didn't have flashing lights and seemed to move slowly for their apparent height.

There are a few RAF bases in our area so they could have been anything, just nothing like anything either of us has seen before. Maybe experimental aircraft of some kind, or even something much less unusual.

I'd be very interested to know what they were. Does anyone know of a web site where you can submit a UFO sighting a place it on a map?

Interestingly, the Telepraph reports that UFO sightings have been exceptionally high this summer.

It's the end of my first week as a "Technical Solutions Engineer" intern at Google in London.

I'm living a 6 minute walk away from work (which everyone is very jealous of) in a studio flat in Westminster. The flat is about the size of a postage stamp, is in an ex-convent, is currently still full of the previous tenant's belongings, still has no Internet connection and is costing me more than most people's mortgages - but it's home, for the next 12 weeks at least. I can just see the top of Westminster Cathedral from my window and it's quite a weird feeling being around the corner from Buckingham Palace.

So far, working at Google has more than lived up to my expectations. It isn't just the three free meals a day, the permenant supply of snacks and drinks (healthy and not so healthy), the lava lamps, games room, bean bags, hammocks and massage chair. It's the whole atmosphere - the flexible hours, the incredibly friendly and intelligent people and the open-ness. Google might be secretive to the outside world, but internally they're incredibly open - even as an intern the amount of information (and code!) I have access to is astounding.

This week has been quite unusual because there have been a lot of social events - a leaving do, an afternoon of paintballing followed by pubs into the wee hours, and TGIF with free beer and pizza. This is good because the social events involved the gathering of a lot of members of the Partner Solutions Organisation (in which I work) from all over EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) so I really got to know the people behind the organisation in a social context.

The only uncomfortable thing for me is that I am living under my first NDA - for the first time in my life I am learning things that I can't necessarily pass on to other people. I had to do a lot of soul searching before I signed that document. If it wasn't for Google's commitment to Open Source (in their own special way) and particularly Open Standards I think the decision would have been much harder. I can tell you that people here really do take the statement "Do No Evil" very seriously - even if it does cause them lots of problems in the media.

At TGIF (thank goodness it's Friday) yesterday afternoon I had to introduce myself to everyone at the London office, accompanied by many other "Nooglers". All the Nooglers had to create a slide about themselves including a photo (I had pigtails in my photo) and when asked to reveal a "random life lesson" I told a story about the time I found out you shouldn't wear shorts in the Vatican (ask me for the full story). I was also asked who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman and controversially answered Spiderman (Batman doesn't even have any superpowers!) .

Google isn't just about fun and games though. I have a very challenging project to work on and it's going to take me at least the first two weeks to get up to scratch on Google's development tools, build system and production infrastructure. There's a steep learning curve to get started, but I think I've hit the ground running so far.

I'll be back soon with further updates.

Internship 

After two years of trying and five interviews, I've finally got an internship with Google this summer. I'll be working as a Technical Solutions Engineer in the Partner Solutions Organisation at Google London and the work I do will hopefully ultimately improve the results you get when you carry out a local search on Google Maps. I've been to visit the team I'll be working with and had lunch at Google, with a tour of the building. All I'm going to say is, I can't wait to start!

Flat 

I'm currently looking for short term accommodation in London over the summer. I'm looking for a 3 month let of a studio flat (or potentially a flat share) from mid-June to mid-September. I need somewhere in the range of £100-200 per week which is in easy reach of London Victoria station, somewhere on the District, Circle or Victoria tube lines would probably be ideal. My basic requirements are a double bed, a shower, an Internet connection and basic kitchen facilities.

If anyone has or knows of something suitable, I'd be extremely grateful if you could contact me by email (ben at tola.me.uk). So far I've been looking on rightmove.co.uk and gumtree.com and I'm not having a huge amount of success. There's lots out there, but I keep coming across problems.

This is a slightly belated but massive congratulations to my university friend, Alex Smith.

Towards the end of October Alex had told me that he'd done something that had resulted in a company trying to give him money, but he said he couldn't tell me what it was, yet. Then I heard the university press office was frantically trying to get in touch with him and I started to wonder what it was!

On 24th October my housemate told me I should look at the front page of Birmingham University's web site. There was an article saying that Alex had won a $25,000 prize from Wolfram Research for proving that "Wolfram's 2,3 Turing Machine is Universal"! (no I didn't know what that meant either until I looked it up).

The story soon appeared on wired.com, Scientific American, Slashdot and Ars Technica.

In Stephen Wolfram's blog entry you can read how he didn't know whether it would take a month or a century to prove, Alex managed it in 5 months. In fact, his initial submission was just 47 days after the competiton was announced! You can read Alex's 50 page proof here.

Alex described himself as "an undergraduate studying Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages". I worked with Alex on our robot project last year and this year we're in the same group for our Masters Group Project (Radio Orienteering). I've told him that now that he's a celebrity, he shouldn't let the fame go to his head :P We've still got work to do, after all. However, as with any major discovery Alex's proof is already causing contreversy and people are trying to prove him wrong. Alex has proved during countless interjections during lectures that he loves a good argument, so I expect it to keep him occupied for some time :)

I'll watch the debate unravel with interest (albeit a regretful lack of understanding!), having his claims put under scrutiny is all part of the academic process.

Well done, Alex!

As I announced in April, this summer I'm starting a business called Krellian.

Since April I have written an outline business plan and given a presentation in front of a Dragon's Den style panel of judges. The judges were impressed and awarded me a £4500 grant on the SPEED Programme. SPEED is a project led by Wolverhampton University with the involvement of many other universities to support Entrepreneurship in students.

On the SPEED programme I've attended a 3 day training course on running a business and am now developing the business idea further.

Well, it's 07/07/07 and as promised I'm launching my company web site(s) today. They're a little light on information at the moment but they're enough to point people towards, bearing in mind I'm working to a five year plan here.

Products - krellian.com

This is the main company web site where products will appear, products being Web Appliances. If that doesn't quite tell you exactly what the products will be then that's partly intentional. I've not decided what the first product is going to be yet, I'm working through a shortlist. The software projects at krellian.org might give some clues.

Services - krellian.net

This will eventually be the home of a suite of web services, but for now it's serving as a bit of an experiment in natural language command.

Community - krellian.org

Now this is the bit where I'm going to need some help. Once I've kicked off development of some software projects, I'm hoping to get developers interested and build a community around the projects. I don't expect this to happen overnight and I think I really need to get a release out first. I'll be working towards a release of something over the next three months.

Webtop will carry on where Webscope left off. It's a suped-up web browser for devices that don't need a desktop.

How I start on the Webdoors project will depend on what I choose to be my first product, but the long term vision is a Webtop Linux Distribution, much like the Desktop Linux distributions we have today. Essentially a collection of libre web applications given a consistent look and feel.

The vision that Krellian is working towards is a Ubiquitous Web facilitating the free sharing of information and ideas. The Ubiquitous Web is device independent. That means you can access information in a format suited to the device you're using, be that plain text, html, vector graphics, voice or even a 3d virtual world. This gives you an idea of the direction of the Webdoors project.

W3C Compliance

All three web sites are fully W3C compliant XHTML and CSS and are tested in IE6, Firefox and Safari (if anyone could test them in IE7 it would be helpful).

Balancing W3C compliance with the web page actually looking OK in the most widespread but worst standards supporting browser is a bit of a pain. My advice is keep it simple!

Hosting

It wasn't the original plan but the websites (apart from the software projects) are currently temporarily hosted in my bedroom. That's very bad because out here in the sticks we have a very unreliable power supply and I've recently had a lot of problems with PlusNet, my Internet provider.

I'm looking at hosting options at the moment, trying to get my head around Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of renting a dedicated server from day one.

VoIP

Thanks to ALUG for the advice on VoIP service providers, I now have an 0845 number for my business provided by sipgate which points at wherever I happen to be on the Internet.

Business Cards

I've ordered 250 double sided business cards from VistaPrint for about £15 including a completely custom design and delivery etc.

LugRadio Live 2007

See you at LugRadio Live!

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.

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 :)

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.

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