radiac.net

It's been a while since my last entry, that's because I'm busy doing my dissertation. I wake up, dissertate, go to bed. Must not get distracted!

On which subject, play with a fishy.

I have this desk calendar that my godfather sent me for Christmas, which has funny things that people have said or written. Todays is:

The Dyslexia Insitute
ad in the Sevenoaks Chronicle (UK)

How cool is that? My home town paper gets mentioned in some big American calendar thing :)

Anyway, time to float.

I have been working on my dissertation today again. Have been doing this for weeks, am getting bored of it now. Still, nearly over...

So, who likes yetis?

With 5 days and 22:45:00 remaining, it could be going better. Of course, that's when it's actually due, I have to print and bind it well in advance, so really it's more like 3 days. Woo.

We had an HCI group meeting today, and we've nearly finished. For some strange and unknown reason I volunteered to print and bind it. What am I doing?

My tracking code works! Sweet sweet cheesy beans!

Here's a couple of the resulting videos. I tried compressing them, but they didn't really get any smaller.

My hand (380kb)
A Post-it (484kb)

Warning: several minutes download, for under a second of video. But still, its quite cool. In case you're wondering what you're looking at, the big white thing is the screen, the big pink thing is my hand, and the little purple circle is where the computer thinks the tip of my hand (or post-it note) is.

3 more videos. This time, they do stuff.

Circle (373kb)
Shapes (756kb)
House (565kb)

(Watch the bottom left corner)

Well, I think it's done! Pending some more proof-reading, I think I've finished my report. For those of you having problems finishing it, here's a helpful little trick I picked up, which really sped up the process:

1. Find a chapter you haven't written yet
2. Delete all reference to it
3. Go to 1 until the project is complete

Result!

So, anyway, for your viewing pleasure, here are the last two videos. I stuck a camera above my monitor, and one to the left of it, and put the following picture on full-screen:


I then recorded me moving my hand at the screen, and ran it through a fancy script that prints in the top left corner what it thinks I'm pointing at. The resulting videos are here:

Top (407kb)
Left (426kb)

Now all I've got to do is print and bind it...

Well that's my HCI group coursework finished and handed in! Actually finished the dissertation yesterday, but was too tired to be bothered to write an entry about it. That's probably because the night before I had gone to bed at 3am, woken up at 6 (with similar amounts of sleep for the past couple of weeks), and then got up to uni at about 8, so I could print and bind my project before the queue.

In case you didn't know, the library is almost totally empty at 8.30 am, and when I got to the printers, I was the only person in that half of the ground floor of the library. Joke. However, by the time I had got halfway through printing, I got that feeling (you know the one) that someone was standing behind me. So I subtly tried to turn around to see, and sure enough, a few feet behind me was a woman, just standing there. She smiled at me, so in my panic, I smiled back, privately thinking 'What the hell?! Why are you standing behind me, you can't be queueing, there are four other printers that aren't being used, you're from munchies, aren't you, you stalk the library by night, cut your victims into little pieces and then feed them through the shredder along with the cardboard to make the burgers and fake chicken'. She stood there for the rest of my first print job, and I started the next one going (we have to hand in two printed copies of our dissertations). Over a hundred pages of printing she stood there for. When it was all done, I hit log off, grabbed my bag and walked away slowly in the hope that I would not anger the knife-weilding maniac. When I got to the library issue desk, I turned to see if she was following me. Turns out she wasn't a psychopath, she was just plain crazy, as she had logged onto the machine I had just been using, and had started to print. Makes you wonder how someone that dumb got to be a member of the university...

The queue in the printing place isn't really that bad at 9.30 either. I got there and was the second person in the queue, which was nice. Still took me an hour though... Eventually handed it in at about 11.30. And then I slept for 12 hours when I got home, which was nice.

Member of my coursework group woke me up at 12 to ask where I was, because we have to hand it in today. Oops. I had a quick shower, popped up to uni, spent a little while finishing off the write-up with him, then we printed it, bound it and just handed it in. Yay!!

So now I am off home to watch some TV. Good afternoon, good evening and good night!

I'm on my way back to bath after a long weekend at home, and my train has stopped, in the middle of nowhere, because of signalling problems. Woo. Wellat least i have my mobile and PDA! Yes, I know some of you are now saying 'how sad', but never mind.

The delay was only an hour, so it's not that bad... Now I'm back, I have the joys of my inbox to deal with. While I have been away (left on Saturday at 2pm), I have had 3 emails actually to me, but over 2500 spams. Yargh.

This morning, I woke up to find a cut between my lip and nose, with a big scab on it. There is no apparent reason for this, which can mean only one thing; aliens. Thanks to my brilliant deductive reasoning, I have pieced together the following facts:

• At some point in the past month, aliens monitoring the Earth for the perfect human specimen detected me and scheduled a DNA extraction team
• At some point between 0200 and 1000 hours on the morning of Friday 21st May 2004, an elite DNA extracting team of aliens beamed into my room
• They drugged me so that I would not wake up while they performed the procedure. This is also why I did not wake up in time for my lectures today
• They made a small incision on my face and extracted a sample of my DNA before beaming it back to their ship
• They are now in the process of cloning me, to produce an army to invade the earth
• In a couple of years time (assuming they have some kind of accelerated growth devices), aliens will land, and millions of my clones will swarm from the landing craft, armed to the teeth and intent on the destruction of mankind.
• They will get bored, descend on the nearest cybercafe and spend the rest of the day spodding, before going to WHSmiths, buying copies of Vice City and heading home
• The aliens will give up on Earth and go attack the moon people instead.

So I think you should all thank me for saving this planet, despite my obvious discomfort. Still, guess it could have been worse...

While everyone is indoors revising this weekend, Leela would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that she is spending some of it on a beach in Florida, and the rest at the Kennedy Space Centre.

However, revision not being one of my strong points, today I have played a little Hitman Contracts. I actually started writing an entry about this a while back, but I don't know where it went. Maybe I just never got round to clicking the 'add' button. Anyway, Hitman is a fun little game. The aim is to run around killing people in a stealthy manner. However, stealth is not one of my strong points either, so the past few days I have been experimenting with god mode, infinite ammo, and a rather charming nailgun mode, where your bullets pin them to the walls and they flap about. Although today I accidentally completed a mission and only alerted one guy. But don't worry, I went back and did it again properly - if you get seen, you'd better leave no witnesses, that's my motto.

What else? Well, I've been looking at APM again (that package manager thing I've been working on for a year and a half and occasionally mention), and think I know what it's going to do and how it's going to do it. More importantly, I think I've worked out what APM can stand for; APM Project Manager. See, my first real bit of software has a recursive acronym, how can it fail?

I found myself in Sainsburys the other day, thirsty and without anything to drink, so I bought four little bottles of volvic which are flavoured with Lemon and Lime. Thought that sounded quite nice. Just goes to show how wrong I can be. Nah, it's not at all bad, but it could be better. Not making me grimace every time I take a swig would be a good start.

Last but not least, I just saw an absolutely classic film on BBC 2 - Assault on Precinct 13, by John Carpenter no less. As IMDB says, it's all about the lone inhabitants of an abandoned police station, who are under attack by the overwhelming numbers of a seemingly unstoppable street gang. IMDB also says that there's a remake in production, due 2005, starring Laurence Fishburne. Bet they'll murder another classic. Still, at least the 1976 version should be here on Wednesday...

At 13:13, I ordered a new toy.

I really should have checked the time first, shouldn't I...

Due to livejournal displaying incompetence at similar levels to the natwest, Leela is unable to update her journal today, but she will tell you all about her luxury weekend as soon as she can. You can all look forward to the story of how she slept in a room with 6 other people, and how she and her friends accidentally tried to drive through a restricted NASA area.

I have a lovely shiny new laptop. It's a Sony Vaio, and it's great:


Oooh. Main features are 1.5 Centrino (pretty good), 2.1kg (pretty light), ~4 hour battery (pretty good), 14" SXGA screen (pretty lights) and Sony Vaio (pretty pretty). Very pleased with my purchase :)

Today was a momentous day. Today was a day that will be remembered through the ages. Today was a day that wrinkly old people will recount to their grandchildren on a cold winter evening, who will be thrilled and excited, and beg for the story to be told again on subsequent visits.

For today was the day that I broke 1000 spams.

Yes, that is right, today I received exactly 1001 spams. I would like to thank all of the people who have helped me get where I am today; my manager, my sweet lord and saviour Buddy Christ, and most of all, the guy who came to fix my phone line - you’re my inspiration, man. The line still doesn’t work though.

So to commemorate the occasion, I thought I'd do a special index page. Wait till you see the ending, it's spectacular!

This morning, I got round to setting up a centralised mail server, which collects my e-mail and lets me access it from any machine, anywhere. It works like this; fetchmail picks up my e-mail, exim sorts it into folders, and courier makes it available via IMAP (with SSL). It was pretty easy, although I spent a few hours writing a web-based exim .forward editor so I can edit my filter rules and add mailboxes a lot more easily. And at some point, I'll implement some whitelist and blacklist filtering, which should help with my spam problem - for those who don't know, basically whitelists are lists of addresses from which e-mails are OK, and blacklists are lists of addresses that aren't, so if it's on the blacklist I can ignore it, if it's on the white list I'll read it, and if it's on neither then there's stuff you can do to figure it out.

But I'll save that for after the exams. It seems a bit weird - that little countdown box to the left says I only have 14 days and 19 hours until I'm unemployed - after 18 years of this stuff, that seems kinda crazy. Good, but crazy.